The September Girls (41 page)

Marcus nodded and stood aside to let her pass. She disappeared down the stairs to the kitchen. He followed and stood at the top, listening.

‘I looked in on you earlier, and you were dead to the world,’ he heard Nancy say. ‘I thought it best to let you sleep, wake up in your own time, as it were. How d’you feel this morning?’

‘Much better,’ Cara said again, although Marcus suspected it was a lie. ‘I’ve just been speaking to Mr Allardyce. He’s awfully kind, isn’t he?’

Nancy chuckled. ‘You’re probably the first person in the world to say that.’

‘Oh, but he is!’ Cara protested. ‘He was kind to our Fergus too when he gave him a job in his factory. I remember Eleanor used to call him all sorts of names, I can’t think why.’

‘I expect Eleanor had her reasons. Look, pet,’ Nancy said seriously, ‘I was awake half the night wondering what to do with you and I haven’t come up with a single idea. There’s homes for unmarried mothers, usually run by some church or other, but they’re terribly strict places, not very pleasant.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Cara cried. ‘Anywhere will do. It’ll only be for seven months, then I shall have to sort meself out.’

She was so naive, Marcus thought. Somehow, she’d managed to reach the age of nineteen without having learnt that people could be very cruel, that not everyone thought the same as she did. He moved swiftly to his study when he heard Nancy say, ‘I’ll just take Mr Allardyce up a cup of coffee.’

‘What’s happening with Cara?’ he enquired innocently when Nancy came in.

‘All I can think of is a home for unmarried mothers,’ she replied. ‘I feel awful, if the truth be known. I feel as if I’m letting her down - Sybil, too.’

‘You can’t do the impossible,’ he said. ‘Look, why not let Cara stay here for however long it takes for her to have the baby? Then you won’t be letting either her or Sybil down.’

‘Do you really mean that?’ Nancy looked at him with disbelief.

‘I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it,’ he snapped. Did she think him such an ogre that he was incapable of a single kind gesture? It would make a change to have someone living in the house who liked him: no one else did.

 

Cara never left the house, not even for Mass. She wasn’t remotely happy, but she was in the perfect place to be
un
happy. Nancy was out most of the day, Mr Allardyce spent most of time in his study or at the factory, and she had had the run of the house except for Tuesday and Friday mornings when the cleaner came and Cara locked herself in her room.

‘Mrs Clegg is the only paid help left,’ Nancy said. ‘Time was we had a maid, someone to do the washing and a woman who came in Sundays to make the meals. These days, I send the washing to the laundry and look after the place meself. But your mam and Mrs Clegg know each other, so you’d best keep out of her way.’

It was a gloomy house, full of dark shadows and cool even on the warmest of days. Nancy would come in, mopping her brow, saying, ‘By jingo, it’s hot out there,’ but Cara preferred the house the way it was after the scorching heat of Malta.

She never got bored, even if she spent half the day lying on the bed wishing things had gone differently and she was Mrs Christopher Farthing. Sometimes, she wrote letters to Kit, telling him how she felt, then tore them up in floods of tears. She wrote to Mam and Dad, pretending she was in Malta, and sent the letters to Sybil who sent them all the way back to Liverpool with a Maltese postmark, then did the same with the letters that arrived for Cara.

Sybil declared herself tickled pink with the idea of Cara living in Parliament Terrace. ‘Daddy must have had a brainstorm,’ she wrote. ‘I’ve only ever known him to be pleasant with me. He must be mellowing in his old age.’

Sometimes, Mam or Eleanor came to visit Nancy, or they both came together, and Cara would sit on the stairs, listening to her mother’s loud voice, heart thumping, worried she might creep up and find her there - what her reaction would be was beyond the bounds of even Cara’s vivid imagination.

According to Mam, Fergus was having a whale of a time, girls coming to see him every night, even taking him to the pictures and teaching him to dance. He’d been discharged from the Army. Cara winced when she heard this. Her own discharge had arrived, but it wasn’t for an honourable reason like Fergus.

According to Mam, since Fergus had come home, Tyrone was even more steeped in despair than he’d been before. ‘I don’t know what to do with him, I really don’t,’ Mam declared. ‘And neither does Maria. All he does with them poor kids is bite their heads off.’

