The Past and Other Lies (26 page)

Bertha averted her gaze. She was, she realised, in a privileged position. But she would not brag.

‘You’re looking jolly pleased with yourself, Bert. What’s up?’ said Fliss, leaning over the bench to peer at her. ‘Talk about the cat that’s got the cream,’ she added in an aside to Nancy.

They were all looking at her. Well so be it! Was she not about to become engaged to be married? To announce her wedding, her imminent departure? But it hadn’t happened yet. Nothing had been said, nothing spoken out loud. There was nothing to be gained by setting herself up for a great fall.

She pulled down the corners of her mouth lest she give herself away. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘It’s the postman, isn’t it, Bertha?’ said Nancy, leaning forward with a conspiratorial wink at Fliss.

‘He’s a counterman,’ retorted Bertha tartly, feeling her colour rise. And then she felt awful because Nancy’s husband was dead at the bottom of the North Sea. Or was it the Baltic Sea? At any rate it was a heart-breaking story, though you heard such stories all the time. Actually, he might not be at the bottom of the sea at all. She had an idea Nancy had once said he was buried at Portsmouth, but she might be mixing him up with a nephew of Matthew’s. So many dead boys, it was hard to keep track.

‘A counterman,’ Bertha repeated more calmly, amid a few guffaws. ‘And if you must know, I shall be seeing him this evening after work and having afternoon tea with his mother and his Aunt Daisy this Sunday.’

This resulted in a second, louder round of guffaws, and Bertha wished she had said nothing.

‘Well, but that’s very nice, Bert,’ said Elsie loyally. ‘Good for you,’ she added, and well she might because Elsie, as Bertha knew very well, had not been allowed to invite Bernie Sampson to afternoon tea at her parents’ house in Shepherds Bush. Some match that was.

The bell went, heralding the end of lunch, and as they traipsed back into the switchroom Elsie remarked that her new shoes were pinching her toes and Fliss said that that was the last of the sardines and tomorrow it was back to fish paste. It was all so normal, so exactly like any other Friday afternoon in the switchroom, that Bertha wondered if she really was meeting Matthew this evening after work with the understanding that they would become betrothed...or if she had, in fact, imagined the whole thing.

The afternoon dragged on and, apart from a breakdown in the Exeter exchange which meant all calls to the south-west had to be diverted via Bristol and Cardiff exchanges, was uneventful. Bertha passed the time pondering all the different ways a man could ask you to marry him.

At long last the bell rang to signal the end of the shift. Transmitters were ripped off, coats grabbed and hats thrust onto heads, and everyone surged out into the warm air and sunlight of the August evening.

And there was Matthew! Standing on the steps waiting for her, just as he had told her he would be, just where everyone finishing the shift could see him. Bertha felt a surge of pleasure and quickly made her way over.

‘Evening, my dearest,’ he said, leaning over and offering her a kiss on the cheek, which she accepted gracefully as she did each time they met.

‘Hello dearest,’ she replied a little breathlessly, offering him her arm. She allowed herself to be led down the exchange steps, unable to resist a glance over her shoulder to see who might have observed her.

But no one had. Nellie and Elsie were still standing in the doorway, cigarettes already lit, madly applying lipstick. Fliss and Nancy, first out of the door, were already halfway towards the railway station, hurrying arm in arm and laughing at some joke.

‘Dearest, shall we go?’ said Matthew, and Bertha reminded herself what day it was and how she had been waiting for this day all week. And perhaps a lot longer.

‘I thought we could go for a fish and chip supper,’ Matthew suggested and Bertha stared at him, her mouth falling open.

A fish and chip supper?

This had become something of a Friday night tradition over the past five months and meant Pontison’s Fish Cafe in Gunnersbury Lane—haddock and chips for Matthew, plaice and chips for Bertha, hers with vinegar, his without, served with a plate of bread and butter and followed by a pot of tea for two, after which they either strolled through the park or, if it was a chilly evening, had a bottle of stout at the Red Lion. Either way, the evening ended up at the path leading to the Flaxheeds’ house in Wells Lane with a peck on the cheek and an arrangement for Sunday afternoon.

