The War Widows (24 page)

‘Ivy, your words make me sad,’ Ana said quietly. ‘Praise God that you have no idea what it is like to tramp the roads of Europe, itching, starving, selling your body for some scraps of food, not knowing when you will find your way back home!’

No one had ever heard Ana speak like this and there was a stunned silence.

Ivy shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m only giving my opinion,’ she said, looking for support, but there was none.

‘I have seen bad, bad injuries. You cannot know,’ Ana continued. ‘I am happy to serve old people. I know what it is to suffer shame.’

‘All right, you’ve made your point.’ Ivy was silenced for once.

‘I think I will like this work. I like the old people. The staff will show me ropes to pull. They are brightening the wards with curtains and new paint, and Queenie comes to set their hair. She brings sunshine and songs to sing.’

‘Do they know you are a refugee?’ Ivy asked, her ever-waspish questions ready to sting like needles.

‘No one asked to see my papers. I will be just Winstanley. I do what I am told. It is better than sit all day on bum like some,’ Ana replied pointedly, knowing full well that Ivy was at home with Neville.

‘Well, don’t be asking us to rub your back.’

‘Diana found me the job. Queenie helps. She works for Lavaroni now. Perhaps you’ll all have a job there,’ Ana replied.

‘Oh, we all know Lavaroni’s Hair Salon, where they charge twice as much as anywhere else, just to be fingered by that greasy Eyetie with fancy ideas. It’s all right for some,’ sniffed Ivy, lowering her eyelids and looking martyred as usual.

No amount of Lavaroni’s pin curlers would ever make Ivy look like an elegant mannequin. She was a painted doll, pretty enough, but with a hard face when she was thwarted. Now she made a face, pulling her lips in tight but carried on folding the washing.

‘Has no one ever told you, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar?’ The words came tumbling out from Ana’s mouth before she could stop them.

‘Pardon me for breathing! I tell the truth as I see it and if you don’t like it, lady, you know what you can do. I don’t know how Mother puts up with all that
traipsing over her best rugs. If the Greek is in and out at all hours, working shifts, how are we ever to get a decent night’s sleep?’

‘I work night shift so I can see my child in the day, and she is no burden to any of you. I am doing my best to please everybody—’

‘That’s enough, Ivy. Turn the record off. You’ve made your point,’ Esme interrupted. ‘The girl is only doing her duty as she sees fit. It was in the paper about the shortage of trained nurses, and one day we’ll all be in need of a good one. Dr Unsworth’s daughter must think highly of her to speak up for the girl. Let’s start the New Year as we mean to go on. Think on?’

When Esme laid down the law like that everyone jumped. Ana’s face was a picture…

Already 1947. Who’d have thought it! Lily sighed, wondering what the new year would bring; more joy than the last, she hoped. There was a wedding to plan, a new home to find away from all this bickering, but Ana and Su would need sorting out first.

So far, so good, with Ana’s new job. Su still needed watching, though, when it came to Levi’s tricks.

The highlight of Lily’s week, come rain, sleet or snow, was always Wednesday. Not because it was half-day closing, but because it was dancing class day and she got to take Dina to collect Joy from the baby class when their mothers were busy.

The Lemody Liptrot School of Dance took up the top floor of Church Buildings, up a winding wooden staircase, past a photographer’s studio and accountant’s offices, to a glass-roofed studio with mirrors round the walls,
barres
on two levels, a pile of grey blankets to save bottoms from splinters when exercising and a box of resin for
pointe
shoes.

There was a small anteroom where the mothers sat around the walls, which were lined with notice boards, and peered at the portraits of Miss Liptrot in her heyday with the Carl Rosa Ballet Company.

There was the teacher, balancing precariously on the edge of a fountain in diaphanous Greek costume, which
left nothing to the imagination, standing in a line of buxom dancers who looked frozen stiff.

Mothers waited for the end of the rehearsal for the annual charity dancing display in the King’s Theatre, the concert in which the new baby class would make its début and which was already a sellout.

They were doing
Babes in the Wood
mime and dance, but who were going to be budding stars: the two babes, and the lead robin who carries in the leaves to bury the sleeping pair and summon all the little birds to guard them from the wicked huntsman?

