Wartime Brides (37 page)

‘Nine shillings and eleven pence,’ Edna quickly interjected.

Mr Lewis’s mouth remained open. He had one gold tooth. She could see it glinting among those that were more Cheddar cheese in colour.

His fat face slowly dispersed into a smile. ‘Ah yes. Nine shillings and eleven pence. Please sign here.’

He pushed a pile of papers towards her. As instructed by Colin she read them quickly.

Once it was done, Mr Lewis got up from his chair, which scraped the floor as he pushed it backwards. As he shook her hand he said, ‘You’ve struck a very good deal there, young lady. Do you realise how much that contract is worth?’

Edna calculated it quickly. One thousand scooters at nine shillings and eleven pence each. Even after making them, buying the wheels and painting, their profit would still be at least five shillings per scooter. ‘Five hundred and two pounds five shillings,’ she said avidly.

Mr Lewis raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re quite right. At least for the scooters. But I’ve also ordered the same of the rocking horses, the aeroplanes and the battleships. I think we’ll owe you something in the order of two thousand five hundred pounds for the first order alone. You deliver by June and in July we order the next consignment. In the meantime …’

Edna couldn’t find her voice. Her hand seemed to rise in slow motion as he handed her a cheque representing
twenty
per cent of the total amount for the first six months. Five hundred pounds.

Mr Lewis was saying something to her, but she was so stunned by her sudden fortune that she couldn’t catch it at first.

‘I’m sorry?’

Mr Lewis smiled. ‘I was just saying, I understand your husband had his legs blown off during the war.’ His voice was gentle.

Edna nodded.

‘He’s all right apart from that I take it,’ Mr Lewis went on.

His words made her stomach jolt. Colin was keeping something from her about his health. She’d thought about talking to the doctor at the hospital herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Colin, she decided, would tell her in his own good time.

‘He’s quite well,’ she said quickly, and fancied she was blushing again. If only she could be elegant like Charlotte or bouncy like Polly. She was so bound up in her thoughts that she didn’t at first catch what Mr Lewis was saying to her.

‘I’m sorry?’

His smile was full of understanding. ‘I said that if he should ever want a silent partner, one willing to put in money enough to buy a factory and enough machinery to go into export production, then bear me in mind.’

All the way back to Charlotte’s office her feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. Colin, Billy, herself and possibly Polly, if Billy’s intentions were definitely
honourable
, could look forward to a bright new future. It seemed too good to be true.

‘So how did you feel when you first came home?’

The young man to whom Charlotte directed her question squirmed in his chair. He was twenty-four, but his face had the gaunt look of a worn-out fifty-year-old.

‘I felt as if …’ he paused, glanced ashamedly at his wife then looked back at Charlotte. ‘Like a stranger.’

‘
You
felt like a stranger?’

He nodded.

‘And your wife? How did you feel about her?’

He shrugged and looked down at the floor. ‘I didn’t know her. I thought I did. Thought of her all the time when I was out in the Far East. But when I came back …’ He shrugged again.

No answer was needed. This was the same script she’d heard a dozen times before. Men had been away to places they would never have dreamed of going. And women too had led different lives.

She didn’t need to hear about the affair with a foreign soldier. That too was something she’d heard too many times before. At the end of their session she would sum everything up and give them some sound advice. The adultery side of things was always the most difficult to deal with. How could she condemn? She who had shared her marriage bed with an enemy soldier? It wasn’t that easy to forget and rebuild.

After they’d left, Miss Anstice came in to ask if she
would
be taking tea in her office or in the interview room where she was presently.

‘In my office with Mr Smith. I trust he isn’t annoyed with me for leaving him there on his own.’

She got up from the chair, stretched and rubbed at the ache in the small of her back.

‘Oh no,’ said Miss Anstice, her sensible shoes thudding firmly on the brown lino as they both went out into the corridor that led back towards the front of the building. ‘He said he needed to occupy himself and mentioned that he noticed you having trouble opening that drawer. He asked if he could fix it. So, I thought, what a wonderful opportunity. I immediately told him it was always like that but I did know that some workmen had left some tools.

