Ellie (36 page)

Charley was confused. Was she angry because she thought he put his job before her, or had he offended her by what he’d done. His experience with girls was limited to fumbled petting behind the dance hall or in a parlour with the girl’s father upstairs. It had never felt like this. He wanted to tell her how wonderful it had been, but perhaps she thought it was disgusting.

‘I won’t go if you want me to stay,’ he said tentatively, wishing he knew what girls felt at times like this. ‘Maybe I’d better go downstairs. Mum might come back. I’ll take you out to the pictures tonight.’

‘I can’t,’ Ellie said, without thinking. ‘I’m going out to dinner with Jimbo, he wants a serious talk with me about my future.’

Charley was already smarting with a sense of failure, but as Ellie spoke it turned to deep hurt. He leaped off the bed as if he’d been scalded. ‘I see,’ he said icily as he buttoned up his flies. ‘And I was mug enough to think I had a part in your future.’

Ellie was smitten with remorse. She didn’t know why she felt let down, or indeed how everything had suddenly turned sour. Now she’d made things much worse by blurting out about Jimbo.

She wanted him to get back into bed with her, to hold her and whisper words of love, but his eyes were so cold she felt as if she’d been slapped.

‘I suppose you see that future as me being here whenever it suits you,’ she snapped back, sitting up and pulling the covers right up to her neck. ‘A quick fumble, then off to do what you want. Well Just clear off to work and don’t hurry back.’

Charley turned towards the door and wrenched it open, but as he glanced back at Ellie he saw the black dress hanging on the wardrobe door. ‘Oh, I see,’ he snarled. ‘He’s bought you a dress to wear! I suppose he’s a better lover too?’

He pounded off down the stairs before Ellie had time to think of a reply. Seconds later she heard the basement door slam behind him, then silence.

She sobbed then, lying down and burying her face in the pillow, anger and remorse welling up inside her in equal measures.

‘What on earth’s the matter, Ellie?’ Annie said at five o’clock. She’d arrived home at one, having stopped off to see a friend on the way back from the market, and it was clear to her by Ellie’s swollen eyes that she and Charley had had a fight. As the afternoon wore on the girl’s silence, punctuated only by deep sighs and glances at the clock, made Annie agitated. She had heard gossip that a V-2 had demolished an office building round the back of Oxford Street and although it wasn’t yet substantiated, dozens of people were reported to have been killed and even more injured. She was proud of her son putting duty before his personal life and a little cross with Ellie if this was what their row had been about. ‘He has to go if they need him. You know that.’

Ellie refused to be drawn into any sort of explanation; in fact Annie’s assumption that she was cross because Charley put his job first made her even more angry. She wished Charley would come home so she could apologise, maybe even explain herself. But the time was ticking by and she couldn’t contact Jimbo to put him off.

What should she do? Jimbo would be angry if she let him down; perhaps he’d forget whatever plan he had for her. But how could she go out without making peace with Charley first?

‘There’s nothing the matter,’ Ellie snapped. She wished she could tell Annie, but how could she talk of anything so private to anyone, least of all to Charley’s mother!

At six, when Charley still hadn’t come back, she went upstairs to have a bath. It was snowing again, so cold she felt she would never be warm, and the smell of fish cooking for the lodgers’ evening meal made her quite bilious.

She felt a sense of righteous indignation as she coaxed her hair into curls with setting lotion. It was just like Charley to stay away: he was probably in the fire station bar, swilling down pints of beer and laughing with his mates, avoiding her. Maybe everything the girls said at the club was true: men only wanted one thing and once they’d got that they lost interest.

Charley was just coming up Melton Street as the car pulled out of Coburgh Street. There was only one dim light on the corner, but the thick blanket of snow and the yellow glow of headlamps was enough for him to recognise the occupants. He slunk back into a shop doorway and watched it cruise past. Ellie was sitting in the front like a duchess, her hair piled up in loose curls, her head turned towards the driver.

