The Shop Girls of Chapel Street (33 page)

‘When? How?' she exclaimed.

‘Hadley is a small parish but my duties reach further afield,' the vicar explained carefully. ‘Among other things, I act as chaplain to parishioners who are admitted to hospital in Welby. The doctors there take care of their bodily ailments. Their spiritual welfare is left to me.'

‘Hospital, you say?' Violet was slow to absorb the information. ‘In Welby?'

‘Donald's last known address is noted as Main Street, Hadley. The hospital contacted me yesterday to say that he'd been admitted as a patient. I decided that I would try to speak to you tonight when you came to the Institute.'

‘Why? What's wrong with him?'

‘I'm afraid he has a bad case of pneumonia. This morning I went to visit him, as I'm bound to do. Unfortunately, your uncle refused to see me.'

Slowly Violet nodded.

‘I'm sure this has been a shock. Would you like to come in and sit down?' the vicar asked.

‘No, thank you. I can't stay. Is he … is he very ill?'

The answer, when it came, was cautious. ‘The hospital thought it was wise for me to visit him sooner rather than later. That's all I can tell you.'

‘I see.' Seized by panic, Violet backed away from the door. ‘I do have to go now. Thank you.'

‘If there's anything else I can do …'

‘No.' Shaking her head, she reached the gate and blindly made her way to the Institute where she sank onto a chair in the anteroom, her head in her hands. Uncle Donald was dying, or had already died – the thought hammered away inside her head. He was departing this world and leaving her behind, taking with him everything he'd kept secret about her mother's past.
I might never know for certain who my father was
, she thought with chilling finality.
And now Uncle Donald and I might never get the chance to say goodbye.

‘Where are you going?' Ida bumped into Violet as she flew, white faced, out of the building and across the yard.

‘To see Uncle Donald,' she gasped, seeing the bus appear at the corner. ‘He's in hospital in Welby. I'm sorry I can't stay for rehearsal, Ida. I'll see you tomorrow, all being well.'

The Queen Victoria Hospital in Welby was the largest building Violet had ever approached. Built around a courtyard along the lines of a medieval castle, with arched windows and castellated ramparts, it stood back from a busy thoroughfare criss-crossed by tramlines and blocked by buses that lurched out from pavements to join the ranks of slow-moving black cars. Horns hooted, draymen in charge of wooden carts drove heavy-footed horses down narrow side streets and ambulances fought through traffic to deliver patients to the wide hospital door.

Bracing herself to enter, she found a large, well-lit hallway leading to a daunting maze of corridors peopled by porters pushing trolleys and what looked like groups of bewildered relatives trying to follow signs to wards identified only by letters – Ward A, Ward B, and so on, through to the letter H. She walked uncertainly past an empty office furnished with metal filing cabinets and banks of black typewriters towards the open window of a booth where a dour-looking woman sat at a high desk.

‘Please could you help me?' she began. ‘I'm looking for a patient here by the name of Donald Wheeler.'

‘Ward?' the woman barked without looking up from the ledger she was scribbling in.

‘I don't know. He was brought in with pneumonia.'

The clerk sighed and began to flick through the pages of her ledger. ‘Date of admission?'

‘I don't know that either.'

‘Address? Date of birth? Next of kin?'

‘Me – I'm his niece.' Violet pounced on the one question she could readily answer.

‘W-H-E-E-L-E-R.' Spelling out the name, the woman searched then finally stabbed her pencil onto the page. ‘Admitted on the twenty-ninth of September. Ward C.'

Thanking her, Violet hurried down the corridor, its green walls and russet-coloured linoleum floor stretching on before her, the hushed atmosphere and disinfected smell designed to cow even the boldest of visitors. She kept her head down to avoid exchanging glances with the people she met along the way – an old lady in a wheelchair with wispy white hair trailing over her shoulders, a young lad with a bandaged head and sallow complexion – until she came to the ward she was looking for.

‘Yes?' The nurse stationed at a desk inside the swing-doors at least looked up when Violet entered.

‘I've come to visit Donald Wheeler.'

‘Are you a relative?'

‘He's my uncle.'