‘Oh no!’

The letters!

Charlotte didn’t wait to hear the rest of what her secretary had to say. Stupid, stupid woman! What a thing to do! Preparing herself for the worst, she ran along the corridor.

The moment she opened the door, she knew the truth had already happened. All the letters were now open, scattered around Colin’s wheelchair like a host of dead bluebirds. He was staring at the photograph, his face a blank canvas of incomprehension.

‘You knew,’ he said quietly.

Charlotte opened her mouth to speak, but there was no sound. Never in her life had she felt at such a loss for words. Wasn’t she the person everyone turned to when
they
had problems? Ever ready to dish out advice to others, yet unable to follow her own and stick to the straight and narrow. Consolation was easy enough to give to virtual strangers. But she’d come to know Colin. She’d come to know Edna. What could she say?

Stiff with tension, she leaned against the door, folded her arms across her chest and kept her gaze firmly fixed on the floor.

‘Yes. I knew.’

She said it in a low husky, almost ashamed voice. The guilt was as much hers as Edna’s, and shared with every woman who was lonely and in need of loving arms and a warm voice telling her that everything would be all right.

‘Who else knew?’ Colin asked.

His voice was hollow, supposedly empty of emotion. Yet she guessed that the opposite was true. For the moment he was shell-shocked, but not for long. This was merely the calm before the storm.

Suddenly it burst.

‘But how could she? Edna! My Edna!’ His cries of anguish brought people running from the other shoebox-sized rooms along the length of the corridor.

Charlotte marched towards the door. ‘It’s all right! Go back to your own rooms.’ Amidst mutters and whispers, they went. Charlotte slammed her door shut.

The photograph crackled as Colin crumpled it in his hand. He threw his head back, the tears, a mix of despair and anger, streaming down his face.

Charlotte hugged herself and leaned back against the door. She felt so cold. So helpless. She forced herself to
speak
. ‘Circumstances. She’s a victim of war. You were apart a long time.’

‘I still can’t understand it. A decent, respectable woman wouldn’t do that. You should know that.’

Charlotte saw a look in his eyes she’d seen so many times before. He was assuming she had been faithful. After all, with her clothes, her accent, and the accoutrements of her class, she was everything a lady should be.

‘Like me, Colin? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

Narrowing his eyes to keep back the tears, he managed a curt nod.

Charlotte sighed deeply, her shoulders slightly slumped. Sometimes it really felt as though the weight of the world had fallen on her shoulders. So far she had kept her own problems to herself. But now, she judged, was the time to drag out the skeletons in her own cupboard.

‘Colin. This country, and a very large proportion of the world, have been through the most devastating of times. Everyone has been affected. I assumed that my husband, my family and myself had got through it relatively unscathed. But I was wrong.’

This was a hard speech. The hardest she’d ever made. She took a deep breath and hugged herself that bit tighter. Baring one’s soul wasn’t at all easy. Without him knowing it, Colin had become her priest. Because she had to save Edna’s marriage she had to confess the truth about her own.

‘I’m finding this very hard,’ she said shaking her head and covering her eyes with one hand. ‘Yet I feel I have to
say
it. My husband, as you know, is a doctor. You also know he came back from the war a changed man. You saw the bruises around my neck. Never! Never before had he ever done such a thing. My husband went to war and a stranger came home.’

‘Yes, but to get shacked up with another bloke …’

‘No! Listen.’ Charlotte raised her hand to silence him. ‘She’s not the only one.’ She turned and reached for the crocodile handbag that sat nearby on the desk and snapped open the clasp. ‘I want you to read this.’ She handed him the letter from Josef. He eyed it warily, then did as she said.

When he’d finished reading he stared at her. ‘You?’

She smiled sadly. ‘Yes Colin. Me. But I cannot truly blame the war as Edna can. My husband came home and appeared perfectly all right. But after a while I learned that it was just not so. The war took my husband and left me with a stranger. In my despair I needed someone to lean on. Then I met Josef.’

Colin looked at her. ‘A German?’

He looked surprised when she didn’t contradict him.