‘Is it dancing in the snow day?’ Joy asked each morning. She was quite the chatterbox now. Where had the months gone since her arrival, wide-eyed and silent, on Su’s knee?

After Christmas, the three of them had fallen into a routine of sorts. Sunday teas were at Maria’s house. Monday was washday, the clothes hanging around the kitchen since nothing could be put out with the freeze-up. Tuesday was work and shopping. Then it was dancing class, sitting looking up at the ridges of snow on the glass rooftop, watching yet more flakes falling. Thursday was on the market stall and Brownies for Lily. Friday Lily helped Esme and Polly with cleaning and shopping. Saturday was the stall again and a football match with Walt if Lily wasn’t on duty. Walt was fitted in amongst it all like wadding.

The girls and their new friends had all met together on the first Sunday of the year at Queenie’s lodgings, squashed into the living room around the dining table for a game of housey-housey.

Queenie had made her own set of number cards and counters and smart little number boards on the back of Christmas cards to place the markers on. Diana was very impressed. ‘Last time we played this was in the field hospital in the desert…We played for ciggies, and then there was a sandstorm and everything blew away, knickers, brassieres hanging up, the lot. Great fun!’

‘Why do we shout “House”?’ asked Su, not quite getting the hang of it at first, but soon she was roaring with exasperation, waiting for the right numbers to come up to complete a line.

Mother would have a fit to know she was gambling on the Sabbath, thought Lily, but surely dolly mixtures didn’t count, and the children were wolfing them down under the table where no one was looking.

Arthur, Queenie’s husband, worked shifts at the tannery and her older children slept on the sofa, oblivious to the noise. There was a pile of home baking on the table but her tiffin cake, made from biscuit crumbs and cocoa, was soon scoffed along with Arthur’s parsnip wine.

Drinking
and
gambling, it was getting worse by the hour.

‘Let’s have a singsong!’ Queenie shouted, and it was round the piano for the old favourites. Maria always sang her heart out and gave them a turn. Diana told them tales of all the famous people she’d seen in Cairo in the nightclubs.

Lily just sat and listened and soaked up the atmosphere of chatter and laughter. This was such a treat after the squabbling at home.

Queenie was now playing the piano in the studio, standing up to watch and play at the same time. Miss Liptrot would be deciding this afternoon which dancers would get solo parts. Madame had big ideas about her dancing school, attracting the best mummies in the district with promises of national examinations and certificates and a smart uniform of purple crossover cardigans and pleated lilac tunics, a colour that seemed to suit everyone.

Rosaria Santini looked so pretty in purple, with her dark curls and olive complexion. Even Dina’s sandy mop of curls would look good when her turn came. Joy’s black straight hair was so different. Maria was taking orders for knitting cardigans, working into the small hours for the smartly dressed young mothers in fur coats from the Victoria Drive end of town.

Some of the little girls even had nannies carrying small hatboxes with their pumps in, driven by chauffeurs, but none of them was as good a dancer as little Rosa who excelled at skipping and pointing toes.

‘Look at your feet, not the sky, Joy!’ shouted Madame Lemody.

Joy was really too young for the class but pestered them silly to be included, a right little diva in the making. Dina watched from the safety of Lily’s knee.

Dancing had never been Lily’s forte. Hockey, rounders, anything with a bat and ball took her interest, but then she’d always played with brothers. Ballroom dancing was something old folk did, and courting couples. Not that she and Walt ever danced.

Maria and Su were worried about making robin
costumes with all those graduated feathers and hoods and beaks. Lily had promised to help them make them up but they needed a sketch to work from. She was still recovering from the shame of those awful soldiers’ outfits.

Joy looked like a little pudding in her mock-up outfit, with two left feet and no sense of rhythm, but she was still only a baby.

With the loan of Ivy’s Singer sewing machine Lily and her friends had managed to create the costumes from just the teacher’s pattern. Susan tacked it all up carefully and Madame was pleased with the result.