The nurse pointed to a chair. ‘Wait there.'

She disappeared through another set of doors and didn't return. Violet was kept in suspense, watching the hands of the clock above the nurse's desk jerk forward. Visitors came and went, and occasionally a nurse in starched cap and apron, but not the one she'd first spoken to.

At last she stood up and approached a porter – a heavily built man in a brown cotton coat with a receding hairline and an old scar stretching from his eye to the corner of his mouth. ‘Excuse me. I'm waiting to see my uncle. I asked a nurse about him but she hasn't got back to me.'

The porter tutted. ‘Was she tall with a snooty air? That's Edith. You'll wait forever for her if you're not careful. What's your uncle's name, love?'

Listening to Violet's answer, he went behind the desk and was calling out that her Uncle Donald was in bed number eleven when the tardy nurse returned and caught sight of Violet sitting where she'd left her.

‘Are you still here?' she said sharply. ‘I told your uncle you were here. His answer was that he didn't want to see anybody.'

Violet heaved a sigh. The long wait had deflated her and she was stung afresh by this latest rejection. Ah well, she'd made the last-ditch attempt at putting right the wrongs of the past, but she'd failed and that was that, it seemed.

Then out of the blue came a mental picture of Aunty Winnie in a shaft of sunlight in the corridor, standing full-square with arms folded, an unshakeable presence.
Don't take no for an answer
was the clear message in the loving, down-to-earth voice that Violet remembered so well.

‘The poor lass came all this way,' the porter pointed out to the sharp-tongued nurse. ‘Why not try again – see if he's changed his mind?'

Edith frowned but then relented. She disappeared again. There was another, shorter wait until she came back. ‘Your uncle says you can go in after all,' she reported. ‘But if I were you, I wouldn't get my hopes up.'

Duly prepared, Violet thanked the porter for his help and entered the ward with mixed feelings. The last time she'd seen Uncle Donald, on the doorstep of Jubilee, she'd felt sure their paths would never cross again. Looking back to that moment, she realized she hadn't even been sorry. Part of the reason was that she now had people who cared for her – Ida, Muriel, Evie, Stan, to name but a few, and, of course, Eddie above all. She didn't have to rely on Donald any more. But if the vicar was to be believed, he was nearing the end here in this hospital bed.

Once more Violet imagined what Aunty Winnie would have said – that it would be cruel to leave Donald all on his own and that their little family had stuck together through thick and thin.

So Violet walked between rows of iron bedsteads, eyes straight ahead out of respect for the sick people lying there, until she came to the bay marked 11. The shape under the green blanket was skeletal, the head on the pillow skull-like. Only the dark, sunken eyes moved – glittering in the pale face, papery skin drawn tight over the cheekbones, lips dry, breath loud and rasping. Pity and sadness drew her close to his bedside.

‘Well?' Donald said when he saw her.

Violet swallowed her distress and tried to speak normally. ‘Well, how are you?'

His eyes flickered shut. ‘How do I look? I told them to let me get on with it – to leave me there and let me die, but they carted me in here instead.'

‘Who's “they”, Uncle Donald?'

‘The Public Assistance busybodies. They found me collapsed on their doorstep.' Talking seemed hard. Words came in short snatches, in between painful attempts to drag air into his rattling lungs. ‘Who told you I was here, anyway?'

‘The vicar in Hadley. I came as soon as I heard. I'm sorry to see you in this fix, Uncle Donald, I really am.'

‘I'm not – I'm glad. I'm on my way out and it's a blessing.'

Gradually, as she pulled a chair close to the bed, Violet once more mastered her feelings and came to terms with what she saw. ‘But is there anything you need?' she asked gently.

‘Like what?'

‘The prayer book that I kept for you, for a start?'

‘If you want,' he conceded after a long silence. ‘It belonged to Joe. But fetch it anyway.'

‘Tomorrow,' she promised. As if she could still hear the clock above the nurse's desk ticking and measuring out the short time that her uncle had left, she went to the heart of the matter. ‘Uncle Donald … I've worked things out at last.'

‘What things?' A flash of the old suspicion appeared in his glittering eyes.