‘That doesn’t make me a collaborator, does it? And it may surprise you to know that I still love my husband, I still miss all the things we had together and, despite his violence and his philandering, I will still attempt to get back what we had.’

Many things had gone through her mind since the end of the war, but this was the first time she had put into words what she really wanted. Through Edna’s problems she had found her own strength.

Colin sighed and handed her back the letter. ‘I thought I could count on her. I thought she loved me.’

‘This is life, Colin, not a night at the pictures. You weren’t there. Someone else was.’ She paused, then asked, ‘Did you love her all the time you were away?’

‘I thought so.’

‘And you got lonely at sea.’

He nodded. ‘Yes. Of course I did.’

‘And in port? What’s that old saying I’ve heard tell of sailors? A sweetheart in every port? Now let’s be honest, Colin.’ Her voice was now that of the professional advisor.

Colin hung his head and nodded. ‘I see your point. But I haven’t got a kid.’

‘As far as you know.’

He looked up then. Charlotte met his gaze. ‘Millions have been killed, Colin. Millions more have been orphaned and others have been born out of this carnage. All those who participated have been affected by it. They acted out of character when the world was ablaze and it seemed as though death was near at hand. Our lives will never be the same again. All we can hope to do is to build something better on the ashes of the old.’

The sound of the outside door at the end of the gloomy corridor creaked as it opened. Charlotte felt her stomach tighten with nerves. Edna was back! What would he do now? What would she do?

Colin, too, assumed Edna was approaching. His whole body seemed to turn to stone. Not a muscle moved. His eyes held Charlotte’s.

Footsteps echoed along the corridor, sounding unduly
heavy
. What shoes had Edna been wearing? The tension was unbearable. Charlotte imagined Edna’s face all smiles because she’d clinched the deal all by herself. It was no good. She had to say something.

‘Try and understand,’ she said in a hoarse, urgent whisper.

He looked up at her from beneath a heavy frown. There was no sparkle to his eyes, no hint of joy on his lips. She feared the worst.

The office door swung open and Charlotte gasped.

‘Everything all right then, mates?’

The voice was unmistakable. Cheeky as a sparrow, there was Billy, trilby hat pushed to the back of his head, belted overcoat pulled tightly around his lean form. He glanced swiftly at the bits of paper scattered over the floor. ‘Blimey. What the hell’s been going on here?’

Colin spun the chair round. Charlotte watched, unsure of what to expect next.

‘Got the van outside?’

‘Course I have.’

‘Are you feeling better?’ Charlotte directed the question at Billy in an effort to inject some normality and calm into the situation. She remembered that the reason Edna had kept the appointment to read and sign the contracts with Mr Lewis was because Billy’s injuries were supposed to be playing him up.

‘Fit as a fiddle!’ He flushed, and she guessed he remembered that he’d given an excuse that was far from the truth.

‘I want you to take me home,’ exclaimed Colin, turning
the
chair wheels himself, his face flushed with emotion as he made for the door.

Charlotte stepped into his path and barred his way. ‘Colin! You can’t!’

He said nothing but simply stared up at her, his eyes full of anger, his lower lip trembling with emotion. ‘Get me out of here!’ he shouted to Billy.

Billy frowned at Charlotte, expecting an explanation.

Charlotte put as much meaning as she could into the look she gave him back. She sensed immediately that he knew what the matter was.

She wanted to shout after him, ask him what she should tell Edna. But in her heart of hearts she feared his reply.

Exhausted by it all, she leaned against the desk and covered her eyes with her hands. God, what was she going to do about this? What was she going to tell Edna?

Her arms fell helplessly to her sides as she looked down at the scattered pieces of paper. Tears in her eyes, she bent down and picked each piece up from the floor, flattening them on her bent knee before putting them up on the desk.

Words like
caring, wonderful, sweetheart
jumped off the paper at her and touched her emotions. Just as she picked up the last piece a shadow fell across her from the open door.

‘I ’ope you don’t mind, Mrs, but mind if I make a suggestion?’

Billy Hills was back. He had a witty, swift look about him, a spiv of sorts, the sort who sold tins of black market apricots on cleared bombsites then legged it when the police whistle blew.