The Heart of the Family (36 page)

Fran smiled at the commanding officer in charge of Joint Operations at Derby House, the headquarters of the North-West Approaches, whilst keeping her arm tucked discreetly through Brandon’s. They had arrived in Liverpool earlier in the day, and despite the fact that the train journey had resulted in him being dreadfully unwell, Brandon had still insisted on them meeting Jean and Grace, and Grace’s husband-to-be, Seb, at Lyons Corner House for afternoon tea.

Fran had seen the way Jean’s eyes had widened when she had realised how young Brandon was, but tactfully her sister had not said anything, not even when she and Fran had gone to the cloakroom together, other than to ask Fran if she was happy.

‘Very,’ Fran had told her promptly, and surprisingly she had discovered that it was true. It was as though Brandon’s need of her had given her a purpose in life that had somehow taken away some of the pain of her loss of Jack and Marcus.

She hadn’t said anything to Jean about Brandon’s illness. There would, after all, be time enough to explain all about afterwards.

And now here they were at this very military reception, with all the top brass lined up to greet their guests, and the American general, who had initially simply been in England on a diplomatic visit, was now anxious to talk to a fellow American, especially one with American Embassy accreditation, about the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on 7 December.

The attack had shocked America, propelling the country towards war, and patriotic young men were rushing to join up for military service. Brandon had been filled with helpless anger when they had heard the news, plainly desperate to do his bit and yet at the same time knowing that his health would mean that he could be putting those men he was serving with at risk.

Fran had slipped into her official role as the wife of a very wealthy and patrician young American with the ease that came from years of being in the public eye as a singer. Working for ENSA had honed her existing small talk skills so that she was easily able to converse with the military top brass whilst at the same time sympathising with the American general over the language difficulties he was encountering.

‘Two nations divided by a common language,’ Fran quoted to him with a smile.

To which he had nodded his head and announced emphatically, ‘Now ain’t that just the truth, ma’am.’

‘Career soldier,’ Brandon murmured in her ear, as they stood to one side, ‘and definitely not WASP, not with that accent.’

‘Don’t be such a terrible snob,’ Fran whispered back teasingly, managing to look at ease and sound light-hearted, whilst at the same time keeping a careful
eye on Brandon, whom she was sure was feeling far from well, even though he was refusing to admit it.

She was just about to suggest to him that they use the excuse of Grace’s wedding in the morning to make their escape when the door to the large room opened and a fresh group of uniformed men came in. Since she was facing the door Fran had a good view of them and her heart rolled over like a boulder crashing into her ribs when she saw that one of them was Marcus. A leaner Marcus, perhaps, and not as tanned as he had been in Cairo, but his dark hair was still as thick, and still in need of a cut, whilst his height and the breadth of his shoulders set him apart from the other older men he was with.

Marcus. Her heart felt as though it had been seized in a giant vice, but she had no idea that she had said his name until she heard Brandon querying brusquely, ‘Marcus?’ before he turned to stare at the new arrivals.

‘Ah, here’s Colonel Stafford, who is in charge of our liaison group here,’ the CO exclaimed. ‘Do let me introduce you.’

It was too late to escape. The American general was turning towards the colonel and extending his hand. Naturally, Brandon had to follow suit, as the colonel strode towards them, followed by his entourage, which of course included Marcus.

Fran was guided forward, with a professional smile and a firm hand in the small of her back from one of the smartly turned-out and very pretty WAAFs who were on ‘hostess’ duty, and introduced as, ‘Mrs Brandon Walter Adams.’

The colonel, bluff and burly and red-faced, took her hand and held it briefly as though afraid to shake
it in case he broke it. Fran had already noticed that American military and diplomatic men gave a much harder handshake that their British counterparts, accompanied by a much wider smile, although as yet she had not come to any conclusions as to whether they were ‘just being American’ or making a point of showing their superior strength. Having worked in Hollywood she tended to think it was the former – after all, everything in America was ‘bigger’ than its British equivalent.

‘Major Marcus Linton.’

It couldn’t be avoided, and somehow Fran managed to hold her gaze steady as Marcus took her hand and she forced herself to say calmly, ‘Marcus, how nice to see you again.’

‘Oh, you’ve already met.’ The WAAF looked slightly put out.

‘I was with an ENSA group in Cairo and the major had the unrewarding task of shepherding us around safely,’ Fran explained with one of the bright professional smiles she had learned long ago to use to protect her real emotions.

‘You were with ENSA?’ The WAAF’s tone and glance were speculative and assessing, but Fran ignored the subtle challenge in the younger girl’s manner. What did it matter to her now what another girl, who obviously felt a proprietary interest in Marcus, should think about her?

The light from the unexpectedly extravagantly illuminated chandelier fell on Fran’s left hand, sparking a riot of flashing colour from her engagement ring – a gift from Brandon that she had told him he should not have given her but which she wore to please him.

