All Fall Down (38 page)

‘I ain't Sadie.' She had to repeat it over and over to calm him. ‘Sadie's my mother. You saw me when I was a little baby. Don't you remember?' Meggie picked up his fear that there was someone else in the room. Despite her revulsion, she began to pity him. ‘Don't worry, they don't know I came here.'

After a while the pieces fell into place; this was many years later, time for the dark-haired, brown-eyed baby to have grown into the severe but beautiful girl sitting opposite. He got things in order. She couldn't know it, but Meggie wasn't the only child he'd fathered, then abandoned, over the years.

‘Is Sadie waiting outside?' The edges of the room were blurred; he was convinced that there was another presence.

‘No. She don't know!'

‘How did you find me, then?'

‘Through Gertie Elliot.' This was the filthy bargain; Richie Palmer for Ronnie, out of a sentimental idea that her father would clap eyes on her and instantly love her.

Gertie's name also meant something to the sick man, though he failed to make the connection between his present visitor and the landlady at the Bell. His eyelids drooped, he put a shaking hand to his temple. ‘Seen enough, have you?'

‘Are you very sick?' Meggie could see that he was in pain. The regulation pyjamas donated to the club gave him the look of a prisoner, known by number not by name. They'd cut his grey hair short, almost to a stubble.

‘With a bit of luck, I am.'

She grimaced. ‘Shall I go?' She gave up hope that he would show any interest in her; he'd hardly seemed to register her presence after the initial shock.

‘No. Tell me about Sadie.'

The hand shielding his face was mottled and threaded with thick veins. ‘She's well, considering. We sent the boys up north because of the Blitz. She's up there with them now.'

‘Boys?'

‘My two brothers.'

‘Who did she get hitched to?'

‘Walter Davidson.' The best stepfather anyone could wish for, she reflected guiltily.

Richie coughed and turned the phlegm inside his mouth.

‘You worked for him and my Uncle Rob.'

‘What if I did? Are they thinking of giving me my old job back?' His laugh ended in another coughing fit. ‘That's funny, if you did but know it.'

Meggie sighed. ‘Ain't you ever wondered about . . . me?' She'd harboured the notion that she at least existed inside her father's head; in his thoughts and dreams, if not in his actions.

He glanced up at her from under hooded lids. ‘Sometimes.'

‘Won't you ask me something about myself?'

‘I can see plain enough. You got your ma's stubborn streak.'

She raised her head higher. He hadn't forgotten everything, then.

‘Don't worry, you ain't got nothing of me in you.' He recognized his own worthlessness, had done for years. ‘You're a Parsons through and through.' The dark brown, wavy hair, the big eyes and proud look, the slight figure. ‘Will you tell her you tracked me down?'

She shook her head. This was a secret she would cling to; there was only hopelessness in it. The man was too far gone. Yet he said he had sometimes wondered about her.

‘No.' He rested his head against the back of the chair.

‘Shall I come again?'

It was his turn to deny her. ‘I ain't got nothing to give you. You can see that.'

‘I don't want anything!'

He looked her in the eye in a moment of clear, concentrated communication. ‘Yes, you do,' he insisted. ‘And I ain't got it to give.'

Meggie wished the visit would finish. She was glad when the doctor came back to tell her that her time with Richie Palmer was up. She would find her friend waiting outside, he said. She made a fumbled farewell, lacking the right phrase, doubtful of her future intentions as far as her father was concerned.

‘You're your ma's girl,' Richie reminded her as she got up to leave.

There was one last thing; a hunger to have another question answered. She steeled herself. ‘Did you see me once down Tottenham Court tube?'

Richie was falling back into confusion, or perhaps he wanted Munroe to think he was sicker than he really was. He coughed and turned away.

‘Don't expect him to remember,' the doctor advised, ushering her out.

Meggie drew herself together by buttoning her white coat. She was already through the door, out in the corridor.

‘I did.' Richie's reply was late, issued through the wheeze and
crackle of his diseased lungs. She could hear him drumming his fingers on the arms of the chair.

Full circle.

To Meggie's surprise, the doctor offered to shake her hand. ‘Don't take it too hard,' he advised.

