Wartime Wife (26 page)

Michael nodded. ‘That is so.’

Routledge straightened. The beady eyes were like buttons on either side of his nose. He shrugged and a smattering of dandruff fluttered from his shoulders. ‘Your choice, Mr Maurice. Your choice. But you’ll regret it, I’m tellin’ ye, you’ll regret it.’

Arm level with his sightline, he pointed his finger accusingly, his other hand jerking the shop door open.

‘Just you remember!’

The door slammed. The brass bell above it jangled angrily and the glass in the display cases shivered in their loose frames.

Once she was sure Routledge was gone, Mary Anne came out into the shop. ‘He’ll make things difficult for you. You know that, don’t you?’

Michael’s eyes met hers and he nodded.

He sighed. ‘I suppose it would have been sensible to take him back on, but …’

When he shrugged again, Mary Anne could not resist the urge to take hold of his shoulders, looking up at him intensely, as though she would will him to be careful. ‘It might have been more sensible. He’s a bully. He’ll be back.’

He glanced at the hands clutching his shoulders, wanting to lay his upon them, but not daring to do so. Instead he looked into her face. ‘In my experience it is never good to give in to bullies.’

Mary Anne suddenly realised just how close they were standing and how taut were the muscles beneath his shirtsleeves. Her cheeks, so pale a moment before, now reddened with embarrassment. Flustered, she dropped her hands, shoved them into the patch pockets of her red and black coat, and took a step back.

‘I’d better be going.’

‘Yes.’

He didn’t want to see her go. Once she was gone he’d have only memories for company. Some were good, some not so good, and some the most terrible nightmares that would be with him for the rest of his life.

He reminded himself that she was married and that he was still an honourable man, or at least he liked to think that he was.

Head bowed, eyes averted, he turned his back on her and headed for the private rooms at the end of the passage.

Picking her way carefully over the rumpled carpets, she tried to put her thoughts in some order. For a while back there she had forgotten her ‘little problem’, and indeed, a lot of her problems. He’d been kind and she still tingled at the memory of his touch.

There was something about him that stirred her, perhaps the fact that he was the exact opposite of the man she was married
to. Her thoughts were confused. Michael’s confrontation with Thomas Routledge had meant something. Thomas and her husband, Henry, were out of the same mould. They were both bully boys, both wanting their own way regardless of who they had to trample underfoot.

The fact that her hands were tucked into her pockets broke into her thoughts. Where is your handbag and purse? The answer came swiftly: In the chair.

The loose floorboards creaked beneath her feet, creasing the scattered mats as they moved.

Michael was sitting in the same chair he had been when she’d arrived, only this time he was not asleep and dreaming. This time his elbows rested on his knees, the trumpet clasped between his hands like a religious chalice for which he had great reverence. He glanced up as she entered.

‘I left my bag in the chair.’ She pointed to the deep cleft between seat and arm at his side.

Shifting his thigh, he dug down into the narrow void and brought it out and handed it over.

It was warm because it had been next to his body. The feel of it was strangely erotic and she hugged it close. Although their eyes met, their conversation was at an end; he seemed wary of saying anything else to her. She put it down to worry. Crossing swords with Thomas Routledge was enough to worry anyone. She couldn’t quite come to terms as to why her heart was beating so quickly, but decided to express her gratitude on behalf of Flossie and Aggie.

‘And thank you for the money.’

In her estimation it was far too much, but she guessed at his reasons. He wanted more customers. He also wanted friends.

Michael Maurice was lonely. That was the decision she came to as she let herself out and the haunting strains of a trumpet drifted out into the empty shop.

Flossie Davies was tickled pink when Mary Anne presented her with four pounds ten for the trumpet.

‘Five shillings I already subbed you, and five shillings for going,’ explained Mary Anne.

Flossie’s eyes stayed pinned on the money, hardly noticing that her baby was pulling the side of her mouth out of shape with sticky fat fingers and making her speak funny.