There were lots of novels in the parlour with ‘This book belongs to Eleanor Wallace’ written on the flyleaf. They were by authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens. Never one for reading much, nevertheless, Cara found that once she’d started a novel, she became so absorbed she couldn’t put it down.

Only one thing spoiled Cara’s quiet, limited existence in the house in Parliament Terrace and that was the air raids that had started in July, at first the bombs dropping harmlessly in fields damaging only the crops. Next month, the raids became more frequent and the bombs crept closer. The docks were hit, the Customs House, Mossley Hill church, and ordinary streets with ordinary houses where a lot of people died, people who’d done no harm to anyone in their lives.

Nancy and Mr Allardyce stayed in their beds and ignored the raids, but Cara woke the very second the siren sounded - that’s if she’d gone asleep in the first place. She couldn’t understand how anyone could sleep through the hideous wail of the siren, the drone of the approaching planes, followed by the dull thud of bombs exploding all over the city.

With every raid, Cara relived the night in Malta when she’d lost Kit. Everything would come back, as if it had only happened yesterday, and she would go downstairs in the pyjamas that were now too small for Nancy, yet were too big for her, sit in the kitchen and try to read her book, but found it impossible to concentrate. There were public shelters not far away, but even if there had been no chance of seeing someone she knew, the stoutly built house probably offered more protection than a shelter in the case of a direct hit.

During these quiet times in the kitchen, Cara reviewed her own situation. She wasn’t the only woman in the world who had lost a loved one. She would never cease to mourn Kit, but the fact she was single and pregnant was probably common to a lot of young women in wartime and she was one of the luckiest, living where she was in a comfortable house with Nancy to look after her. As Mam would have said, she’d landed on her feet - she’d said the same thing when Fergus had got the job with H.B. Wallace. Then, as now, it was the much-maligned Mr Allardyce who’d turned up trumps.

September came and the raids were even heavier. Nancy remarked they’d woken her; Mr Allardyce said he’d found them rather worrying. The next time Cara went down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, Nancy was already there in her dressing gown in the process of making tea. Five minutes later, Mr Allardyce, wearing a grey silk robe, joined them, just as an explosion rocked the house.

‘Bloody hell!’ Nancy gasped. ‘That was close.’

That was the night the cathedral was hit, destroying many of the stained-glass windows. Next day, Nancy reported the building was surrounded by craters. ‘There’s one right outside our back door.’

From then on, every time the siren went, all three would meet in the kitchen, Mr Allardyce with a couple of bottles of wine from the cellar, which he shared with Nancy; Cara preferred tea. By the time the raid was over, she would be the only clear-headed person there.

‘If I’m going to die,’ Nancy said once. ‘I’d sooner do it when I’m as drunk as a lord, rather than as sober as a judge.’

‘Hear, hear!’ echoed Mr Allardyce.

An unlikely camaraderie developed between them and they began to play cards during the raids, aces high and poker, using cutlery for money, each knife, fork or spoon worth a thousand pounds. Cara had learned to play poker in the Army and was good at reading people’s faces and guessing if the cards they had were good or bad. She would throw in thousands of pounds’ worth of spoons and end up winning a fortune, even if the cards in her hand were hopeless.

‘I’ll be a millionaire in no time,’ she laughed one night when the all-clear sounded and she collected her winnings. Her expression changed. ‘I can’t remember the last time I laughed,’ she said in a shocked voice.

‘Let’s hope it won’t be such a long time before you laugh again.’ Nancy patted her hand. ‘Now, put that cutlery back in the box. It’ll be needed tomorrer.’

 

Nancy had found loads of baby clothes in the drawers in Nurse Hutton’s old room. ‘They just need a wash,’ she declared, ‘get rid of the smell of mothballs.’

‘They’re lovely,’ Cara breathed as she sorted through the pretty embroidered gowns, hand-knitted cardigans, booties and bonnets, a satin christening robe, a crocheted shawl, dozens of warm vests, pretty socks and loads of napkins. Everything was white and some things looked as if they’d never been worn. Nancy said there was a pram in the cellar and a cradle in the loft. ‘Will Mr Allardyce mind if I have them?’ Cara asked.

‘He won’t mind a bit.’ Nancy winked. ‘He likes you. It’s not often Marcus likes someone, but he does you. Any road, pet, that’s the baby clothes sorted, but what about you? You’re already bursting out of that frock and you’ve still got another four months to go. There’s probably some of Eleanor’s old frocks still in her wardrobe. I’ll see if I can turn two into one and make you a maternity frock.’