She could see Marcus looking down at it, and she
was not surprised as, when the WAAF was called away to talk to someone else, the minute they were left on their own Marcus said pointedly, ‘No need to ask how life is treating you, obviously.’

Holding on to her anger and her pain, and conscious of Brandon’s presence and the reality of their marriage, Fran told him quietly, ‘When I was younger I used to feel envious of those people who are able to make such absolute judgements of others on the strength of what lies on the surface. Now that I’m older, though, I tend to feel rather sorry for them because I’ve grown to realise that their judgement is as superficial and shallow as their own emotions, with no real depth or understanding. Please excuse me. I must rejoin my husband.’

It was over, done; and only she would ever know how much, instead of walking away from Marcus, she had wanted to throw herself into his arms and beg him to hold her there for ever.

Lou felt dreadfully sick and shaky, and yet excited at the same time. She had had to hold her breath whilst she had lied about her age in case she was challenged but she hadn’t been, and now it was done and she had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

At the beginning of December, Mr Churchill had announced that all young men and women of sixteen had to register their names as a first step towards going into uniform, and all unmarried women between the ages of twenty and thirty were to be called up to serve in the police, the fire services and the armed forces, whilst married women and single women up to the age of forty had to register as available labour.

Because of that her dad wasn’t going to be able to put his foot down and refuse to give his permission for her to join the WAAF, as she knew he would have done before the new rules had been brought in. It was true, of course, that girls were supposed to be at least eighteen before they could go into uniform, but no one had made any comment to her about her age when she had been interviewed. The country needed girls like her, she had been told approvingly.

She had been given an address to go to on Monday to be measured for her uniform and to go through the rest of the enlistment process, but there was definitely no going back. Not now that she had signed on the dotted line.

Her father would be furious and her mother would cry, but what about Sasha? Would she secretly be glad that they were going to be separated? It would certainly mean that she could spend as much time as she wanted with her precious boyfriend, Lou thought miserably, the shock of what she had done suddenly bringing her down out of her clouds of euphoria at her daring, to the harsh reality of what her actions actually meant.

Panic mixed with pain filled her, but then another girl emerged from the recruitment office and smiled at her, exclaiming in a jolly way, ‘Golly, I never thought I’d really have the guts to do it, but I have. I keep telling myself that it will be spiffing fun, especially if I get to learn to fly, although only a few of the girls do get to do that.’

‘That’s what I want to do as well,’ Lou agreed firmly.

Jean sighed in semi-protest at the sound of yet another caller knocking on the front door. She’d had that many people coming round these last few days as the wedding day drew closer, that her voice was hoarse from reminding everyone not to leave the back door open too long and allow the precious heat to escape. Not that the house was likely to get cold with all the cooking and baking that had been done, and all the rushing about that was going on.

‘Go and get the door, will you, Sasha love?’ Jean instructed, carefully measuring a precious spoonful of cooking sherry into the juice from the bottled pears she was planning to put in the trifle. She’d had neighbours coming round virtually all week bringing their cut-glass trifle bowls, and spare plates, along with offers of whatever other help they could give.

At least one of the benefits of a winter wedding was that she didn’t need to worry about any of the food going off, Jean acknowledged, as Sasha returned, accompanied by Amy Preston from several doors away.

‘My, but it’s lovely and warm in here, Jean,’ Amy announced. Her own nose was pink from the late December cold.

‘Sasha, take that dish from Mrs Preston, and her coat so that she can sit down and get a bit of a warm. I’d offer you a cup of tea, only my Sam will be back soon and I want to get this on the trifle sponges before he comes in. You know what men are like. He’ll be expecting his tea, wedding or no wedding,’ Jean warned her visitor tactfully, not wanting to be rude or ungrateful for her offer of help but not wanting to encourage her to stay for a long chat either, when she had so much to do.

‘Bertha from across from me said as how you were wanting some extra trifle dishes, so I thought I’d pop down with one,’ Amy told Jean as she handed over the dish, and then her coat to Sasha, before settling down on the kitchen chair Jean’s last visitor had left pulled up close to the warmth of the oven.

The kitchen smelled of the ham Jean had been roasting earlier in the day. Sam, along with several of the other allotment holders, was part-owner in a pig, and with Grace’s wedding to cater for Sam had managed to claim a good-sized gammon joint as his part of the animal.

There was also a pressed tongue in the larder, cooked earlier in the week and now weighted down ready to be carved up for the buffet.

First thing tomorrow morning Jean and some of her neighbours were going to go to the church hall to give it a thorough clean through before they started to decorate it for the wedding breakfast.

‘I suppose you’ll have to have one of them cardboard wedding cakes?’ Amy asked Jean.