‘Not that I’ll tell that bleeder that I got that much,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell ’im two pounds. He’ll probably tip me half a crown from it for being so obliging – then expect me to be even more obliging once he gets back from the pub, if you gets my meaning.’ She made a guffawing sound – somewhere between a laugh and a sneer. ‘Fat chance!’

Once she was alone, Mary Anne pulled the loose brick out from behind the boiler and took out an octagonal tea caddy with Chinese figures along its side. This served as her cash tin.

Due to the dampness of the environment it lived in, the lid had rusted slightly and was usually difficult to prise off. Today it was less so, but Mary Anne did not regard it as irregular until she looked inside.

The tin was divided into two layers. She kept the bulk of her money in the bottom compartment. The ‘current’ money
– such as that the pawnbroker had given her for the trumpet and the mother of pearl vase – she’d placed on the top until such time as she’d settled with the vendors, Flossie and Aggie.

It wasn’t there. It occurred to her it might have fluttered out without her noticing when she’d put it away. She’d been in a hurry at the time. As was his habit, Henry had been hammering at the front door, shouting to be let in. He never ever went through the arch and around the back of the house, and in case he might discover that she did more than laundry in the washhouse, Mary Anne had never encouraged it.

Leaving the tin on top of the boiler, she got down on her hands and knees, peering into the gap left by removing the brick. She also probed behind the boiler’s supports.

There was no sign of anything except cobwebs, crumbs of loose mortar and scurrying spiders.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘Ouch!’ Mary Anne jerked up hitting her head on one of the boiler’s brick supports. She came face to face with Lizzie, who had a puzzled frown creasing her forehead above her clear, greyish-green eyes.

Slapping the dirt from her hands and plastering a smile on her lips, Mary Anne got to her feet.

‘My scrubbing brush. I can’t find it. Never mind. It’ll turn up.’

Lizzie’s attention had been diverted to the tea caddy. She was peering into its bottom layer where bundles of ten bob notes jostled with pound notes and fivers.

‘What’s all that money?’ Her voice was touched with wonder.

Mary Anne opened her mouth to explain while racking her brain for a suitable excuse, and ended up stating the obvious. ‘It’s mine!’

She pushed the money down beneath the partition and closed the lid. It didn’t alter the fact that money had been
taken from her tin, but now was not the time to worry about it. Lizzie was still looking puzzled, her eyes going from the tin to the cupboards, one of which was presently unlocked, hanging open and exposing the items within.

This particular cupboard held china: teapots, tea services, tureens never used, gravy boats and even a lustreware chamber pot, palm trees and a bright-blue camel etched into its honey-coloured surface.

Lizzie’s face held a look of wonder. ‘What’s all this stuff?’

Mary Anne slammed the door shut and turned the key. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’

Prevented from peering into an Aladdin’s cave of best china that had once graced many a front parlour in the neighbourhood, Lizzie’s gaze went back to the money and from there to her mother, her head tilted to one side and the frown remaining.

There was no need for words. Mary Anne knew she was waiting for an explanation, something believable.

Mary Anne slammed the lid shut and put it back in the gap, ramming the loose brick in behind it. The simplest excuse came to mind. ‘It’s my Christmas money.’

‘You saved all that?’

She sounded and looked impressed, but Mary Anne fancied the look in her eyes was at odds with her attitude, not so much disbelief, but as though she knew the truth.

‘I did,’ said Mary Anne, turning to the pile of washing waiting for the water to heat up, sorting it into whites and coloureds as a way of busying herself and not meeting Lizzie’s eyes.

Henry never entered the washhouse, and neither did her sons and daughters. As children they’d wrinkled their noses at the smell of soapsuds and steam. It had always been her domain. That’s why she had been able to run her business without any of the family guessing why so many women came and went,
presuming perhaps that they merely gossiped and drank tea. Her family didn’t question where the good tablecloths, fine china and excess indulgences in dress and food came from. They were accepting of the good things, living their own lives and leaving their mother to lead hers. Why had Lizzie chosen to come out here now?

‘What are you doing out here anyway?’ Mary Anne asked.

‘I wanted to talk to you.’

Lizzie leaned against the boiler; her bright eyes, made brighter because her lashes were so dark, followed her mother’s every move.