‘Thank you, Nancy, I don’t know what I’d have done without you - or Mr Allardyce.’ Cara looked at her shyly. ‘I like him too, by the way.’

 

She was reading when he went into the living room, her feet on a stool, but put the book down immediately she saw him. He got on better with her than he’d ever done with Sybil.

‘Hello.’ Her smile lit up the room. ‘What’s it like outside? It looks awfully cold and windy. I watched people go past snuggled inside their coats and holding on to their hats.’

‘It’s exactly that,’ Marcus said, ‘cold and windy, a typical November day. What’s that you’re reading?’

‘
Pickwick Papers
, it’s dead funny. Have you read it?’

‘I did when I was a child.’

She snorted. ‘You must have been a very clever child. Me, I only read comics.’

‘I liked comics too,’ he conceded. He noticed there were a handful of coals burning in the grate giving off hardly any heat. ‘That’s not much of a fire,’ he remarked.

‘We’re virtually out of fuel. All of a sudden there’s a shortage and we’ve only a little bit of coke left. No more will be delivered until Friday, and then it won’t be much. I hope you don’t mind, but Nancy lit that just for me. She’s got visitors, else I’d be in the kitchen helping to make tea. It’s lovely and warm down there. I made some fairy cakes earlier,’ she said proudly. ‘I don’t know what they’ll taste like, they’re little more than flour and water and a bit of margarine.’

‘I’m sure they’ll taste very nice.’ He liked the way she’d said ‘
we’re
virtually out of fuel’, as if she belonged there and they were all mucking in together. By now, she genuinely was better and the fighting spirit she’d inherited from her mother had come back, although her face sometimes bore an expression of utter desolation if she thought no one was looking. ‘I’ve bought you something,’ he said bashfully. He fetched the Frederick & Hughes carrier bag he’d left in the hall and gave it to her. ‘Call it a late birthday present.’ She’d turned twenty about six weeks ago.

‘What is it?’ She delved into the bag and brought out the turquoise velvet dressing gown he’d got that afternoon. ‘Oh! Oh, it’s
beautiful
!’ Her face turned pink and she clutched the gown to her chest. ‘Oh, Mr Allardyce, you shouldn’t have. It’s not right. You’ve already been incredibly generous, letting me live here, like. This is too much.’

‘To tell the truth,’ he said, making a joke of it so she wouldn’t feel so embarrassed, ‘I’m sick of seeing you in those giant pyjamas. And this house gets very cold in the winter and we won’t be able to have fires in every room as we used to. Try the thing on, see if it fits,’ he suggested.

She put it on and twirled round a few times. ‘What d’you think?’

‘Very smart.’ He nodded. ‘Very smart indeed.’

‘It’s lovely and warm,’ she breathed, smoothing her hands over her stomach as if she was caressing the baby inside. She sighed. ‘Poor thing, he doesn’t what lies ahead of him, does he?’

‘What do you mean?’ He was at a loss to know why she thought it was a boy.

‘He won’t have a name, only mine, and that’s not worth anything.’

Marcus thought of something he could do about that, but he’d wait until he knew her better.

 

The next time Mam came to see Nancy she was in a terrible mood, understandably given the circumstances. The night before, a bomb had dropped in the next street and the front windows in the house in Shaw Street had been shattered in the blast.

‘Colm’s taken the day off to fix them, but all he can fit is plywood for now. It’ll be desperately miserable inside. Joey and Mike had fits of hysterics when it happened and Maria screamed her head off. And didn’t I have to cope with everything on me own? Colm was out, him being an ARP warden, like, and our Tyrone wasn’t there. He never is; he just sits in the pub until it closes and, if there’s a raid, the pub stays open until the all-clear goes, although they’re not supposed to.’ She paused for breath. ‘And our Fergus! Well, all I can say is I’m dead disappointed in our Fergus. You know that woman he’s been knocking around with?’

‘You mean Jessie Clifford?’ Nancy queried.

‘Indeed I do,’ Mam huffed. ‘The one with the dyed blonde hair and eyes like cockroaches. Well, didn’t he only go and spend the whole night in her house! Not only is she ten years older than him, but she’s got a husband in the Merchant Navy. I called him every name under the sun when he came back this morning, but he told me to mind me own business.’