The Second-last Woman in England (35 page)

‘Go upstairs, Julius,’ Cecil ordered, coming out and closing the door behind him. Julius turned and fled upstairs to his room.

Cecil walked towards his study and, despite the drawing room door being closed, he could still hear Harriet. She spoke in a curiously quiet voice: ‘We must do something … Cecil will come round.’

‘No, he won’t. I don’t know why you can’t see it, Harri. He has no intention of helping. He’d prefer it if I left for good and never showed my face again.’

‘
No
! Freddie, that’s nonsense … Where are you going?’

The door opened again and Freddie came out. He paused in the doorway, staring at Cecil, and for a second their eyes met before Freddie dived down the stairs. Cecil stepped back into the doorway of his study and a moment later Harriet emerged, breathless, and ran down the stairs.

‘
Freddie! Freddie, come back!
’

Downstairs the front door opened, then shut with a slam. Cecil closed his study door and realised that, in fifteen years of married life, he had never seen Harriet run before.

Chapter Twenty-three

APRIL 1953

Mrs Wallis’s brother was leaving. He had only just got here, and now he was leaving. And by the look of it, Mrs Wallis was going with him.

Jean watched from her top-floor window and a moment later a door slammed on the floor below. That was the third door slammed in as many minutes. She came out of her room and stood at the top of the stairs. The door sounded like one of the children’s.

She was the nanny, she ought to go and investigate. But this evening was her night off, she had asked Mrs Wallis especially. But she had plenty of time. And the children hadn’t had their tea yet.

Jean had ventured halfway down the stairs when she heard a loud thump from Anne’s room. It sounded as though Anne had fallen off her bed or dropped something. A moment later Julius burst from his room and banged angrily on his sister’s door.

‘What’s going on in there?’ he demanded, opening her door and going in.

From her vantage point on the stairs, Jean could see past him to where Anne was kneeling on her bed, leaning down as though searching for something on the floor. She jumped up as Julius came in, her face pink, and glared at him furiously.

‘Don’t come into my room without asking—it’s very rude!

‘What the
devil
are you playing at in here?’ Julius demanded a second time. ‘Sounds like a herd of blasted elephants.’

‘None of your business, Nosy Parker!’

‘Fine. Suit yourself. I shall find out, anyway.’

Julius leaned against the wall, taking his time when Anne clearly wanted him out and wasn’t being very subtle about it.

Jean was about to intervene when Julius added, ‘I don’t suppose you have the slightest idea what’s going on downstairs, do you?’

‘What do you mean? Nothing’s going on!’

‘Oh really? Shows how much
you
know.’

Behind him, Jean came silently the rest of the way down the stairs. Here she paused. Something told her that if Julius saw her, if he realised she could overhear him, he would clam up. And she very much wanted to hear what he had to say.

‘While you were thumping about in here with your stupid little-girl secrets, Uncle Freddie was downstairs, except that Father has just kicked him out.’ Julius paused dramatically. ‘I just saw the whole thing. Father threw him out. I doubt he’ll ever come back, and we’ll never see him again,’ he added.

‘You’re
lying
!’ screamed Anne. ‘I don’t believe you!’

‘Doesn’t actually matter a damn if you believe it or not, old girl. It happens to be true.’

‘Go
away!
Get out of my room!’

‘And that’s not all. I know
why
Father threw him out, too,
and
why Uncle Freddie’s been away all this time. And you’d better listen, because people are going to find out and when they do, it’ll be the worse for us.’

‘
What
is? What are you
talking
about?’

‘Uncle Freddie. Turns out he wasn’t doing important work on the railways in Canada. Or for a shipping firm or for anyone at all, really. He was on the run. He’s a deserter, so there!’

‘He is not! You’re lying! That’s a
rotten
thing to say!’

‘Fine. I shan’t tell you then,’ and Julius shrugged and turned to leave.

‘What do you mean? Tell me! I
demand
you tell me! It’s not
fair
!’

‘Oh? I thought you didn’t believe me. I thought you said I was lying.’

‘Tell me!’

‘All right, old girl, keep your hair on. If you really want to know, I just overheard them all talking. In the drawing room. Mother and Father and Uncle Freddie. And Uncle Freddie said he’d been sacked from a job and it was because the firm had found out he’s a deserter.’

Anne walked right up to him, her cheeks puffed out and her fists clenched as though she would make him shut up if she could.

‘And then Mother said, Well, Father must help Freddie get his job back. And Father got very angry and said it wasn’t any of his business, anyway, and he stormed out. And Uncle Freddie said it wasn’t fair, and then he stormed out too and Mother went running out after him.’

‘Mummy doesn’t run,’ Anne countered, evidently latching onto that image as though it undermined the veracity of Julius’s story.

‘Well, she does now, I just heard it. Mother was absolutely
furious
with Father. I expect they’ll be getting a divorce now.’

‘
That’s not true!
And anyway, Uncle Freddie’s not a deserter, I know he’s not.’

‘How do you know it? You don’t know anything. And you know what? Everyone will find out, all your friends and everyone at school, they’ll know that your uncle is a deserter
and they’ll never let you
forget it, ever
!’

‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! They won’t! It’s not true!’

Anne stood furiously before him, her fists held tightly by her sides.

‘It
is
true and you standing there saying it isn’t isn’t going to change a bally thing, so you’d better get used to it because nothing will be the same again after this, you’ll see.’

‘Go away, get out!’ and Anne pushed him with both hands, only stopping when she saw Jean. Her hands at once dropped to her sides and her face registered dismay. Julius, seeing this, turned around and stared at Jean too.

