Time to Say Goodbye (37 page)

The three girls were profuse in their thanks and as soon as they reached the Linnet they rushed inside and cantered up the stairs to their room. Imogen, ahead of the other two, thought how strange it was that already the place seemed different, almost as though it, too, missed Auntie and knew that things had changed.

In their attic bedroom, they worked with feverish haste, eager not to give Mrs Caldecott any excuse to say she could not take all three of them into the city. Mrs Jacky toiled slowly up the stairs to say that they need not clean the room until they returned from their trip, and even her footfall was so different from Auntie’s quicker, lighter tread that Imogen had to fight back tears.

‘She’s using too much bleach; everywhere smells horrid,’ Rita murmured, as the old woman began to descend the stairs once more. ‘And what on earth is she cooking? I’m not sorry we shan’t be here for dinner!’

Imogen stifled a laugh. ‘It’s pigswill. Why, Rita, Auntie boils up all the potato peelings and the onion skins and stuff like that every day; you can’t have forgotten the smell of it.’

Debby chuckled, but Rita shot her a scornful look. ‘It smells different. Auntie’s pigswill smells delicious, almost as though it was a nice dinner cooking,’ she said. ‘Debby, if you don’t want that poster, I wouldn’t mind it.’

‘Feel free,’ Debby said obligingly. She rammed her parents’ wedding photograph into her already bulging suitcase, snapped the lock shut and cast a lingering look around the attic where they had slept for nearly three years. ‘When I think of all the fun we’ve had . . .’ she was beginning when a shout came echoing up the stairs.

It was Mrs Caldecott. ‘Come
along
, girls,’ she called. ‘Don’t forget we have to go up to the farm first, to dump your suitcases. And Mrs Jeffries has made it plain that she’ll be very annoyed indeed if she misses her train back to Liverpool. If you aren’t ready in five minutes . . .’

‘We’re ready now,’ Rita said, casting an impatient glance at her two companions. ‘Come on, you two. My mother hates to be kept waiting.’

Debby promptly grabbed her case and followed Rita’s example, but Imogen lingered for a moment. She hardly knew why she did so, but she found herself eager to take one last look at the room which had been their retreat for so long. We must come back when we’ve seen Rita off and make the room respectable again, she told herself. The blackout blind needed repairing and they had all abandoned small things such as night lights, an electric torch whose battery had failed, comics, magazines and even clothing which no longer fitted any of them, so the room was in desperate need of tidying.

But then she heard the back door opening, so she grabbed her case and followed Debby, chiding herself for believing even for a moment that they would never come back here, that Auntie would refuse to take responsibility even for Debby and herself. She thundered down the stairs and into the familiar kitchen, blinking back sudden tears when she saw that it was Mrs Jacky rolling out pastry on the big wooden table, and Jacky seizing the cauldron of pigswill, clearly intent upon feeding the pigs before setting off for the harvest field. Because she was last out, it was she who sat in the front passenger seat this time whilst Rita and Debby sat in the back. No chance for whispered conversations, then, between herself and Debby, but perhaps that was a good thing. Although Rita had shown little sign of distress since they had left the hospital behind them, Imogen knew very well that the other girl was deeply unhappy, and perhaps it would be some consolation to be able to chat to Debby as the car took her ever nearer to the meeting with Mrs Jeffries.

‘Goodness, Rita, wharron earth have you got in this perishin’ suitcase? I’m sure it weren’t as heavy as this when you left three years ago!’ Mrs Jeffries chuckled. ‘Don’t say you’ve been and gone and stole the family silver from that old woman what took you in! So what made you decide to run home to your old mam? I suppose you got the blame for something what weren’t your fault. Well, there’s been so much bomb damage in the city that folk is clamouring for beds, so I’m full to the roof tiles, even though we’ve still got no glass in half the winders. You’ll have to share a bed with me until you can leave school and get yourself a billet somewhere out Love Lane way, because that’s where the big factories are, and that’s where you’d best look for work. It were all very well you bein’ evacuated when the bombs was raining down, but now you might as well earn your keep.’

Debby and Imogen stared at Mrs Jeffries, almost unwilling to believe their ears. On the only other occasion when they had met Mrs Jeffries, she’d clearly been on her best behaviour in order to come across as a caring mother, concerned with her child’s welfare. How different was the reality! No wonder Rita had not wanted to go home; no wonder she had not been as keen as Imogen for her mother to visit the Canary and Linnet. But now she had to put a good face on it, and to Imogen’s relief she skated neatly round the question of running away and instead introduced Mrs Caldecott. That lady, clearly as surprised as Imogen and Debby, greeted Mrs Jeffries rather stiffly. ‘I think you may have been misinformed,’ she began. ‘There has been no suggestion that Miss Marcy was not a caring foster parent; indeed, all the young people in her charge are desperate to stay with her.’

