The Back of Beyond Page 13

  ‘No, I want to, I assure you. I am an old man now, and many of the people with whom I come in contact do not have much time for me, but you have been so friendly, I can talk to you and not feel I am being a nuisance.’

  ‘I should hope so!’ Gwen said. ‘But I’ve been doing most of the talking today.’

  ‘There will be other days, yes?’

  ‘Yes, of course, and if it happens to be raining on any of the days you come to see me, we can have our chat inside. How does that sound?’

  ‘Ideal, and shall we make it Wednesdays?’

  When they returned to the house, he accepted her offer of a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea, and remained with her after the children had been settled upstairs for their nap. ‘I suppose Alistair has told you that I used to have a dream …?’

  Gwen raised her eyebrows. ‘Used to have? Oh, Manny, you haven’t given up on having an antique shop, have you?’

  He didn’t answer for a moment, then said, softly, ‘If I tell you, you must promise not to say anything to Alistair. I want it to be a surprise for him.’

  ‘I won’t tell him.’

  ‘I am not really fit to be making a daily trek round the stalls and second-hand shops, and I have also decided that I am too old to start out on a new venture, but I have not forgotten my dream. I have …’ He stopped to consider the wisdom of going on and came to the conclusion that it was not fair to expect the young woman to keep such momentous information a secret from her husband. ‘No, my dear, I shall leave it there. You will both have a pleasant surprise when the time comes.’ He was relieved that she did not press him for details, yet he should have known she wouldn’t. She was every bit as honourable as Alistair. They were a perfect match.

  Gwen did tell her husband that Manny had called, and that he was making it a weekly occurrence, but she did not mention what else he had said, and although Alistair knew why the arrangement had been made, he said nothing about that, either.

  For many months to come, therefore, Gwen’s weeks were fairly social, what with seeing Ivy for about fifteen minutes every Monday morning and afternoon, when she collected the children for the day and brought them back, and all Thursdays, when they went to Lee Green. Then there were Sundays, when Alistair went with her to see her mother and sisters again as a family.

  Wednesdays, of course, were for Manny, who gradually opened out and told her about his wife having to go out cleaning in the early days of their marriage until the pawnshop was making enough for them to live on, about his parents and his grandparents, who had originally come from Poland, about how honoured he felt to be accepted as part of her family, and she, in turn, told him about her father’s army career, about her mother being in service at a farm on the outskirts of Aldershot, which is how she had met her husband.

  On several occasions, when she was telling Alistair in bed about her Wednesdays, she remarked that she felt closer to Manny Isaacson than she had ever felt to anyone else.

  ‘Even me?’ he asked, a little hurt.

  She gave him an extra-special kiss. ‘Even you. I love you as a wife’s supposed to love her husband, but I love Manny like a favourite uncle.’

  And so the Ritchies, the Finnies and the Jenkinses lived their rather ordinary lives oblivious of what was going on in Europe. Only Manny could see the threat of war looming ever and ever nearer, and he kept his fears to himself.

  As did too many others.

  Chapter 9

  His mother’s letter devastated Dougal. ‘Why didn’t she send a telegram?’ he wailed to his wife. ‘Fancy waiting till a week after the funeral before she tells me.’

  Marge laid her hand gently on his bowed head. ‘She knew you’d a mortgage to pay, so she probably thought you couldn’t afford the fare to Scotland.’

  ‘I’d have managed somehow. Oh, God, I wish she’d told me before … I’d have liked to have seen him again before he died.’

  ‘She says people at the funeral told her they thought he’d been looking tired and ill for months, and I think she’s blaming herself for not noticing till it was too late.’

  ‘She was aye too damn busy keeping her house so clean you could eat off the floor,’ Dougal observed, sharply. ‘It would have been the end of the world if anybody had seen a speck of dust on the dresser, and she didn’t like when Dad told her there’d be houses when we’re all dead and gone.’