‘Why you were so dead set against me and Stan. It was because his father was my father too.'

‘Douglas Tankard.' The dying man filled two simple words with a lifetime of bitterness. ‘He was a married man, but that didn't stop him.'

‘It's true, then?'

For a long time Donald struggled for air but he held Violet's gaze. ‘Florence Shaw had got hitched to my brother but that didn't stop her either. The two of them were as bad as one another.'

‘From what I can gather, Joe had already gone off to the Front?'

‘He answered the call straight off, in late 1914. I went to the town hall and signed up with him.' There was pride in this and it set the memories flowing more freely. ‘It's true Joe wasn't as steady as me when we were growing up, but he had a decent heart, not like Tankard. No one had a good word to say about him, not once they got wind of the way he treated Gladys Sowden and their little lad.'

Violet leaned forward. ‘Mightn't there have been two sides to the story – especially if Joe wasn't a good husband either?'

‘No. Right is right and wrong is wrong. Your mother broke a holy commandment when she went with him. Winnie suspected it and by promising not to tell a living soul she managed to winkle the truth out of her. Florence admitted that Tankard had got his feet under the table by Christmas and nine months later you were the result.'

So then, there was no room for doubt. The jigsaw of Violet's life, first broken apart by her discovery of the bracelet, was pieced together again to form a new picture, a new identity. ‘What about Gladys and Stan?' she asked shakily.

‘Winnie kept her word so they never found out. Anyhow, with another baby on the way, and out of wedlock this time, Tankard saw he was in a tight spot so in the spring of 1915 he upped and enlisted as well. He was never seen or heard of again.'

Listening to the halting words, Violet began truly to see what it must have cost Donald to agree to adopt her after he'd returned from the trenches. His brother and Florence – betrayed and betrayer – were both dead. There was an illegitimate child and every reason in the world to have nothing to do with her. Yet, out of love for Winnie, Donald had given in to her desire to nurture the baby. ‘I see,' she said slowly, laying a hand on the cool bed cover.

‘You see some of it …' A raw cough rattled in Donald's throat and panicked Violet into calling for the tall nurse who came with more pillows to prop him up.

‘He needs to rest.' Edith spoke to Violet more kindly than before, waiting at the bedside for her to leave.

‘… but not all,' Donald carried on with difficulty, as if he hadn't been cut off.

Violet felt a shudder of apprehension. ‘What else should I know?'

There was a grim silence while he dredged through ancient events. ‘No last letter home, no personal effects – nothing. And there was never any telegram.'

‘To say Tankard had been killed?'

‘He didn't come home to Gladys and Stan – that's plain. But no – Gladys didn't get proper word of what happened to him in France.' Donald coughed again but as the nurse moved in to help, he pushed her away, seized Violet's hand and pulled her close. ‘No telegram,' he repeated with an urgency that shocked her.

‘Please,' the nurse murmured to Violet as she came between them. ‘It's time to leave.'

‘I have to go now, Uncle Donald.'

‘Joe's prayer book,' he reminded her amidst a fit of violent coughing, falling back against the pillows.

‘I'll bring it tomorrow,' Violet promised. She was glad that she'd come, if ‘glad' was the right word. It showed Uncle Donald that she cared and that she'd won the chance to do this one last thing for him.

‘Aye, do,' he gasped, letting his outstretched hand fall onto his chest.

‘Goodnight, then,' she said softly.

‘Aye and God bless,' he sighed, as if begging and not bestowing.

Shaken to her core, Violet backed away from the bed and turned to walk out of the ward, down the long green corridor, with Uncle Donald's pitiable gaze etched in her memory.

A sober mood hung over Violet during a visit from Eddie later that evening. They sat together over a cup of tea in Jubilee's small kitchen, Violet glad of Eddie's company while she thought out her next move.

‘In my heart I can't help but believe that Douglas Tankard loved my mother, despite what Uncle Donald said.'

‘Because of the bracelet?' Eddie quickly picked up her train of thought and saw how this might help Violet to feel better.

‘Yes. In the note he calls her his dearest Flo. He asks her to keep the bracelet for his sake. That shows he did love her, doesn't it?'