Whisper on the Wind (34 page)

But she didn’t want Marco out of her life. She liked him; liked him more than she should. And there, she acknowledged, lay the whole of her trouble.

Kath Allen wanted it both ways, it seemed.

At weekends, Polly did not oblige at Ridings. Saturdays and Sundays she considered to be her own; Saturday for shopping and shirt-collecting, Sunday for church and the
News of the World.
But this last Saturday in May would be different; she had sensed it with the snapping of the letterbox flap. Few letters came to the gate lodge since most of Polly’s business, family and otherwise, could be conducted by word of mouth, so it followed that anything delivered by the Post Office aroused curiosity and consternation, the more so if the envelope lying on the doormat was pale pink and scented.

Suddenly stiff, she bent to pick it up. Carefully, because she liked to do things tidily, she slit it open.

‘Your Mam’s coming,’ she announced, shocked, to the back of Arnie’s head. ‘This morning. At eleven.’

Arnie looked up from his comic. What they’d said at Ridings was true, then? She
was
taking him back to Hull.

‘Why’s she coming?’ he grunted.

‘Coming? To see you, that’s what. Says she’s sorry she didn’t let me have more notice, but she got the chance of a lift with a – a gentleman friend.’

‘In a car?’ Arnie hoped it wouldn’t be with Kellygodrottim. Any mention of that name made Mam’s face go red, if memory served him rightly.

‘Of course in a car. There’s no bus at eleven, you should know that by now.’

Arnie brightened considerably. Kellygodrottim was an idle good-for-nothing without a penny to his name, Mam always said, let alone a motor car. She couldn’t be coming with him.

‘Where are they getting the petrol?’ he demanded.

‘That’s something I wish
you’d
tell
me.
Shift yourself and get your best boots blacked and polished, and make sure you scrub your fingernails. And for goodness’ sake lad, get a comb through that hair!’

Arnie folded his comic at once. He always did things immediately when Aunty Poll showed signs of agitation.

‘I’m not going back to Hull,’ he muttered. ‘I’m not, Aunty Poll.’ Not even in a car, he wasn’t!

‘Course you’re not! Whoever put such a notion into your head?’ Drat the lad. Too sharp for his own good, that’s what.

‘I heard.’ His toe traced the patterns on the hearthrug. ‘I heard you tell Mrs Fairchild you thought Mam wanted me back.’

‘Oh? Listening at keyholes, were you? You know what happens to boys who do that, then? Never hear any good of themselves, they don’t.’

‘I won’t go.’ He didn’t care what happened to boys who heard things at back doors; he
did
care about going back to Hull. ‘You’ll not let her take me?’

‘Bless your life no, lad. Not if I can help it. Now get your boots seen to like I told you and don’t bother me with your chatter. I’ve got a bit of thinking-out to do.

‘And don’t go sneaking off when your Mam arrives. You’ll stay and greet her civilized – let her see how you’ve growed these last two years. Wait till I say you can go – is that understood?’

‘Yes, Aunty Poll.’ Already he was making plans for Beck Lane. The oak tree was in full leaf again; no one would ever see him up there. He’d stay there for a week if he had to and when they found him they’d all be sorry, when it was too late.

Visions of an Arnie lying palely dead brought tears to his eyes. Polly saw them and hugged him to her, planting a rare kiss on the top of his head.

‘Now then, lovey, don’t take on so. I don’t want her to take you any more ’n you want to go, so leave it to me, why don’t you? Your old Aunty Poll isn’t as green as she’s cabbage-looking.’ Oh my word, no!

Mrs Bagley arrived a little before noon. She was sorry for being so late, but they’d had trouble finding the place, she explained, waving from the doorstep to the driver of a small black car.

‘My friend has business in the area, Miss Appleby. He’ll be back later to pick me up. And is this my boy, then?’

She patted Arnie’s head and he took a step away from her in case she tried to kiss him.

‘Hullo, Mam.’

‘This is Arnie,’ Polly confirmed, marvelling how easy her voice sounded when her inside was churning something awful. ‘He’s growed, don’t you think?’

‘Goodness me, yes. Nearly as tall as your Mammy, aren’t you?’