That was not what this evening was supposed to be.

Already they were walking along the street towards Horn Lane, Matthew discussing with obvious relish that afternoon’s sorting at the post office. Sorting was an event in which he, as a senior counterman, no longer had to participate but, as an ex-sorter himself, took some pleasure in observing. The current team of sorters were all ex-servicemen—a group, according to Matthew, so intensely dull and stupid they could only have survived the trenches by sheer dumb luck. It was, he concluded, a daily miracle that the post got sorted, placed into the appropriate mail bags and loaded into the delivery vans at all. One could only imagine where some of the more obscurely addressed parcels ended up. Last week, for example, a registered letter bound for Salisbury had, he revealed with grim relish, turned up in Salford, Manchester a week later.

Bertha experienced a tightness in her chest, a lightheadedness and flickering of lights before her eyes like when you’d run for the last tram and not quite made it to the stop in time. This was not how she had imagined her evening. It was not why she had waited so impatiently for the week to come to an end, had counted the minutes each morning, lying in bed, waiting to get up and wash and dress so that it had seemed her heart would burst out of her chest and her brain would erupt from her skull with the effort of lying still, the agony of waiting. And for what? So that they could go for a fish supper at Pontison’s!

She couldn’t speak. Her throat was parched and her tongue was numb and lifeless in her mouth. She walked in silence and her hand, where it rested on his arm, was dead and cold.

‘Careful, m’dear,’ said Matthew suddenly. She looked down and narrowly missed stepping in a steaming pile of horse dung on the road. A little way ahead, a horse and dray from the brewery were stationed outside the Red Lion, where barrels were being unloaded and rolled down a wooden ramp into the cellar.

The Red Lion. She looked up and realised they were walking east along High Street and not south down Gunnersbury Lane as usual. They passed Acton Lane and she could hear a train rattling over the bridge. They were not, in fact, very far from Matthew’s aunt’s house in Oakton Way. She paused, confused, and looked at Matthew, who had fallen silent. He had a sort of dogged secretiveness about him. Bertha felt quite sick.

‘And did all go well at the counter today?’ she blurted out, because now she needed the familiar and ordinary when just a moment before she had despised it.

‘A little fraught, m’dear, in actual fact,’ Matthew replied with a slight frown.

‘Oh?’

‘The unions, stirring up a hornet’s nest as usual. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say the new lot are every bit as bad as the old lot. We shall all be Bolsheviks by Christmas, at this rate.’

‘Oh dear.’

The new lot, she knew from previous discussions, was the National Federation of something or other who were an offshoot or a rival branch of the Union of something else and were always on the brink of calling out the postal staff on a strike.

Bertha made no further comment. Somehow the familiar and the ordinary had not proved as comforting as she had imagined. And now they were turning, very definitely, into Oakton Way. Things had gone far enough.

‘My dear, aren’t we going to Pontison’s?’ she inquired lightly.

She felt a slight pressure on her hand as Matthew reached across and squeezed her fingers. That was all, just a slight pressure, but it was enough, and in a rush the giddiness returned and she felt little pinpricks of perspiration on her skin.

They continued to walk almost to the end of Oakton Way and at last came to a stop outside number fifteen.

The houses in Oakton Way dated from the 1880s and had been built as cottages for the workers at the nearby railways yards. They were similar to the houses in Wells Lane, though the front gardens were smaller, and while Wells Lane had elm trees dotted along its length, Oakton Way was treeless and bordered at one end by the blackened walls of the new gas works that cast a shadow over one half of the road. Number fifteen had a dark-green front door and in the lounge window hung a pair of ancient white net curtains. The little garden was bordered on one side by rosebushes and the flowers, now past their bloom, had shed pink and white petals onto the little pathway that led up to the front door.