  He ranted on about his mother’s obsession with having everything excessively clean and tidy, how his father had tried to make a ‘clootie’ rug one winter but his mother had gone mad about the fluff and bits of thread that blew about so he’d had to stop, and Marge let him get his angry frustration off his chest.

  His mother’s next letter just told him that she was managing fine, the one after that said she had got one of the men to throw out all the rubbish in the outhouses, the next one said she had asked the Salvation Army to collect his father’s clothes. Then came the final blow. ‘I’ve sold the farm and everything that goes with it,’ she wrote, ‘and I’m leaving for America tomorrow to be with Flora.’

  ‘God Almighty!’ Dougal exploded, making Marge jump. ‘What’s wrong with the woman? Tomorrow? It’s today she’s sailing! Has she taken leave of her senses?’

  Marge felt a strong resentment against his mother for not only excluding him from his father’s final hours but selling up and going off to live with her daughter in America without as much as a by-your-leave from her son. Marge had always had the suspicion that Meg Finnie was a woman who ruled the roost – though she had been very friendly when they went to Forvit for a week one spring – and this was proof, wasn’t it? She might at least have asked Dougal what he thought about her giving up the farm and the house that had been his childhood home, not waited until everything was cut and dried. But knowing her husband as she did, Marge deemed it best not to mention that; it would do more harm than good.

  ‘Your mother’s bound to be lonely,’ she murmured, tentatively, ‘and we’re too far away to help if she needs anything, or if anything goes wrong. She’ll be better where your sister can keep an eye on her.’

  Giving a sigh so prolonged that his wife thought it would never end, Dougal muttered, ‘I suppose so. It’s just … well, she’s cut my last link with Forvit, and I wish I’d seen the house just one more time. I’m sure there must be odds and ends of mine still there.’

  ‘They’d just be childish things, though?’

  He managed a weak smile. ‘Treasures at the time. Ach, don’t mind me, Marge, I’m just being sentimental. You’re quite right. Mam will be better with Flora, and it’s her life, after all, though I know I’ll never see her again, either. I’ll never be able to afford the fare to America. The east side would be bad enough, but Flora’s man’s a deputy sheriff in one of the counties in Oregon, that’s right over on the west.’

  ‘If she’d been sailing from Southampton, you could have met her at King’s Cross and gone down there with her, but Greenock … that’s not far from Glasgow, is it?’

  ‘Aye, it’s on the Clyde. If she hadn’t gone at it like there wasn’t a minute to lose, I’d have tried to get up there to see her on to the boat and wish her bon voyage, but she’ll be on the Atlantic by now, telling the captain the stewards aren’t keeping the cabins clean. And I bet she’ll not be seasick, for whatever kind of food they give her, it wouldn’t dare to disagree with her.’ Dragging his sleeve across his eyes, he got to his feet. ‘If I don’t go now, I’ll be late for work … and don’t worry about me. The shock knocked me for six, but I’ll get over it.’

  That morning, Marge did not follow her routine of clearing up after her husband had gone, but kept sitting at the table thinking how heartless his mother was. It was the only word to describe Meg Finnie, though the woman herself wouldn’t think so, and likely neither would Dougal once he simmered down. But, to have been blessed with a son and then shoot off to the other side of the world, actually emigrate, without a thought for him, what else was that but heartless? If she and Dougal
ever had a son, she would never let him out of her sight. She would lavish all her love on him … till the day she died.

  She often dreamed in the night – not sleep-dreaming but wide-awake-dreaming, which was better because she could arrange things to suit herself – of having a little boy of her own, younger than Gwen’s David but having the same happy-go-lucky temperament. In her mind, she called him Ritchie, as a compliment to Alistair whose son she was more or less appropriating in her imagination. They would each take after their own father, David was fair like Alistair, and Ritchie would be dark like Dougal. In her wide-awake-dreams David was living next door and the two boys would have fun and adventures together, and sometimes their parents would be up to high doh with worry because they were late in coming home from the Heath, or from school, or wherever they’d gone.