Of all the jobs Charley had worked on, today’s had been one of the most harrowing. Nearly all the dead were women: young typists, telephonists and office clerks, many of them crushed as they sat at their desks. Coal and paraffin fires had caught piles of papers alight, burning the injured before they could reach them. A mother walking past with a pram had thrown her body protectively over her child and been killed outright, but the baby miraculously survived, screaming lustily beneath not only its mother, but a pile of smoking rubble. Charley lost count of the bodies lying on the pavement under blankets, snow falling on them until they were taken away.

He had been frozen all day, and the only thing he’d had to eat was a couple of Spam sandwiches and lukewarm tea. But he’d managed to keep going by telling himself Ellie would be waiting for him. He was so sure she wouldn’t go out, whatever she’d said. It was all so clear in his mind: he’d tell her how wonderful she made him feel and he’d make her talk about it too. Maybe he could even take her away for the weekend somewhere and start all over again.

But he was wrong about her. She didn’t love him.

‘You bitch,’ he muttered. ‘You don’t care for anyone but yourself. Go and find fame and fortune, but don’t expect me to be waiting for you.’

Chapter Thirteen

April 1945

‘You don’t sound like my Ellie. What’s wrong, love?’ Marleen asked.

Ellie looked at her aunt sitting in a wheelchair, sightless eye sockets hidden by dark glasses, and she felt suddenly ashamed of having considered herself hard done by.

It was the first of April. On the way down to Aylesbury on the train Ellie had seen lambs in the fields and a green haze of buds on the trees, but she had been so immersed in her own misery at being rejected by Charley and forced to leave Coburgh Street that she’d been unable to take any pleasure in knowing that spring had arrived, or that the war was almost over.

‘I’m just tired,’ she lied.

They were in a room off the main ward at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. There was little furniture, just a utility table under the window, three or four chairs for visitors and a grey tiled floor, but a few paintings by patients and a vase of daffodils on the window sill gave a cheery, optimistic note to an otherwise drab room.

Marleen’s hair had turned grey, cut to the level of her chin, pinned unflatteringly to one side with a hair slide. She was wearing a checked, man’s dressing-gown, a blanket over her knees and dark glasses.

Dr Guttmann and his team at Stoke Mandeville had performed miracles. In any other hospital she would probably have died or been tormented by futile operations: urinary infections, renal deficiency and bed sores were all problems common to spinal patients. But here they not only pioneered new treatments to mobilise the natural forces of healing, but believed most patients could be rehabilitated to lead a useful life.

They had rescued her aunt from utter despair and given her back some pride, but even so her situation was still tragic. Marleen would never regain the use of her legs, and neither would she ever see again. She couldn’t survive without constant medical attention. One day she might just be moved to a less congenial home for incurables to grow old and bitter surrounded by other casualties of war.

Marleen was one of only three women patients; the others were mostly servicemen wounded in battle. Her cheery, cockney humour had won her a special place in everyone’s affections, and her efforts to wash and dress herself, to manoeuvre her wheelchair unaided without sight, were an inspiration to all the other patients.

But while the others were learning new skills and crafts, filling the long days with reading, jigsaw puzzles and writing letters to their loved ones, some even playing table tennis from their wheelchairs, Marleen had nothing to occupy her. To watch her attempting to steer her chair was so sad, for there seemed little point in becoming mobile when wherever she went was dark.

Each of Ellie’s visits here upset her. It was a pleasant, bright, single-storey building, surrounded by open space, with everything geared for people in wheelchairs, and it was run with dedication and compassion. But the tragedy of these brave people struggling to rise above such insurmountable problems made her want to cry. The nurses reassured Ellie that Marleen had accepted her disabilities, yet Ellie always left the hospital with the feeling that her aunt was praying silently for death to release her from the need to pretend.

‘You’ve told me all about this ’ere theatre Jimbo plans to get,’ Marleen said now, smoothing Ellie’s hand between her two. ‘I’ve heard about ’ow well your act is coming along and about the other girls at the club. But you ain’t mentioned Annie or Charley once. Now suppose you tell me why?’

‘It’s over with Charley and me, and I’ve moved,’ Ellie said, realising she couldn’t hope to keep up the pretence much longer. ‘I’ve got a room near the club.’

Marleen didn’t reply for a moment, but lifted her hand and groped for Ellie’s face. When her fingers found tears her lips quivered. ‘The whole story, love?’ she said gently. ‘What ’appened?’