Arnie regarded her dispassionately, forced to admit that she looked nice in her flowered dress, and the furs looked posh, too. And she was smiling at him as if she really liked him, he supposed, though she didn’t smile like Aunty Poll did; not with all her face.

Polly took stock of the fancy frock and the double fox furs, worn as if she’d been brought up to them, which she hadn’t, or she’d have known that no lady wore furs when there wasn’t an R in the month. Mrs Fairchild’s fur coat was put away at the end of April and never taken out until the beginning of September. Nor did Mrs Fairchild paint her nails or pluck her eyebrows to a thin, surprised line. And where had that nail polish come from except from the black market?

‘You’ll take a cup of tea, Mrs Bagley?’ Polly indicated the rocking chair at the hearth. ‘Afraid it’s all I can offer you, rationing being what it is.’

‘Deary me, yes. Wouldn’t dream of taking your food, Miss Appleby. As a matter of fact, my friend was able to get a little boiled ham so I’ve brought sandwiches with me. They’re in the car. To eat later. Now, Arnie, tell me how you’re getting on at school?’

‘All right.’ He scowled, wishing he could go, wondering how long a civilized greeting was expected to last.

‘He’s doing very well.’ Polly nodded. ‘They’re expecting him to win a scholarship to the Grammar School next year.’

‘Well fancy that, now. What a clever boy I’ve got. I think that deserves some sweeties.’ Tantalizingly she opened her handbag, peeping inside; slowly she drew out a paper bag. ‘There you are. Don’t eat them all at once and say thank you to your Mammy.’

Red-faced, Arnie obliged then opened the bag to release the heady whiff of mint humbugs. His smile of pure joy so pleased his mother that she opened her handbag again and gave him a shilling for doing well at school.

Polly shook with indignation. Bribery, that’s what, and Arnie falling for it, an’ all. Mind, you couldn’t blame the lad – not when quarter-pound bags of sweeties were as rare as hens’ teeth, though it wasn’t fighting fair if she thought to entice him back to Hull with humbugs.

‘Will you take a saccharin in your tea, Mrs Bagley?’

‘Thank you, no. I take my tea without. All sweetness is bad for the complexion.’

Polly glared at her visitor’s handbag. New it was, and pigskin, if she was any judge.
Real
pigskin like her gloves which only went to show she’d been right all along. Petrol, nail polish and expensive handbags, not to mention boiled ham and bags of humbugs had ceased to exist for ordinary folk. Only money could buy such luxuries, and since Arnie’s mother had been on the bones of her backside not two years ago, Polly considered, it stood to reason that her new-found prosperity could only spring from one source.

She closed her eyes as a sharp crunching caused a shudder to run through her. Glowering at Arnie she demanded he hand over his bounty before he made himself sick.

‘You ration them sweeties out, lad. Make ’em last,’ she admonished, placing them in the dresser drawer, closing it firmly.

‘Can I go out, now?’ All at once he was bored.

‘Of course you can go out, lovey,’ the visitor beamed, asserting her mother’s rights. ‘Miss Appleby and me have important things to chat about, haven’t we?’

‘I reckon we have. Off you go, lad.’

Things to chat about.
Important
things. She really had come to take him back?

All at once Arnie was afraid, sorry he’d taken the humbugs, realizing that not if Mam gave him sweeties every day would it make up for leaving the gate lodge and his warm, soft bed, Aunty Poll’s suppers and all the lovely things a boy could do at Alderby. And nothing in the world could make up for leaving Aunty Poll. As if the man from the Workhouse was on his tail, he made for Beck Lane, and sanctuary.

Some folk, Polly seemed to remember as she listened to Arnie’s fast-fading footsteps, considered that attack was the best form of defence and attack was exactly what she intended; a head-on, no holds barred confrontation. Taking a seat at the kitchen table, folding her arms belligerently she flung:

‘You want the lad back, don’t you?’

‘I – er – oh!’ Mrs Bagley sat bolt upright. ‘He – he’s my son,’ she defended. ‘A mother gets lonely for her child …’

‘You’ve come to take him back,’ Polly insisted.

‘Well, I – yes. Since you ask, Miss Appleby, I have.’ Her head tilted defiantly.