It was a little after six o’clock and the sun had yet to set, though in this part of Oakton Way the street was already deep in the shadow cast by the gasworks. Bertha pulled her jacket a little closer about her shoulders.

They paused now at the garden gate, but rather than opening the gate Matthew stood and gazed up at the house with obvious satisfaction and then, with another squeeze of her hand, he looked down at her. Bertha, frozen into inaction, couldn’t decide whether to gaze up at the house, turn towards Matthew or return the squeeze. So instead she contemplated the last full bloom of the nearest rosebush.

‘We own this house now, of course,’ he said, which meant that she ought to be gazing up at the house. ‘Bought it whole from the landlord and now we own it—I own it. Not a brick belongs to the bank either.’

Bertha gazed more intently, her eyes settling on the geranium in a vase that stood on the sill of an upstairs room. She had not visited the upstairs rooms during her previous visit, the closet and wash room being situated downstairs behind the kitchen and down a cold passage.

‘My salary at the post office is not excessive,’ Matthew continued. ‘However, as a senior counterman I do earn a little over five hundred pounds.’ He paused, scrutinising the upstairs window.

Five hundred pounds! That seemed rather a lot, certainly more than double her own salary at the West Western. But the exact size of his salary was unimportant compared to the fact that he had told it to her. When a man told you how much his salary was, it meant only one thing.

‘Indeed?’ she replied.

‘However, it is steady work and the prospects for a hard-working, dedicated employee are more than satisfactory. I intend to become sub-postmaster in time and then, well—’ he sniffed and appeared almost abashed, ‘it is not inconceivable that I should make postmaster before retirement.’

She tried to decide whether a response was required at this point and, if so, what that response might be. She nodded, her head a little to one side, implying an intelligent understanding of the situation.

‘I therefore consider myself to be...to be in a position, a good position you might almost say, to make an offer of matrimony to a young lady and to hope that that young lady might accept it.’

What young lady? Me? thought Bertha, confused then flustered and finally a little annoyed—after all, what sort of a proposal was that? It hadn’t even been a question. She took a deep breath.

‘Well, I think that that young lady is in a position to accept a proposal of matrimony—should one come her way,’ she replied tartly, fixing her gaze as haughtily as she could on the one remaining bloom in the rosebush.

There was a short silence and she was pleased to see she had nonplussed him.

‘Miss Flaxheed—Bertha—would you consent to be my wife?’

‘Yes, I would,’ she replied unequivocally, and now there was no reason at all not to turn and face him and allow him to take both her gloved hands and to risk, yes, to give him a smile. After all, it was the happiest day of her life.

‘Well! This is marvellous, quite marvellous!’ exclaimed Matthew and then, remembering himself, he put a hand inside his jacket and pulled out a ring. ‘May I?’

She nodded and let him unbutton her left glove and roll it slowly down her hand and her fingers, then slip the ring over her engagement finger. It stuck at her knuckle and had to be worked around and around a number of times before it would go any further, but when it had and she was able to look at it, it was very fine. A simple narrow gold band with two tiny rubies on either side of a slightly larger pearl. Victorian in style, it was true, but with a certain understated elegance. She was very pleased.

‘Shall we go inside? I know Mother and Aunt Daisy will be keen to offer their congratulations.’ He opened the wooden gate to let her pass.

As the gate banged back against the fence post the one remaining rose shed its petals in a pink arc on the path and Matthew stepped on them as he went to open the front door.

‘Do have another muffin, Miss Flaxheed.’

Bertha contemplated the almost-transparent china plate that was being offered to her and on which were another eight buttered muffins. On the small mahogany tea trolley beside Aunt Daisy were three more such plates, one laden with slices of gingerbread, one with Madeira cake and one with teacakes. The piece of uneaten Madeira and the large chunks of Aunt Daisy’s homemade gingerbread on her own plate were, she hoped, hidden by the remains of her last muffin.