The Girls They Left Behind (43 page)

It’s like furniture makers, they’re all doing different things now. Nothing’s the same as it was.’

Jess lifted Maureen off the counter and took her outside.

She was getting almost too big for her pram now, but she’d go on using it till she was past two, for you couldn’t expect a toddler to walk all the way up the street and round the shops.

Besides, it made carrying the shopping so much easier. Jess would miss it when she finally stopped using it.

Alice Brunner was looking whiter than ever. Jess tried to persuade her to come down to number 14 for a cup of tea in the afternoon, but she shook her head. It was as if she were afraid to leave the house.

‘She won’t go out in case there’s a telegram from Daddy,’

Joy told her afterwards, coming out on to the pavement on the pretext of cleaning the windows. ‘She’s got really superstitious 296

about it, as if it would bring bad luck. She’s certain that the minute she steps out of doors, they’ll tell us he’s dead.’

The girl rubbed her face tiredly. ‘Sometimes I wish they would, then it would all be over. That’s an awful thing to say, isn’t it?’

‘It’s an awful thing to feel,‘Jess said gently. ‘It’s been hard on you too.’

The girl’s face crumpled. ‘I miss Daddy too. But we can’t go on as if he’s only just died. We’ve got to carry on, haven’t we? That’s what everybody says.’

‘Yes,‘Jess said, ‘we’ve got to carry on.’ She hesitated, then said on impulse, ‘What are you and your mum doing for Christmas?’

Joy made a face. ‘Christmas! We don’t even talk about it.

We’ll only know it’s happening because there won’t be any papers that day. At least we’ll get a lie-in, that’ll be our only Christmas present, I reckon.’ She bent and swilled her rag about in the bucket of water. ‘I got Mum some of those chocolates she likes, and a book. I can’t afford any more than that.’

‘I’m sure she’ll be pleased. But what I was going to say was, why don’t you both come down to us for your Christmas dinner? We’ll probably be at my sister’s, but there’s room for another two at the table. We can always squeeze round a bit. It might be better than being on your own.’

Joy paused in her polishing and stared at her. ‘Oh, Mrs Budd. Could we really? Will Rose be there too?’

Poor kid, she’s lonely, Jess thought. Stuck in this shop all day and all by herself with her mum in the evenings, no time to have fun with her own friends. And she’s missing Rose.

She’s always asking how she is, out at Bridge End.

‘You tell your mum that’s what you’re doing,’ she said firmly. ‘And as soon as Rose gets home, I’ll send her up to see you. It’s time you had a bit of companionship of your own age.’

She looked at Joy’s face. There were lines that shouldn’t be there, a frown of worry on her brow. The girl was growing old before her time.

There were more ways than one of being injured in the war.

‘Will you be going home for Christmas, Bet?’

Yvonne was sitting on her bed, cutting her toenails. The girls had had their weekly bath and Erica was drying her hair.

She had had it all cut off the week after Geoffrey had died, almost as short as a boy’s and it had curled just like Betty’s. It clustered like a golden halo all over her head and created much envy in Yvonne’s breast.

‘Look at her. She doesn’t even care what she looks like now, and she still manages to look like a film star! I thought having all her hair cut off would make her look - well, not ugly, but more ordinary. What chance have you and me got, Bet?’

‘I don’t know that I want any chances,’ Betty said with a sigh. ‘Seems to me you’ve only got to put a skirt on and it causes trouble.’

‘It causes even more when you take it off!’ Yvonne said with a giggle. ‘But you never answered me. Are you going home?’

‘I don’t know.’ The arrangement was that two of the four farm workers - the girls and Dennis - should have Christmas, while the other two had the New Year. Betty wanted to go home, of course, she’d had a letter from Olive only yesterday which hinted at some news she and Derek would be breaking to the family, but she also wanted to be on the farm while Dennis was here. And she hadn’t plucked up courage to ask him. ‘What are you doing, Yvonne?’

‘Oh, I’ll go home. Mum’s got enough on her plate as it is, with all the kids round her feet.’ There were five younger than Yvonne, and her sister Clarice’s two who were looked after by their grandmother while Clarrie worked in the Dockyard.

‘And Mrs Spencer told me she’d give me a few bits and pieces to take home with me. That’ll make a lot of difference in our house.’

