Crooked Heart (4 page)

Donald drew the quilt from his face and reached out a hand. Vee had checked the postmarks earlier, and they were the usual puzzling collection; one from Wembley, another from Luton, a third from Leicester. Two were cheap yellow envelopes, one was expensive, the paper as thick as card. All had masculine handwriting.

‘Friends of yours?' she asked, brightly.

Donald said nothing, but gestured for the tray, and she waited for him to sit up before placing it on his lap. It often took him a few minutes after waking before he could speak. He'd been that way since childhood, and year after year she'd chivvied and nagged him, thinking it was just laziness, and then he'd gone for
his call-up medical and the doctor had found a heart murmur. It was a leaky valve, he'd said, and every beat sent some of the blood back the wrong way, so that Donald wasn't getting the goodness out of it that he ought to be. He'd been born that way, probably. Every heartbeat, thought Vee, for nineteen years . . .

Donald had been brave about it, had only remarked that he knew now why he was so tired all the time, but the guilt that Vee felt was so awful that it seemed to call for some type of Biblical atonement: rending of garments, beating of breasts, the cleaving of something-or-other in twain. The best she could do was to give him her egg and cheese ration, for strength, and her chocolate, for love.

‘How are you feeling this evening, Donny?' she asked, after he laid down his knife and fork, and was dabbing at the remaining crumbs with a finger.

‘Not so bad, Mum. Bit tired.'

He looked quite like his father when he smiled. More well-built, of course, and with thicker hair. And he was trying to grow a moustache, she noticed. Earlier in the year he'd grown a beard, but had shaved it off. And last month he'd changed his parting again. He'd spent a lot of time, lately, looking in the mirror. There was a girl somewhere, Vee thought.

‘I'm making a nice pie for your supper,' she said. ‘Mince.' Donald was busy opening one of his letters. She glimpsed a scant half-page of writing, and a puzzling string of numbers, before he looked up and caught her eye.

‘I'll just go and get your snack ready, then,' she said, and he nodded. He was reaching for his pocket diary when she left the room.

Five minutes later, putting Donald's sandwiches into a tin, Vee glanced out of the window. The view – one of only two good things about the flat – was of fields of green barley, and the
meandering grass-edged course of Pollard Lane. The surface was unmetalled, a mire in winter and a ribbon of dust in summer, but from the kitchen you could see fifty yards along it, in either direction. It was a view that allowed unwelcome visitors to be spotted early on and ensured that neighbours could be avoided or deliberately encountered, depending on circumstance. The only visible building was Mrs Fillimore's slate-roofed farmhouse, but Green End Cottages and their nosy occupants were only just around the corner, the smoke from the chimneys hanging permanently above a clump of elders.

For a moment Vee thought that the lane was empty, and then she spotted Mrs Fillimore out on her constitutional, hauling her little black dog behind her. Vee watched the woman for a while, noting, with disbelief, the vigour of her walk. Eighty-seven. Mrs Fillimore was
eighty-seven
. How long was she going to go on for? When would it all end? Threescore years and ten, it said in Psalm 90, ‘and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow'. Well phooey to that. In December, shortly after they'd moved into the flat, Vee had discovered Mrs Fillimore lying in a heap on the lane, seemingly breathing her last. The doctor had shaken his head. The vicar had been summoned. A bed had been found at the cottage hospital. Then Mrs Fillimore had rallied and made a recovery that the doctor called ‘temporary' and Vee had paid a visit to the offices of Firebrand Insurance, and taken out a life policy on her neighbour. It was only a shilling a week and all fully legal; the man at the office hadn't even raised an eyebrow.

Since then she'd popped in regularly to see how the old so-and-so was doing, and every single time, Mrs Fillimore had found a task for her (‘You won't mind giving Binky-Boy his worming tablets, will you? I know how much you love pets . . .') and on every visit she'd looked in better health and spirits.

That was what happened when you tried to do something
straight: the world simply laughed at you. Like the job she'd taken in the packing room of Ballito Hosiery just after the war started: ‘You'll love it here, we're one big family, all our girls have a grand time' – fifty minutes' walk each way, standing for the whole shift, no time to get to the shops, no air with all the windows boarded up for blackout, bloody great boxes to lift. After a fortnight, her legs felt as if she'd borrowed them from her mother, and she took one day off,
one
day, and had turned up on the dot the next morning only to be told she'd been sacked (‘The point is, Mrs Sedge, you're either a member of our Ballito family, or you're not'). On her way out of the factory she'd stumbled across one or two items of water-damaged stock that were going to be discarded anyway, and had just popped them in her bag, and the next thing she knew, the foreman was threatening to call the police.

In the end, she'd persuaded him not to. Ugly, stringy little man. Hairy too.

It wasn't something she liked to remember.

Outside, Mrs Fillimore performed a smart about-turn, and dragged her dog back to the farmhouse. Briefly, the lane was empty again, and then there was the sound of a slamming door, and Mr Croxton walked into the middle of the lane, looked directly up at Vee, and mouthed ‘He is late.' For added emphasis, he held up the keys to the yard, and gave them a shake.

Vee nodded and smiled, and held up five fingers.

Mr Croxton shook his head and held up a single finger.

‘Donny!' called Vee.

Mr Croxton continued looking at her, lips pursed, and then slowly lowered his gaze and disappeared again beneath the window lintel.

‘Donny!' called Vee again, trying to sound bright and careless. ‘Time for work.'