Mrs Jeffries gave a scornful sniff. ‘You can’t tar my girl with the same brush as you tar them others,’ she said belligerently. ‘In my view there’s always a reason for everything. Why should my Rita run away if she were so happy, answer me that!’

Rita began to mutter that it wasn’t exactly Auntie who had driven her to run away, but then she caught the accusing eyes of Imogen and Debby and changed her mind. ‘It weren’t Auntie: me and Debby had a row. I said awful things, things I didn’t mean, and then I was ashamed, so I ran off. Oh, Mam, make them let me stay! Tell ’em I’ll look after Auntie like a proper nurse and never give no trouble. Tell ’em I mean to go to university, like what Debby says she will. Tell ’em anything, so long as you make them let me stay!’

Mrs Caldecott’s cheeks went red with embarrassment and she began to stutter, but it was clear that Mrs Jeffries had made up her mind. When she told the story of her daughter’s sudden arrival home she would tell it her way. Rita would be the innocent victim of an old woman’s spite, and though this was manifestly untrue it would go down in history as ‘what happened to Rita Jeffries’, until either Mrs Jeffries thought up a better tale or Rita moved away from home and was forgotten.

Perhaps it was a good thing that at that moment the train for which they waited came hissing and clattering alongside the platform. Mrs Jeffries held out her hand to shake Mrs Caldecott’s, and Imogen was struck by the difference between those two hands. Mrs Caldecott’s was clean, with well-trimmed nails; Mrs Jeffries’s was somewhat grimy and the nails were painted scarlet, looking so long and pointed that Imogen was reminded of the wicked queen in Snow White.

‘Thank you for looking after my girl,’ Mrs Jeffries said rather grudgingly as the hands met. She turned to Imogen and Debby. ‘Best say goodbye now, you two, ’cos railway trains don’t wait for no man . . .’ she chuckled, ‘nor women neither.’ She hefted Rita’s suitcase on to the train and gave Rita a not unkind push in the same direction. ‘Get me a winder seat,’ she ordered, and began to climb ponderously aboard. Imogen had one last glimpse of her friend’s set white face, and then the porter was coming along the platform, blowing his whistle and waving his flag. The train began to move and Imogen started forward.

‘We never said goodbye properly,’ she wailed. ‘Oh, Debby, we let her go without telling her how sorry we were, and how much we shall miss her. Oh, stop the train, someone stop the train!’ She began to run along the platform, but stopped when she felt Debby’s small hands grip her wrist.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right, Immy,’ Debby said soothingly, and Imogen realised that the tears which had filled her eyes had splashed down her cheeks. ‘It was hearing all the lies her mother was making up about Auntie which made us forget to say a proper goodbye. When we get back to the farm we’ll write her a nice long letter, telling her we love her and shall miss her. And after supper we’ll get the boys to add a PS to the letter so she’ll know everyone’s forgiven her, not just us.’

‘Oh, Debby, I do love you,’ Imogen said. ‘We’ll be friends for all our lives long, won’t we? And when it’s our turn to go home, we’ll go together.’

Chapter Twelve

1959

THE YOUNG WOMAN
sitting on the bench was brought back to the present by a ray of sunshine falling on her face, and when she opened her eyes she realised that the rain had stopped. She had dressed with care that morning in the peach-coloured jersey wool suit which Will had always loved, and now she jumped up, a hand flying to her mouth. If the seat had marked it . . . but then she remembered that the suit was protected by an old brown mackintosh and relaxed for a moment, though she brushed the seat carefully before sitting down again. Brown? Brown was not her colour, never had been; what was it that was tugging at her memory? Odd, the things one remembers . . .

Abruptly, she sat upright. She had not thought about her dream of the Canary and Linnet in ruins for years, but now that it had come back to her she remembered everything. The woman in brown who had called Imogen’s name . . . but dreams were only dreams, she chided herself.

She glanced at the house behind her and got to her feet once more, and even as she shook the rain from the shoulders of her mackintosh she heard a small sound at her feet and looked down to find a tortoiseshell cat stropping itself against her legs. She bent and stroked it, noting that it was well fed and quite young. Clearly it belonged to somebody and would doubtless make off as soon as it realised it was unlikely to get any sort of welcome here. But as she went up the side path – sadly overgrown – to take a look at the front of the pub the cat followed, and when she reached the courtyard which Auntie had called her parking area it darted ahead of her, rearing up on its hind legs to grab a whirling leaf.