I ought not to be here, Lily sighed. If she and Walt didn’t make time to find somewhere to live after the wedding, there’d be no dancing daughters or footballing sons to follow on. Somehow there was always something stopping them taking the plunge. Take this awful snow that froze Gertie’s tyres to the kerb and made the buses scarce. It was as much as they could do to get to work on time and open their stalls. There were that many colds going round, they’d even run out of Nurse O’Brien’s herbal linctus. It was an ill wind…

After all the disruptions of war it felt wimpish to be defeated by a blizzard or three, but it sapped spirits and no mistake. It was not the weather to imagine herself walking down the aisle in some flimsy get-up with an arctic gale blowing up her smalls.

Ana and Su were always frozen to the marrow, no matter how many layers she piled on their backs. The Olive Oil Club had put their coupons together to help buy Ana’s new nurse’s uniform. She ought be saving
hers for a trousseau, Lily frowned to herself, but seeing Joy prancing around like a sack of potatoes made her laugh and forget the cold. Susan thought she was going to be the next Margot Fonteyn. Those kiddies were the only bright rays of sunshine in this wintry world.

All the Santini family were putting the Winstanleys to shame, drummed into buying tickets for the matinée show. Tina, Angelo’s wife, Maria, and Toni’s wife, Sonia, and all Maria’s customers were bombarded with a once-in-a-life-time chance to see Rosaria Santini’s first appearance on stage. They would take pictures to Marco, if he didn’t manage to get out of the san for the day. He’d made one home visit but couldn’t manage the stairs so was staying with Nonna Valentina, which upset Maria.

Dolores Pickles down the road said Marco was a saint in his suffering. Father Michael of Our Lady of Sorrows took the sacrament to him each week. He was clinging on to life by a thread and they were praying for his recovery, lighting candles to all the saints. It looked as if Maria would have yet another job to add to her collection. That woman didn’t know how to sit down, but when she did she fell asleep at her knitting. It was as if she had the troubles of the world on her shoulders. Lily wished there was something she could do to help.

One more row and then I’ve finished the back, dreamed Maria as she was knitting in her sleep, with the chatter of the dancing school waiting room fading into the background.

She could see Marco striding towards her with Rosa on his shoulders and she leaped up to greet him, only to watch the picture fade. Then another face came into view and she fought herself awake.

Knitting cardigans almost paid for Rosa’s lessons and it stopped Maria’s hands from shaking. She worked every hour and visited her husband dutifully, but the best nights were spent with her friends, sharing suppers, going to the pictures. Lately, however, something unexpected had crept into the few gaps in her busy life, something that was churning her stomach upside down. Something had happened to shake her world even more.

It started when Queenie gave her and Lily a free hair-dressing appointment each as a treat. ‘You work so hard and no one gives you anything. You spend loads on the children and never a penny on yourself,’ Queenie argued, plonking an appointment card on the counter.

For weeks Maria kept changing the appointment until she hadn’t the nerve to look Queenie in the eye. She kept tying up her hair in scarves to keep her locks out of the ice cream and as it got heavier and longer, taking a tin of Kirby grips to hold it up.

Lavaroni’s was setting the trend for the soft waved look. Not that she would ever need a permanent, not with yards of heavy curly hair, but a shorter lighter style on her head might suit the new look of the times.

She had seen Diana Unsworth off duty from the hospital sporting the new look. If Diana was going with the times then so could she. Ana was so striking to look at now she was filling out, and Su was always so neat and prim in her tailored suit and blouse, her hair caught
up in a tight bun in the nape of her neck. She never changed her style, but something inside Maria was aching for release, something to distract from the sadness of Marco’s slow progress, from the drudgery of all her chores. She was a businesswoman, mother, wife, daughter-in-law, cleaner. Where was the old Maria? Who was the
real
Maria?

In her dreams, she floated across the stage like Mimi in
La Bohème
, or strode proudly like Tosca. She was six feet tall like a Valkyrie riding to her doom. There was not a heroine on the stage at the King’s Theatre that she didn’t weep for and imagine herself acting out the great dramas.

She sat in the gods with her mop and brush at rehearsals, wiping tears from her eyes as they died so bravely in the spotlight. Why couldn’t life be so full of drama and colour, with velvet, net and satin?

Her life was drab and she was always tired, but lately she had perked up because of her new friends and their kindness. It was time she took herself in hand.