It wasn't a nice flat, nor even a convenient one: a quarter of a mile from the nearest shop, draughty, dusty, overlooking the scrapyard, subject to deafening clangs all day and the rustle of mice all night. It wasn't really a flat at all, for that matter, just a long, thin space above the workshop, roughly partitioned, one room opening out of another, the kitchen so-called only because it happened to have a sink in it. Even the staircase that led to ground-level was a botched afterthought, each stair of a different height, so that every descent was a series of jolts and surprises. The advantage – the sole advantage, apart from the view of the lane – was that it came rent-free.

Vee had spotted the advertisement in the
Herts Advertiser
:
Night watchman needed at St Albans place of business, duties include guarding premises and vermin control. Accommodation included
, and she'd telephoned Mr Croxton to make enquiries. ‘He's a good steady boy,' she'd said to Mr Croxton, ‘doesn't drink, hardly even smokes. He likes his crosswords.'

It had come at a useful time, three weeks after Donald had handed in his notice at the shoe shop – the bending was giving him terrible palpitations – and only a couple of days after Woolworth's in Harpenden had asked Vee to leave (on the word of one customer, just
one
), and Vee had been beginning to panic about the arrears on the cottage they'd been living in.

Manna, she'd thought, when Mr Croxton had told her about the flat. Manna. And for the first few months that they'd lived there, the simple joy of not having to find a weekly ten shillings had been as good as a holiday (not that she'd ever had a holiday); anyhow, she'd felt almost carefree, like the lighter-than-air dancing girl in the Ballito hosiery advertisement.

She'd even had a dream, one night, that she was on the swingboats with Donald's father, eating a toffee apple, and that was unusual, since her dreams were nearly always about money: finding it, dropping it, winning it, spending it, losing it. Losing it, mainly.

‘You calling, Ma?' asked Donald, coming into the kitchen, buttoning his shirt.

‘Mr Croxton,' she said, apologetically.

He nodded and sat down at the table, nudging the teapot with his cup. She'd have preferred him to hurry down to work, but he wasn't the hurrying sort, nor the sort to get riled by Mr Croxton and his perpetual watch-tapping. He'd been a sleepy baby, a contented toddler, a placid schoolboy, and Vee had seen enough of other peoples' troubles (not to mention bruises) to bless his even temper. He was never bitter, punchy or sharp. Or pushy, or nervy, or talkative. Nothing like her at all, in fact. It made it difficult to know, sometimes, what he was thinking.

She poured him another cupful.

‘Can you do me a clean shirt for tomorrow?' he asked.

‘Going out for the day?'

He nodded.

‘Anywhere special?'

He shook his head, smiling easily. Vee could feel the usual questions piling up behind her teeth. These day trips had started a few months ago, not long after the frightening medical. Donald never said where he was going, or where he'd been, or what he'd done, though Vee had come across train tickets to Birmingham and Cheadle and Brixton in his trouser pockets. Sometimes, the next day, he'd slip her some money, a couple of pounds or so; she wondered whether he might be going to the races. Maybe he had a
system
. She didn't want to pry. Whatever he was doing, when he went out, he tended to arrive back a bit late for work.

She hovered beside the table, one eye on the clock, unable to sit down for the tension of watching Donald drink his tea in tiny, appreciative sips, but then, at last, he was done. She gave him a kiss and handed over his snack and then watched out of the window as he emerged into the yard and took the keys
from Mr Croxton. She couldn't see the latter's face but she could tell from the jut of his backside that he was furious. Last week he'd threatened to re-advertise the job. ‘You're going to have to give me a bloody good reason why I shouldn't,' he'd said to Vee.

She was still hoping that it wouldn't come to that.

She'd just started pushing half an onion and the heel of a loaf into the mincer, when the evacuees came back along the lane. Only two left now: a great lump of a girl who looked as if she'd eat you out of house and home, and the limping creature with the ears. Who on earth would want to look after a crippled evacuee, she wondered. You'd not only have to feed them, and deal with the lice and the London cheek, but you'd be forever at the doctor, going back and forth and—

An idea rolled into her head, fully formed, like a marble. Vee paused for a second or two, to think about it, and then snatched off her apron and tied on a headscarf.

‘I've got to pop out, Mum,' she said. ‘Won't be long. Back soon.'

It was a beautiful evening, balmy, the sky a washed-out pink like a faded eiderdown. It didn't take long for her to catch them up.

Noel stood by the side of the lane, next to Ada, and watched the billeting officer talk to the scrawny woman in the headscarf. He was so tired that his eyes kept closing and then jerking open again, so that the scene jumped forward like a damaged film.

‘. . . and you get ten and sixpence a week,' he heard the billeting officer say. ‘More if he's a bed-wetter.'

‘
She
looks nice,' said Ada, hopefully. She had said this about every housewife they'd seen that day, and they'd probably seen a hundred. After a morning in the Masons' Hall, during which the smaller and prettier children had been picked off, a crocodile of the plain and badly dressed had been marched from
door to door in a widening spiral, gradually leaving the centre of the town behind.

‘This is Noel,' said the billeting officer, beckoning him forwards. ‘And Noel, this is Mrs Sedge, who has very kindly,
very
kindly agreed to take you in. I shall drop by in a day or two, Mrs Sedge, to see how Noel's getting on. Will you make sure he writes the postcard to his parents, giving his new address? It's already franked.'