But the moment she rounded the corner, the young woman forgot the cat when she saw something else which brought her to an abrupt halt. A house agent’s board, announcing that the premises were for sale, proclaimed its message to anyone passing by on the main road. The woman went closer, to read the small print, thinking that the agent could not be a local man or he would have put his board up at the back rather than the front, for locals popping in for a drink or the men from the RAF station had always come via the lane. But then, the agent would scarcely expect a local to put in an offer for the ramshackle place that the Canary and Linnet had become, so it stood to reason that the board had been put in the most obvious spot for anyone who might be looking for somewhere to buy.

Having read that the property was freehold and contained, in addition to the house, three acres of good land, the woman turned away from the board, and looked long and hard at the place where she had spent the happiest years of her childhood. The back of the house had been a shock and in a way the front was a shock too, only this time a pleasant one. Someone had cleared the path to the front door and tidied the beds beneath the bow windows. Here there was no missing glass, no crumbling wood, no scarred paintwork. And even as she took a couple of steps towards it the front door opened and a figure shambled out carrying a bucket and, when he saw her, blinking in mild surprise. She guessed he was in his fifties, and when he tilted his cap to the back of his head and scratched his brow an elusive likeness caught at her throat.

‘Jacky?’ she said uncertainly.

‘That’s me,’ the man said. ‘But I don’t know as I reckernise you, missie. Unless you was meaning t’other Jacky – my brother Ralph – ’cos the older we gets the more like one another we grows.’

With a tremendous effort of memory the woman remembered that Jacky and his wife had had two sons, Ralph and Tommy. She had only met them once, at the very end of her sojourn at the pub, when the girls had left the Pilgrims and moved back to the Canary and Linnet to help Auntie with her chores. The two brothers had come home to celebrate VE day. She remembered noticing even then the strong family resemblance between all the Jacky family – or perhaps she should say the Wellbeloveds. But the man had set down his bucket, and now jerked his thumb at the house agent’s board. ‘Are you lookin’ to buy? The poor old Linnet is in a bad state, ’cos it’s been empty for years. But the owner is payin’ us to clean it up, make good the winders and so on. Hev you bin round the back?’

‘I hev – I mean I have,’ the young woman said quickly. ‘But I’m not interested in buying – well, not unless it’s very cheap indeed, that is.’ She cleared her throat and looked speculatively at the man. ‘Forgive me, but I believe you must be Jacky Wellbeloved’s son Tommy. I knew your father very well during the war.’

‘You did?’ A broad beam spread across the man’s sunburned face. ‘My dad’s been dead this dunnamany years, but Mam’s still livin’ in the cottage next door to ours.’ He grinned, showing a set of teeth far too white to be his own. ‘I don’t say nothin’ agin young Mr Pilgrim – his ma and pa were rare good to us Wellbeloveds – but when my ma drops off her perch they’ll do away with them two cottages and build somethin’ a bit more modern. A’ course the rent’ll go up, but my Millie, she hanker after a proper oven and that. And Ralph don’t live at home no longer. Him and his Sandra hev got a flat over the general shop in the village, which suit them quite well since they’ve got no kids.’ He beamed at the young woman. ‘Two boys and a girl, that’s us.’ He looked at her narrowly. ‘But don’t go tellin’ me you was in the forces, ’cos you’re too young, so how come you knew my dad?’

The young woman explained that she had been an evacuee, billeted at the Canary and Linnet, and Tommy Wellbeloved nodded sagely. ‘I heared tell of them,’ he said thoughtfully. He picked up his bucket. ‘But I’d better get on,’ he observed. ‘The owner want every weed took out and the beds planted with suffin’ colourful, though God know what it will be, ’cos this ain’t the time of year for beddin’ plants.’ As he spoke he started heaving out the knee-high weeds and dumping them in his bucket. The young woman watched until the bucket was full, and was about to turn round and go back the way she had come – for she knew that if anyone else did turn up it would be by the lane from the village, and not the main road – when Tommy cleared his throat. ‘If you’ve got five minutes to spare I dare say you might pop up to the cottage and hev a chat with my old ma,’ he said. ‘She’d be right grateful. She don’t see many folk these days – don’t get out much, in fact. Well, she’s past eighty, deaf as a post, and her sight’s failing. But as she tells it she were right fond of the little gals what stayed at the old Linnet.’