Although Mary Anne only glanced at her, she was aware of something akin to wonder in her daughter’s eyes, but found interpretation quite impossible.

Lizzie had learned a lot of things since the 3rd of September. For a start she knew more about European politics than she’d ever cared to. She’d also seen another side to her father and brother, even a more selfish one in Daw, her sister. Daw, she’d decided, was under the impression that the world revolved around her or her and John. She’d never noticed before. And then there was Peter. It still irked that he hadn’t told her he was going to Canada. It irked her that he never really took her out, only in the back of his car or to Clancy’s Farm. Why had he never taken her dancing or to the pictures?

The world was altering, or perhaps it was her that was altering, seeing things differently – like her mother. The realisation that her mother, Mary Anne Randall, wasn’t just her mother but a person in her own right had only recently come to her. She had lived her own life, fallen in love at one time, though it was hard to imagine her parents lusting for each other. It just didn’t seem right.

We don’t see them as people at all, she thought to herself. To her and her friends, parents were just ‘them’, the woman
washing the dishes and the man sitting, smoking and reading a paper, or in her father’s case pretending to read, picking out the words he did know and getting the gist of the news that way. They certainly couldn’t see them doing ‘it’, though God knows how they would have come into existence in the first place. Chillingly, so chillingly that she shuddered, it occurred to her that Stanley could be telling the truth, that her father did actually strike her mother. The thought left her feeling quite sick, but the possibility was now undeniable. How much did any of them really know about their parents’ private relationship?

‘So what do you want to talk to me about?’

Mary Anne made a great show of folding the dirty sheets into neat piles. She didn’t usually do that, but keeping busy was better than meeting the quizzical look in Lizzie’s eyes. She couldn’t recall Lizzie ever looking at her like that before. It made her feel like a child who’s been caught with stolen chocolate around her mouth. In response to the thought, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘I don’t quite know where to start,’ said Lizzie, dropping her eyes to look sheepishly down at her toes as she wriggled them against her fleecy-lined boots.

Following Stanley’s outburst, she had watched her parents more closely during the past few days and what she’d seen had surprised her. Her father’s nostrils had flared and his eyes hardened when her mother dared to disagree with him. On one occasion, she’d seen her mother passing Daw ten shillings so she could buy herself something nice to wear. John was coming home for Christmas and Daw was frantic with excitement; she’d always been slightly vulnerable, a little anxious, not like Lizzie who had a tendency to go where angels fear to tread.

‘That’s it! Go and spend my hard-earned cash. Housekeeping money don’t grow on trees, you know.’

Her father had said it jokingly, but a nerve had pulsed beneath one eye and his jaw had turned as stiff as cardboard, his eyes glaring with contemptuous anger, and that anger directed at her mother. The experience had alarmed her. She’d never seen him rise to anger, as he had with Henry. This war, she thought grimly, it’s all down to this war. It’s going to change all of us.

Alone in the room she shared with Daw, she’d asked herself whether she had imagined it; was there really more to her father than met the eye, or had Stanley been dreaming?

Her question had been answered later that evening. Henry and Daw had gone out and Stanley was asleep when she passed the kitchen on her way to the outside lavatory. Only her parents remained.

Unseen, and feeling slightly guilty, she had watched and listened.

Her father’s voice was low and rumbling and he was hovering over her mother as she cleared the dishes away, the front of his body almost pressed against hers. She couldn’t hear what he was saying and didn’t see him strike her, and yet he’d seemed intimidating.

‘The beginning tends to be a good place.’

Her mother’s voice brought her back to the present.

Lizzie sucked in her bottom lip, her dark lashes brushing her cheek as she lowered her eyes, searching for the right words to say, words that made sense.

‘You and Dad; are you happy?’

Mary Anne stopped what she was doing. Her laugh was forced and short. ‘Now there’s a question.’

‘Are you?’

Mary Anne covered her confusion with a concerted attack on Harry’s dirty shirts. Regardless of the fact that he worked in the tobacco factory, he insisted on a clean shirt every day.