‘What are you doing, Erica?’

‘What?’ The blonde girl turned from the photograph she was gazing at. She looked at it every night for hours, as if trying to memorise every line of Geoffrey’s face. In fact, she was trying to remember it. In her memory, his face had blurred and become indistinct and it was only when staring at his photograph that she could recall clearly what he looked like. She was bewildered and upset by this, thinking that it meant she hadn’t loved Geoffrey after all - and I did, I did, she thought despairingly.

‘I asked what you’re doing at Christmas? Staying here or going home?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, anyway. My parents don’t even know I’m there, half the time.’

‘Oh go on, they must do.’

‘No, they don’t. It was all right while I was little, my mother could dress me up like a little doll and show me off to her friends. But now, she doesn’t want me around. It doesn’t matter how nice I look - sometimes, I think that makes it worse.’

The other two stared at her, fascinated.

‘How could looking nice make her worse?’

Erica shrugged. ‘She doesn’t want me around when she’s got her friends in the house. Her men friends,’ she added with slight emphasis.

Betty felt her cheeks turn scarlet. Yvonne smothered a giggle of embarrassment.

‘You mean she has - has - you know, lovers?’

‘I don’t know what they are,’ Erica said. ‘All I know is, there are always people at our house, men and women. It’s like one long party. And if one of the men takes a fancy to me, she doesn’t like it. All the same, when I took Geoff home, well, you’d have thought he was her boyfriend, not mine!’

She turned back to the photograph. Betty picked up the sock she was darning. Erica’s home life sounded so different from her own, she could scarcely believe it. She tried to picture her mother having men friends at home, and failed.

Nor could she imagine her father treating life as ‘one long party’. As for Annie behaving as if Graham was her boyfriend - well, Betty’s mind couldn’t take that in at all!

Not that Graham was her boyfriend now. She hadn’t heard from him since the night he’d walked out and didn’t really expect to. She felt sorry that they’d parted bitterly, but relieved to be free of his possessiveness.

She hadn’t told Dennis yet about that last quarrel. She wasn’t ready yet to start a new relationship. She wanted to get to know him slowly, to try to understand the way he thought about things, the different attitudes he seemed to possess.

She asked him about them as they worked together.

Dennis was willing enough to talk.

‘I’ve always believed in peace,’ he told Betty. ‘It’s all any of us want. Well, except for a few madmen who’ve got the power to send other men to die for what they believe in. I think that’s what I’ve got against it mostly. Why should anyone have that sort of power? Why should anyone have the power to send thousands - millions - of people to fight other people they haven’t even met?’

Dennis was a Quaker too. He explained this to Betty as they worked together, milking the cows. It was warm and cosy in the byre in the early mornings, with the cows breathing steamily and the lamp flickering gently. Betty pressed her head against the solid flank and squeezed the teats between her fingers. The milk squirted into the bucket and made a white froth.

‘We don’t really call ourselves Quakers,’ he said. ‘We’re Friends. The Society of Friends.’

‘That sounds nice.’

‘I think so, too. We believe that every man has the seed of God within him.’ Betty blushed, feeling almost as embarrassed by the reference to God as she felt about sex. ‘That means Germans and Japanese and Russians, you and me - everyone.

And you can’t kill someone who’s partly God, can you?’

‘No. But… even Hitler?’

‘Even Hitler,’ Dennis said firmly. ‘And Rommel and Goering and Mussolini and all the rest of them. Not that I mightn’t forget about being a Friend and a pacifist if I had them there in front of me,’ he added thoughtfully, eyeing a pitchfork that was leaning against the wall.

Betty laughed soberly. ‘I can see what you meant about the pilots, the ones who crashed in our field. They were just young chaps, like Sandy and the others. But Hitler and those people, they’ve got to be stopped.’

‘Oh yes. But killing young men and girls and children and old people, and people who’ve got nothing to do with the war, isn’t going to stop them.’ Dennis finished milking Bluebell and came round the other side to start on Dewdrop. ‘Look at what they’re doing. They’re just getting together as many soldiers and sailors and airmen as they can and setting them against each other, like spiders in a jar. In the end, it’ll all come down to who’s got most men and most bombs. Why not just count them all in the first place? Or better still, why not just sit down and talk about it?’