‘I don't.' She put on a brave smile and went into the street. She thought of the letter to Ronnie in the postbox on Charing Cross Road. Could she get there and retrieve it when the postman made his collection? No, Gertie would have planned for that too. The letter would be on its way to Plymouth.

There was no sign of Ronnie's mother in the throng of traffic that roared beneath the railway arches; the woman who must have knowingly betrayed her in this worst of all bargains. No stylish figure in fur hat and collar. Nothing.

What do I do now?
Meggie asked herself. She felt tiny, lost.
Where to now?
Nowhere.
Who with
? No one.

Chapter Twenty-Three

‘The Yanks are in Somerset!' Dorothy O'Hagan crowed over the newspaper spread on the bar at the Duke. ‘It's true; it says here they've set up bases all over the country. They're on the verge of coming in with us.' She still loved to goad Tommy, who would go green when he heard the latest. ‘That's where Edie went, ain't it? Somewhere near Taunton?'

‘About time too.' Dolly headed for safer waters. It was early on a Saturday evening in autumn, the pub was crowded, but Dorothy's remark had hit home. She saw Tommy standing further along the bar, his face like thunder. What's the betting they come in all guns blazing, reckoning they can beat old Hitler single-handed?'

‘Yes, but the Yanks!' Dorothy made cow-eyes over it. ‘Don't I wish I was in Somerset right now!'

‘They ain't all Clark Gable, you know. I bet there's ugly Yanks and all.' Dolly fed Dorothy all the right lines without realizing it. ‘Anyhow, looks ain't the important thing.'

‘Ain't it?' With a voice loaded with innuendo, Dorothy continued to enthuse. ‘It's them two-tone uniforms, and such nice, smooth cloth. And them fuzzy haircuts. They give you goose-bumps, just thinking about them.'

‘Not me,' Dolly said.

‘Me neither.' Annie slipped Tommy a sympathetic extra whisky. ‘Take no notice.'

It was over a week since Edie had written. Every morning at Rob's house, Tommy was up first waiting for the post. ‘I don't.' He sieved the drink through his teeth. ‘In any case, Dorothy would go after anything in trousers.'

His ex-wife heard, protested loudly and looked round for support.

‘Serves you right,' Dolly said, unconcerned. ‘Maybe you'll pipe down in future.'

‘All right?' Rob slid past Tommy, carrying drinks for Amy and himself. Tommy looked down in the dumps, cutting himself off from the general conversation. ‘Don't take it to heart.'

‘Would I?' Tommy said glumly.

‘Not if you've got any sense, you wouldn't.' They all knew how Dorothy tried to needle him whenever she could. Usually Tommy rose well above it. Rob paused to put his drinks down on the bar. ‘Look, if it's getting under your skin, I wouldn't hang around if I were you.'

Tommy drew deep on his cigarette. It wasn't Yanks that bothered Mm, but he couldn't explain to Rob. ‘Righto.'

Rob's way of looking at it included no half-measures, as usual. He'd heard the women in the family going on about Edie needing time to get over Morell, but that was all cock and bull. Did she have to go halfway across the country to sort herself out?

‘I would
not
,' he repeated. ‘You wouldn't catch me waiting for a Yank or a POW to jump into my shoes.'

Tommy hunched his shoulders, glared at his glass.

Rob ploughed on. ‘That's bleeding stupid, that is. I reckon she's got you just where she wants you, right under her little finger. Well, it wouldn't be any good for me. I'd be on that Bristol sleeper like a bleeding shot.'

‘Easy for you to say.'

‘Want to bet? I would. I'd be there keeping my beady eye on her. You ask my old lady.' Hard as it was to believe, the matronly Amy had been a terrible flirt when they first got together.

‘Edie ain't my old lady,' Tommy reminded him. He was sick of advice. What bothered him, pure and simple, was why Edie hadn't written. ‘Anyhow, who'd work the news stand?' He couldn't just cut and run, even if he wanted to.

‘Bobby would. And Jimmie. It'd give them something to do.' Again Rob stated what he thought was the obvious; sometimes people couldn't see the wood for the trees.

Tommy pursed his lips. He studied the wood grain on the bar. Overnight sleeper to Bristol? Then how would he get out into the sticks? By bus? He began to wonder if it was feasible.