Jean agreed. ‘Them’s the rules now, so we don’t have any choice, and my Sam’s a stickler for not buying anything on the black market.’

‘Good for him,’ Amy said stoutly. ‘I admire a man of principle, and heaven knows them poor lads in the Merchant Navy shouldn’t have to put their lives at risk for a bit of black market stuff.’

Later on that evening, Jean intended to try on her own wedding outfit, if she could make five minutes to do so, since Grace had insisted that she wanted to see her mother in her finery. The hospital had given Grace a few precious extra days off and she would be coming home this Wednesday evening to stay until the wedding on Saturday.

Tomorrow, though, she was going to Whitchurch, where she and Seb were giving their new home a coat of fresh distemper and arranging the furniture they had been buying, as and when they could, keeping it stored down at the depot where Sam worked. A friend of a friend of Sam’s had offered to take their bits and pieces down to Whitchurch for them, and in addition to paying him for his trouble Grace and Jean had agreed to give his wife a length of the twins’ bridesmaids’ dress fabric for their daughter’s twenty-first birthday.

Fran, bless her, hadn’t forgotten Jean in her shopping expedition in Cairo, including a lovely coat and skirt ensemble for her, complete with a blouse and accessories. The fabric was so luxurious that Jean was worried about catching the delicacy of the pretty chiffon blouse. Her hands had gone that rough with all the extra work and cooking the wedding involved. Jean remembered that her grandmother had always sworn by goose grease for chapped dry hands, but even if she had been able to get hold of some, Jean didn’t fancy smelling of goose grease all through her daughter’s big day.

Whilst she listened to her neighbour’s chatter and answered her questions, Jean was mentally going over her list of things to be done. Grace, normally so calm and practical, had started to get bridal nerves and worry that everything wouldn’t go according to plan. If she’d asked Jean once she’d asked her a hundred times if she was sure that everyone would fit into the church hall and that they’d have enough food.

‘They’re coming to see you married, not get a free meal,’ Jean had told Grace firmly. ‘They won’t be worrying about that and you shouldn’t either. Besides, thanks to everyone helping out we’ll have plenty to go round.’

Seb’s landlady had generously offered Seb an unexpectedly spare room in her house for his parents, and so naturally Jean had felt obliged to add her name to the guest list, which seemed to be growing by the day as neighbours and friends came round to offer their help. Seb and his parents would be travelling up from Whitchurch on the first train of the morning, and out of respect for the tradition that the groom should not see his bride until she walked down the aisle to him on her father’s arm, Seb and his parents would be going from the station to the home of one of Jean and Sam’s neighbours to change into their wedding finery before making their way to the church.

Jean was keeping her fingers crossed that Saturday would be a fine dry day. With petrol being as scarce as it was, and Sam having the feelings he did about the nation’s resources, it had been decided that everyone, including Grace and Sam, would walk to the church, which was after all only just past the end of the road.

A neighbour had produced from her attic a dark
red velvet hooded cloak that she had worn as Rose Queen years ago in her youth, and Jean had taken advantage of the steam produced when she had preboiled the ham and the tongue to bring the pile back on the velvet before hanging it up in the bathroom for a final steam over bowls of water containing bags of lavender from the allotment, to ensure that it smelled sweetly of summer rather than strongly of cooking meat.

With so many people putting themselves out to help them, they had ended up virtually having to invite the whole street to the wedding.

Not that Jean minded. The more people that came to wish Grace and Seb a happy future, the better, as far as she was concerned.

Sasha had barely shown Amy Preston out of the front door when Katie came in through the back door, announcing, ‘I’ve brought you this, Jean. They were selling them in Lewis’s. They’d just had a delivery, and I thought you might like it as an early Christmas present, with all the extra work you’ve been doing.’

Jean could have cried when she saw the small pot of hand cream that Katie was holding out to her. Sam had also arrived home and was suggesting that they might try a slice of the ham with their tea just to see how it was, causing her to insist vehemently, ‘Sam Campion, you’ll do no such thing!’

Jean was known for the excellence of her baked ham, roasted to her own special recipe of honey and brown sugar spiced with cloves, and before the war no big party had been complete without one of Jean’s baked hams, but such treats had become a rare luxury now.

By the time Grace had arrived a little later in the evening, Jean had decided that since she was going to have to try on her outfit for Grace to see, they might as well have a proper dress rehearsal and all try on their finery, although she instructed the twins to wash their hands first.

Sam was instructed to stay in the kitchen with his paper, whilst the first floor of the small house rang with excited female voices, dropping to an awed hush after Grace had been helped into her gown first. Naturally, there had to be that little moment that they all shared, when they all looked at her and then at one another, and no words were needed to tell of their pride and their love.