Betty shook her head. It sounded so simple when Dennis said that, but could it really be so easy? If it was, why hadn’t people tried it?

‘Because they’re not reasonable people,’ he said. ‘They’re mad. But that doesn’t mean everyone else has to go mad as well.’

‘But if there’s one man like Hitler who goes mad, what can you do about him? He’s got so much power, he controls everything. How can people go against him? And if they did if the whole army rose up against him - he’d still have enough people to take his side. There’d still be a war.’ She gazed at Dennis with troubled eyes. ‘D’you really think there’ll ever be enough people to stand up and say war’s wrong, and refuse to fight?’

‘I’d like to think so,’ Dennis said. ‘But I don’t suppose there ever will be. But that doesn’t mean that those of us who do think that way should be forced to go against our beliefs. And more in this war than ever before, because this is supposed to be a war for free speech. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself said so.’

He finished Dewdrop and stood up. Betty gave Buttercup a pat on the flank and the cow turned large, mild brown eyes on her and blew softly. Dennis came to stand beside her.

‘You never told me, Betty. What happened when you went home the other weekend?’

‘About Graham and me, you mean?’ She looked down at her hands. She still missed Graham’s little ring, even though she’d rarely worn it on her left hand. She had felt as though she was wearing it. ‘We’ve broken up. He wanted us to get married so that I’d be there waiting for him whenever he came home. And I didn’t want to, so we called it a day.’ She looked up into Dennis’s eyes. ‘I’m not sorry, not really. We shouldn’t ever have let it get that far. He wanted to own me, that’s why he wanted to get married. That and -‘ she blushed. ‘He never did like the idea of me working on a farm.’

‘I see.’ Dennis said nothing for a few minutes. Then he said quietly, ‘I won’t rush you, Betty. You need a bit of time when you’ve just broken up with someone. But when you feel ready to think about someone else, well, you know I’ll be here.’

Betty turned her head to look up at him. He was tall, an inch or two taller than Graham, and his body was lean and strong. Graham had filled out since joining the Navy but there had always been a hint of flabbiness about him, as if he had muscles he didn’t bother to use much. He had cheeky eyes and a grin that had caught at her heart for a while, but he didn’t really have much sense of humour. He got most of his fun out of teasing, or even taunting, other people.

She remembered the day she had first met him, walking down Queen Street with Bob Shaw. Bob had been friendly but a bit shy and Graham had seized his opportunity to ask her out. If he hadn’t, she’d have gone out with Bob, because he’d asked her too, on the bus on their way home, but by then she’d promised Graham.

Well, it was all over and no harm done. And now Bob was in the Army, though he was back in Pompey now, and she’d met Dennis instead.

He was looking down at her, his eyes smiling and serious all at once, and his mouth was slightly curved. Suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to put her arms around him; to feel those smiling lips touch hers.

‘I feel ready now,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s if you are too.’

‘Oh yes,’ Dennis said, ‘I’ve been ready for a long time.’

He slid his arms around her and drew her close. Betty went willingly, feeling the excitement leap like a flame in her body.

She closed her eyes, savouring his warmth, the steady beat of his heart. She felt a strength flow from him, a strength that had to do with more than mere physical muscle. There was a power in Dennis that Graham hadn’t had, a stamina and courage that she hadn’t known before.

Dennis bent his head and laid his lips gently upon hers.

She felt their tension, an emotion that quivered very slightly against her mouth. It drew from her an instant response and she tightened her arms about him and opened her mouth to his.

‘Betty, I love you.’

The words came from his lips as if they had been born there. She heard them with wonder, heard the truth in each syllable, and felt her answer like a warmth inside, like a flower opening to the sun.

‘I love you, Dennis.’

It was like a vow, spoken there in the byre with the cows shifting gently around them and the smell of warm milk in the air. They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled gravely, and Dennis lifted one hand and traced the contours of her face with his fingertips.

‘You’re beautiful, d’you know that? Has anyone told you before?’

Graham had, at least, he’d told her she was a ‘smasher’.

But it hadn’t been the same. Dennis was talking about a beauty that was more than skin deep, a beauty that arose from the love they had just expressed for each other. It was a beauty that shone only for him, and had nothing to do with perms and make-up and silk stockings.