‘Back to where there’s bombing, and you on war work, I shouldn’t wonder? How’s a lad not yet ten to be looked after properly, will you tell me, with his mam on war work and no father to guide him?’

‘Same as he was looked after before he was taken from me.’

‘
Taken
from you?’

‘You know what I mean.’ The thin eyebrows met in a frown. ‘We didn’t know what to expect, when war broke out. We panicked, let our children go …’

‘Happen so, but now we know, don’t we? Air-raids and rationing. How’s a mother on war work to find the time for food queues, will you tell me?’ She didn’t, Polly thought, know why she was going on so about war work, but instinct seemed to have put the words there. ‘And what about if you had to work nights?’

‘Arnie would be all right.’ The red lips formed a sulky pout. ‘I wouldn’t be far away …’

‘You mean to tell me you’d take him to live near a factory?’ Factories got bombed, were prime targets for German planes.

‘I didn’t say that. But it doesn’t matter where I take him to live, if you’ll forgive me for saying so,’ she threw haughtily, suddenly recovered from the speed of Polly’s assault. ‘It isn’t any of your business.
I’m
his mother.
I’m
the one with rights.’

‘The right to take him away from where he’s happy, and wanted?’

‘He’d be happy enough with me, Miss Appleby, because
I
want him, too.’

She jumped to her feet and strode to the table, glaring down angrily.

At once, chair legs scraping, Polly stood to face her. You couldn’t win an argument when you were being looked down on. Folding her arms again, chin jutting, she met her protagonist eye to eye.

‘And why,’ she said slowly, ‘do you all of a sudden want him? Or is it that you
need
him? Could it be that your age-group has come up, Mrs Bagley? Have they sent for you to register for war work? Do you
need
to have a child under fourteen – is that it?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’ She took a step backward, repulsed by Polly’s gimlet gaze and the blaze of anger that flushed her cheeks.

‘Then I’ll tell
you.
I’ll say it in words so simple, Miss, that even you can understand.’ Polly’s chin jutted farther and higher. She was winning, had touched the raw nerve she’d been probing for. ‘
Miss
, I said, for you’re no more wed than I am and single women your age have to do war work. No getting out of it.

‘Except, of course, if you happen to be a woman with a bairn under fourteen years old; then you don’t have to work anywhere, can stay at home and look after him. That’s why you want Arnie back – so you needn’t go out to work. Suit you down to the ground, wouldn’t it?’

Polly stopped, amazed at her own eloquence, taking a deep, calming breath, wishing she knew all the big words Mrs Murgatroyd knew; wishing her inside would stop its churning.

‘So is it wrong to want my boy with me? And why am I making excuses to you? He’s coming back with me.’ Mrs Bagley curled a fist, banging it on the table-top.

‘Then I’ll have the law on you if you so much as take one step outside that gate with him!’ Polly countered with a harder, noisier fist. ‘I’ll have the Billeting Officer here so fast you’ll wonder what hit you, my lady!’ Jamming her hands on her hips, she stood with feet apart, eyes narrowed, challenging. ‘And you’re
not
taking him because –’

And that had been where she played her trump card she had recounted later to Mrs Murgatroyd. That, she said as she stirred her tea in the kitchen of the bay-windowed house, had been where the benefit of legal advice had proved its golden worth.

‘“
… because,”
I said to her, “you’re having men at your house, Mrs Bagley. You’ve no need to do war work. You’re doing very nicely without it and doing honest war work would put paid to your little game, wouldn’t it? Put paid to pigskin handbags and black market petrol for your friend’s car, wouldn’t it?”’

This, Polly paused to explain, had been the point at which Mrs Bagley had gasped and collapsed into the rocking chair.

‘“And what’s more,” says I, “there’s something you should know; something it’s my duty to tell you because I don’t want you landing up in prison. Did you know,” I says, “that it’s an offence in law” – oh, how she flinched at that, Mrs Murgatroyd – “an offence
in law
to have a child under fourteen living in a – a house of ill-repute. ‘Cause that’s what your house is,” I says. “A
brothel
! That’s what you’re up to,” and she told me to prove it. I said I wouldn’t have mentioned one word of what I had if I hadn’t had proof, because since the matter of Arnie’s welfare had forced me to take legal advice …