Then Jean was bustling the twins into their dresses, shaking her head a little ruefully at the way they were now several inches taller than she, tall and leggy with narrow waists and small bosoms, and then brushing away a few maternal tears when she saw how grown-up they looked in their gowns, not girls any more but proper young women, with their slim figures and their brown hair shining like burnished conkers under the electric light. Katie too looked lovely in her dress, her manner everything that a bride’s main female supporter should be, calm and loving, as she organised the twins and helped Jean to check that the bows at the back of their sashes were tied properly and Grace’s train smoothed out.

‘Come on, Mum,’ Grace urged her. ‘You’ve got to put your outfit on as well.’

Jean had never had an outfit as expensive or as elegant as this one. She had known the moment she had seen it that it was something very special. The blouse was ecru chiffon with a high ruffled
neckline and tiny pearl buttons that fastened all the way down the pintucked front and up the sleeves. The peachy brown coat and skirt she was to wear with it were in the finest silkiest wool she had ever touched – cashmere, Grace had said it was, looking knowledgeable and awed. The skirt was narrow, somehow making her look much slimmer than she was, the coat that went over it three-quarter length, with a soft swing to it. The front of the coat and the collar were trimmed in chocolate-brown velvet frogging, and the chocolate-brown velvet hat that went with it was decorated with matching frogging. Jean could hardly believe she was to wear such a wonderful outfit. It was totally impractical – something she could never wear again in her everyday life – and yet despite her normally practical nature she was as excited as though she was still a little girl at the thought of wearing something so very pretty.

Fran had thought of everything, because there were even chocolate-brown lizard-skin shoes and gloves, and a matching handbag.

Very carefully Jean changed into her outfit, her skin going faintly pink when she saw the way that even the twins’ eyes widened in admiration once she had everything on.

It was left to Grace to speak, her voice breaking slightly as she put her hand on Jean’s arm and said, ‘Oh, Mum …’

The final two days before the wedding passed in a haze of scrubbing the church hall floors, dusting chairs and ironing loaned tablecloths and even white sheets to cover the slightly shabby trestle tables, whilst the younger ones busied themselves decorating the
hall with trails of ivy, ornamented with some white ribbon a neighbour had found tucked away in a drawer and offered as her contribution to the big day.

It was hard work, but the tasks were broken up with shared laughter when they all stopped to eat the meat-paste sandwiches Jean had made and drink tea from one of the borrowed urns.

The local hairdresser had promised to fit Jean in for a shampoo and set the night before the wedding, leaving the early morning of the wedding day free for Grace and her bridesmaids.

Jean would have liked to have invited Seb and his parents over for a family meal on the Friday night before the wedding, but they had all agreed that it would be impractical with the travelling involved. She and Seb’s stepmother had been corresponding with one another ever since Seb and Grace had become engaged. Photographs had been exchanged, and shared goals for their children’s future established, and Jean had no qualms about the warmth of the reception Grace would receive from her in-laws. As for Seb, well, she and Sam already thought of him as a member of their family.

Finally, by Friday teatime, everything was ready: the church hall transformed and the tables laid with immaculate white cloths and borrowed cutlery and china.

The top table – a long trestle table covered in two white sheets and a tablecloth – was decorated along the front with more garlands of ivy, whilst a last-minute addition – a pair of five-branched silver-plated candelabra, loaned by yet another neighbour – held pride of place on the top table, ivy twined round the
silver, ‘pretend’ candles made from cardboard painted white, taking the place of the completely unavailable real thing. She’d have to make sure that no one forgot and tried to light them, Jean acknowledged, as she gave the silent, waiting room a final anxious look before closing and locking the door.

All she had to do now was go home and have a quick bath, and then get to the hairdresser’s. Everyone bar Grace had to have their bath tonight, leaving the bathroom free for Grace in the morning prior to going to get her own hair done.

The weather simply could not have been better, Jean decided, as she took her place in the front pew, preening herself just a little in her beautiful new outfit, knowing from the way the guests had craned their necks to get a glimpse of her that it looked wonderful. They had woken to blue skies and sharp winter sunshine, and now Jean’s heart was thumping with a mixture of pride and nervousness as she waited alone for Sam and Grace to arrive.

Jean guessed that every mother felt as she did on her daughter’s wedding day: filled with a mixture of love and pride and loss, and that every mother too thought that her daughter was the most beautiful bride ever, her heart swelling with the pride that had swelled Jean’s earlier this morning when she had finally stepped back from fussing with Grace’s veil and had felt her heart catch on a stab of maternal love so intense that it had robbed her of breath.

Now standing in the front pew of their church, knowing that at any minute Grace would be coming down the aisle on Sam’s arm, Jean dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief, remembering the sheer
luminous joy and expectation she had seen glowing from Grace’s face earlier. Yes, her daughter had a beautiful gown and was a beautiful girl, but it was her love for Seb that had illuminated her face with the happiness that had touched Jean’s maternal heart.