‘Stand by your beds,' Rob winked at the two boys who sat chatting up a pair of likely looking clippies from the trans. ‘Looks like Tommy might need you to man his stall before too long.'

Amy chided him for poking his nose in.

‘I only said the truth. Anyhow, he can't stay with us forever, can he?'

She nudged him hard, calling him heartless.

‘Practical,' he insisted. ‘One of us has to be.' Even from the back view, as Tommy sat hunched at the bar, it was clear he was giving serious attention to Rob's point of view.

The night train took Tommy to Bristol. Here was another silver estuary under the moonlight, another disgorging of young men in uniform into their sweethearts' arms.

Edie's billet was in a village well inland, however, at a place called Westbury Wootton, and Tommy's choice of transport, as dawn broke and he found the right road south-east out of the city, was a lift cadged from a truck driver. The open truck was loaded up with used rubber tyres from tractors and other farm vehicles, and if the driver had spotted his passenger as a handy source of cigarettes for the journey, he wasn't disappointed. Tommy kept him well supplied with fags and jokes. Neither mentioned a single word about the war.

‘It's the back of beyond where you're heading,' the driver warned. His thick wrists and hands dangled inside me rim of his steering wheel, which he turned with casual ease. They'd left the city streets well behind and travelled through rolling wooded countryside. ‘What do the Yanks call it – a one-horse town?'

‘Have you heard of a place called Wootton Hall?'

The sun was up, but clouds gathering on the horizon.

Tommy's driver flicked a fag-end Out of the window with brown stained fingers. ‘The Land Army billet?' He gave a knowing look. ‘I might've guessed. Does she know you're coming?'

‘Call it a surprise.' Tommy kept up the banter. Inside, his stomach churned.

‘Red-letter day. Well, let's hope she's thrilled!' The young driver pulled up. This was as near to the manor house as he went, he said.

Tommy hopped out and handed a full packet of cigarettes up through the window.

‘Ta very much. I hope you don't mind getting wet.'

Fat drops had begun to fall. Tommy shrugged and fumed up the collar of his jacket.

‘How far is it?'

‘A couple of miles down the lane.' The driver crunched his gears. ‘Just keep right on to the end of the road. You can't miss it.'

Though your heart be weary, still carry on
 . . . Tommy slapped the side of the truck and watched him drive on. The tyres on the back took off a foot into the air and bounced back as he hit the worst bumps in the road.

He'd gone and landed himself in it good and proper. Damn the rain, damn the deep, muddy ruts in the track, damn his own hastiness in following Rob's advice.

Dressed in T-shirt and dungarees, Edie backed the truck out of the barn, ready to set off on the morning round of the local farms. She was due to drop the other Land Army girls at their places of work, then come back here to Wootton Hall to help prepare the traction engine for threshing. During her time in Somerset she'd discovered an aptitude for working with machinery and become a painstaking apprentice to Jurgen Scholtz, the POW fixture at the manor.

A heavy rain set in as the girls filed out from the canteen, but it didn't deaden the chatter about what had gone on at the pub the night before; who went with such and such a US army corporal, what they did and didn't do. The local girls shrieked at the language of those who had come from the cities to work on the land, but Edie suspected it was the farmers' daughters who more often put their money where their mouths were. To them, having the GIs
stationed in the village was manna from heaven, though it was a source of regret and bitter rivalry among the local boys. In the dormitory after lights-out, she would often overhear whispered, triumphant accounts of battles fought over girls who had hitherto thought of themselves as plain Janes; of victory going to the Yanks every time, and of the lurid spoils of that success.

Edie was careful to keep out of the fray. She tried not to be stuck-up and glum about it, but she had memories too near the surface still. To her, jealousy wasn't something to be played about with. None of the Land Army girls was married of course, but when Edie went to a weekend hop and looked at the angry faces of the Westbury boys lined up against the walls of the village institute, watching the Yanks steal their all-too-willing girls, she had to leave and walk back by herself to the hostel. She preferred the company of Jurgen; a studious type who talked constantly about his wife and child in Dresden, whose brown knee-patches signified his prisoner status, but whose calm bearing suggested a free mind, uncontaminated by the indignities of war.