  Her heart aching for her pretend son, Marge told herself not to be silly, and got to her feet. It would be six years in September since she and Dougal were married, and there was no likelihood of them having a son now … nor a daughter. There was work to be done before she popped next door to see that her mother was OK. It was a bit of a tie-up, really, but she didn’t mind. Peggy had been heartbroken when the boy she was in love with dumped her for another girl nearly a year ago, and had moped about the house for weeks with a face as long as a fiddle, so they’d all been glad when she applied for a job with the Civil Service and was taken on as Clerical Assistant. The snag was that Lee Green was such a distance from the City and she hadn’t time to come home in the middle of the day, so Marge had volunteered to give their mother something hot and substantial for lunch.

  Of course, Rosie still insisted that she could manage to cook something for herself, that she didn’t need to be coddled like a child, but she was inclined to do stupid things. Marge had been alarmed one day to find her standing on top of the coal bunker cleaning the kitchenette window. She had used a chair to get up there, but one slip and she would have fallen onto the cement slabs Dougal had laid along the back of the house.

  ‘You could have broken your neck!’ Marge had scolded, after helping the almost sixty-year-old down to terra firma. ‘You’re not as young as you used to be, you know.’

  ‘You’re only as old as you feel,’ Rosie had grinned, ‘and today I feel about twenty.’

  Marge had shaken her head helplessly and ushered her inside. ‘You could have asked me, if you were so desperate to have it done, or Dougal or Peggy could have done it at night, but no! You’re so dashed independent!’

  It had worried her, though, and now she always had this fear lurking at the back of her mind that her mother would kill herself with her acrobatics at her age. That was why she didn’t like to leave her too long on her own.

  In late September of 1938, although trenches had been dug in Hyde Park to erect air-raid shelters, buildings were being sandbagged as a protection against bombs and ARP posts were springing up everywhere, Londoners, like the rest of Great Britain, were going about their business as usual, confident that Chamberlain had smoothed things over. He’d come back from his talk with Hitler in Berlin with a smile on his face, hadn’t he? He’d waved a piece of paper and promised everybody there would be peace in our time, so what was there to worry about? Them old farts in Whitehall would put the wind up Wellington himself, if he’d still been alive, with all their doom and gloom.

  People like Dougal Finnie, however, who had been in the Territorial Army for some time now, kept their thoughts to themselves. It would only put the fear of death in their women folk to tell them that war was inevitable no matter what the Prime Minister said. They tried to hide their fears, reasoning that it would be a shame to spoil the beautiful weather they were enjoying, though they couldn’t understand why the majority couldn’t see for themselves what lay just round the corner.

  * * *

  ‘What does Dougal think of the situation?’ Manny asked Alistair one morning. ‘He should know what is going on.’

  The younger man screwed up his nose. ‘Well, he did say, on the q.t. mind, that they’re being geared up for war, and if it does come, they’ll be hauled in right away to help the regulars.’

  Manny nodded wisely. ‘Yes, I am afraid Britain is on an irreversible path. We were lulled into thinking that Hitler would abide by the promises he made, when those in power must know the kind of man he is. Being Chancellor, Fuhrer, has given him a false impression of his own importance, of his own abilities, of his fitness to rule the entire world, and, unfortunately, he does possess the power to sway the German people with his oratory – the ravings of a lunatic, if they could but see it.’

  ‘Of course, being a Jew, he’d be against Hitler,’ Alistair observed to Dougal in Lee Green the following Sunday, while they were relaxing in deck chairs in the Finnies’ garden with a bottle of beer. Dougal had just come back from his TA training and Alistair had been for a walk over Blackheath with his children, who were now sprawled out in their grandmother’s garden next door. ‘He believes all the stories going around about what’s happening to the Jews in Germany. I think it’s a lot of scaremongering, myself. They wouldn’t have had the Olympics in Berlin in 1936 if things like that were going on. All the spectators from other countries, never mind the athletes, would have seen if the Jews were being persecuted, wouldn’t they? And don’t tell me King Edward would have been so easily fooled, him and Mrs Simpson. She’d have noticed something, I bet.’