Marleen had put on weight since she’d moved here, but there was a yellowish tinge to her skin and a puffiness which suggested she wasn’t as well as she claimed to be. Her hands, which had once been smooth and well manicured, were now a mass of engorged veins.

Ellie blurted out the bare bones, about how Charley was waiting up for her when she got in after dinner at Maxim’s.

‘It was late,’ she said. ‘After three, but I hadn’t done anything wrong. We were only talking about Jimbo’s ideas for a show. He introduced me to some friends of his and they were all drinking; I couldn’t rush off like Cinderella at midnight. Charley accused me of being a tart and we had a terrible row. After that night he just avoided me. I had to leave, it was unbearable.’

She couldn’t bring herself to say that for three weeks she’d tried to plead with him outside his shut bedroom door, where he hid himself away whenever she was in. Or that in fact it was Annie who eventually said she must go because the atmosphere between them was upsetting both her and the lodgers.

Marleen said nothing for a moment. Since losing her sight she had found compensation in picking up the tones in people’s voices. Now she could distinguish half-truths, almost hear thought processes.

‘Suppose you tell me ’ow this come about?’ she said eventually. ‘One little fight don’t usually mean the end of the line when two people love each other as much as you two did.’

Ellie told her a little of how life had been before that night. Of the days spent together when Charley was off duty and how rare it was having an evening together. She implied the row was just the end result of growing dissatisfaction.

‘Were you lovers?’ Marleen asked point-blank. ‘I know it’s no business of mine, Ellie, but there’s more to this than jealousy or lack of time together.’

Ellie had all but blocked out in her mind how it had started; her story for the girls at the club was just that she went out to dinner with Jimbo. She didn’t feel she could reveal any intimate details to anyone, but she was so terribly confused and she knew she needed advice from someone experienced in such matters. Marleen, if nothing else, was an expert on men and her advice would be blunt and forthright.

Ellie blushed, squirmed in her chair and at times couldn’t find the right words. But Marleen gently prompted her, indeed probed in such an incisive way that Ellie found herself telling her, if not everything, at least enough for Marleen to get the drift.

Marleen’s first reaction was relief that Ellie hadn’t actually lost her virginity. But her second was shock at the girl’s naïvety. It was almost unbelievable that Ellie should get to eighteen, especially when she was so astute about most things, without any real understanding of sexual matters.

‘It seems to me,’ she said at length, ‘that you two need yer ’eads knocking together. Didn’t you ever talk about your feelings to one another?’

‘How do you talk to a man about such things?’ Ellie said plaintively. ‘It’s so embarrassing.’

Marleen gave a dry little laugh. ‘You remind me of my mum,’ she said. ‘D’you know she told me after my dad died that they’d never seen each other naked. She was married to ’im for over twenty-five years and ’ad six kids, but their bodies was still a mystery to ’em.’

Ellie sniggered.

‘I don’t want to embarrass you, Ellie.’ Marleen’s voice softened. ‘But it seems to me I’ve gotta duty to explain how it all works. It ain’t enough to know sex makes babies. There’s millions of women out there who never get to like it and it’s mostly because of ignorance. At least I won’t die being one of those, Ellie.’ She laughed, but it sounded hollow. ‘I reckon men get a raw deal too. The poor lambs don’t know what we need, and if we don’t know, or can’t tell them, what are they supposed to do?’

Ellie felt very hot and uncomfortable as Marleen launched into a full and graphic explanation about not only male and female anatomy but love-making and orgasm. Yet despite the embarrassment it was soothing to know the feelings of desire she’d had for Charley were normal and that pregnancy didn’t have to be an inevitable end result of loving one another.

‘Poor Charley ’ad probably been thinking of nothing else for weeks and suddenly it’s ’appening and his fuse was too short. If you’d given ’im a cuddle ’e’d have soon got steam up again.’

Ellie said nothing, just wriggled in her seat.

‘Cat got yer tongue?’ Marleen said with a flash of her old irreverent humour. ‘You got it into your ’ead he wanted to go to work. I doubt he did, it were more likely ’e was waiting for reassurance. But then you ‘it ’im with your plan to go out with with another man.’