‘Oh, it’s quite all right,’ said Jean. ‘No one knows but us, do they? I mean about your Uncle Freddie, the deserter,’ and she smiled from one child to the other. They gazed back at her expressionlessly. ‘Well, now, shall we see if Mrs Thompson has tea ready? I’m starving—aren’t you?’

Tea was a somewhat tense affair.

Jean sat on one side of the kitchen table absorbed in the task of pouring the tea, passing around the butter dish and carefully policing the order in which items were consumed, which meant ensuring everyone ate their slice of bread before starting in on the cakes. Anne sat opposite her glaring at her plate and moodily heaping dollops of raspberry jam onto her bread. Julius sat at the end of the table and appeared to take some satisfaction in spreading lemon curd to each corner of his bread as thinly as possible. This involved, turning the plate on its axis ninety degrees then spreading the lemon curd again from a difference angle until Jean remarked, ‘Julius, I would prefer it if you would just spread it and eat it,’ at which Julius threw his knife down and stuffed an angry mouthful of bread into his mouth.

‘I don’t want any more bread and jam,’ announced Anne, even though she had barely nibbled the slice on her plate. ‘I shall have a piece of fruit instead. Mother likes us to have fruit. What do you think, an orange or a banana?’

She contemplated the large bowl of fruit on the dresser. It was piled high with tangerines and mandarins, a grapefruit, some red apples and two large bunches of bananas. Anne picked up the bananas and surveyed them with a critical eye. They were overripe and turning a little brown. In the end she discarded them and went with a mandarin.

‘Do you want one, Nanny?’ she said, deliberately not offering one to her brother. ‘I should avoid the bananas. They look a little off.’

Jean shook her head.

So much fruit. It swam before her eyes. The smell of it nauseated her. She knew the cost of an orange, of a banana, during the war, and it was more than mere money. It had cost everything in the world.

Eventually the torturous meal was over and Anne made a point of leaving the table without saying ‘Please may I leave the table?’ and Julius made a point of pointing this out to Jean. Jean surprised him by replying that today was her birthday.

‘Oh. Well, many happy returns of the day,’ he replied grudgingly. ‘Are you going out this evening to celebrate?’

‘I am going out this evening, yes,’ she replied and Julius stared at her, clearly not expecting this.

‘Oh. Who with? Your young man?’

‘Never you mind, Julius. That’s my business, not yours. Now, let me get on with the clearing up.’

She got up and went over to the sink, but not before she had seen the blood rush to his face.

Julius turned and left the kitchen without another word and Jean sat down and finished her tea alone.

It’s my birthday, thought Jean.

Once it had snowed on her birthday. She must have been ten, eleven perhaps. It had been during the war and the snow had fallen a couple of nights before so that by the morning of her birthday it was a brown slush on the streets, though small piles still lay undisturbed on the bombsites. It had mostly melted away by the end of the day, but not before all the kids in Malacca Row had worked together to fashion a crude snowman. Someone had stuck a twig beneath the snowman’s pebble nose and a funny peaked cap on its head so that it resembled Herr Hitler—in a lopsided, lumpy kind of way—then they had all thrown hard little snowballs at it, and when the snow had run out they had thrown stones at it, then bricks, then they had all rushed up and kicked it to bits and stamped on it until there was nothing left but a pile of slush, and someone’s mum had come out and told them all off. It hadn’t snowed on her birthday since.

The wind had got up and was blowing newspaper and dust down the street. Jean pulled her coat closer around her shoulders. She had told Julius she was going out and if he had supposed from this that she was going out with her young man, well, that was his mistake. But it was her birthday, after all. You had to go out on your birthday.

As she approached the old hospital an ambulance trundled past and turned in through the gates and she paused, watching for a moment as the driver and a nurse climbed out, opened the doors and wheeled a patient out. All she could see of the patient was a shape outlined by a blanket. The person could have been dead. Or not.

It reminded her of the war.

She turned away and walked the short distance up Athelstan Gardens until she reached the little wrought-iron gate into the private garden. She had, once or twice, used her key herself to go into the garden without the children and on each occasion she had been peered at frostily by the dried-up old biddies who sat, all day, on its moss-covered benches. But by evening the gardens were deserted.

She reached inside her bag, pulled out the key and inserted it into the padlock. The gate creaked in a harsh, rusted way that you never noticed in the daylight, and banged shut behind her. She paused, listening, then stepped silently into the shadows, picking her way carefully. The privet hedge that bordered the garden and kept it safe from prying eyes meant that at night the garden was all but pitch dark. The sky was overcast, but a break in the clouds allowed a single shaft of moonlight to illuminate the neat square of lawn. The benches were deserted now—even the pigeons had vacated—and she walked over to the furthest one, the one Mrs Wallis’s brother used to sit on.

It was her birthday.

Always, on your birthday, Dad would pull out the old tobacco tin and, as well as your presents, you got to dip into the tin and select a quote from the Bible, the same as the family did on Christmas Day. Last year Jean had gone through the Bible making her own tin of quotes. She had found an old pair of scissors and, though it felt wrong, an old and battered copy of the New Testament which she had cut up, mostly concentrating on the Psalms. Very soon she had amassed a collection of quotes and her tobacco tin was full. On the morning of her birthday she had opened the tin, closed her eyes and thrust her fingers inside. She had pulled out Matthew 5, verse 41, ‘And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two’, which hadn’t been very good as no one was compelling her to go a mile with them, or indeed, to go anywhere at all. So she had pulled out another quote but that hadn’t been much better, nor the next one, nor the next. And very soon it had become apparent that, if there was no one to stop you from pulling out all of the quotes, then you might as well pull them all out. And it had become apparent, too, that not one of the quotes was exactly right. And how could that be when she had selected them so carefully? When they were always so exactly right in the old days, when you pulled them out of this same tin and the whole family was watching you?