  ‘People only see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear,’ Dougal said, darkly. ‘That’s what’s wrong with the world today.’

  ‘So you think it’s true? You honestly think there’ll be war?’

  ‘No doubt about it, and now’s the time to start preparing yourself for it. There’s word they’re going to supply shelters for people’s gardens, so take one if you’re offered it.’

  ‘The Jerries’d never bomb London, surely.’

  ‘It’s the first place they will bomb. If they manage to knock out the capital, the whole country would be theirs.’

  ‘Has something upset you?’ Gwen asked Alistair on their way home, but he couldn’t tell her. He didn’t want to alarm her unnecessarily, because he didn’t honestly think there would ever be another war, no matter what Dougal, or anybody else, said.

  Having been seeing Ernie Gammie once a week for around three years, more often when he was on holiday from the Fire Service, Lexie could hardly say she was satisfied with the way the romance was going. He was so … gentlemanly, that was the only word to describe him. He still kissed her as though he loved her, but the second a hint of passion crept in, he backed off, and he’d been shillyshallying for far too long. Tonight, however, she meant to ginger him up a bit. She took extra pains with her appearance, brushing her blonde hair until it shone and glinted like gold, and coaxing it into the new pageboy style that seemed to be all the rage, according to the magazines. She smoothed some Pond’s Cream over her face and neck, added a touch of rouge to her cheeks and softened it by applying a lavish amount of Phul Nana powder. The last touch was a firm coating of Yvette Tangerine lipstick with a pat of powder over it to keep it on a bit longer. This last was probably a waste of time, she thought, for Ernie would kiss it off in five minutes. She did nothing to her eyes, they were lovely enough as they were … so he was always telling her. ‘I could get lost in them,’ he sometimes murmured, ‘so big and so blue.’

  Her pulse speeded up at the thought of the next few hours, and also the extra hours she was going to offer him. She could hardly bear to think about what might happen then – the willing sacrifice of her virginity to a man who had once been married and would know everything there was to know about making love. It would make up for all the bad things that had happened, for her father, for Alistair, for her mother.

  The little tap at the door made her run to let her soon-to-be lover in and, if she thought his kiss was a little perfunctory, she put it down to his shyness at being asked to spend the evening in her house. If only he knew, she exulted, he would be
spending the night there, as well – in her bed!

  ‘Something smells good,’ he remarked as he sat down on one of the armchairs.

  ‘Thanks,’ she grinned, ‘I hope you enjoy it.’

  ‘I’m sure I will.’

  She couldn’t help feeling that there was a lack of warmth in his manner towards her, but he seemed to be quite impressed with what she served him, nothing fancy but good homely fare, and it wasn’t until they had cleared up and were back sitting at the fireside that he said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve something to tell you. I’m being sent on a three-month course, then I’m being transferred to Birmingham.’

  ‘For good?’ she gasped. She hadn’t expected anything like this.

  ‘I might try for promotion in a few years and be posted somewhere else, but it’ll depend on how well I do down there.’

  He fell silent, obviously waiting for her to pass some comment, but what was she to say? She wouldn’t demean herself by pleading with him not to go. He had never made any commitment to her, the love had probably been in her imagination, and it was his career he was speaking about, after all. She couldn’t even ask him if there was any chance that he would come back to her. ‘I wish you luck, Ernie,’ she finally got out.

  A small sigh of relief escaped him. ‘Thanks, that means a lot to me. I’ve really enjoyed our times together, and if I’d been left in Aberdeen … who knows? But you’re a lovely person, Lexie, you’ll find somebody else.’

  He didn’t even kiss her goodbye when he left, but held out his hand for her to shake, and she went inside without waiting until his car drove off. Damn him! she thought. He had walked out on her! Like her father! Like Alistair! Well, she wouldn’t get serious with any other man, even if he swore on a stack of bibles that he loved her.

  Something she had once read came to her now. ‘Love is to man a thing apart, ’tis woman’s whole existence.’ She probably hadn’t got the words exactly right, but their meaning was as true now as it had been when the poet wrote them.