Two Penn'orth of Sky (7 page)

‘Yes, I know what you mean. When Peter’s home, it’s as if someone has lifted a heavy weight off my shoulders,’ Emmy agreed. ‘Well, it’s been a grand day, Beryl, and I hope we’ll have many more of them. Cheerio, kids; take care of your mam, she’s precious.’

She and Diana walked to their tram stop. The basket was a good deal lighter than it had been on going out that morning, even with the damp and sandy towel folded across the empty mugs and bottles within. Emmy reflected, ruefully, that she might be the wife of a man who could afford all sorts of luxuries, but old habits die hard. The lemonade bottles could be handed in at any public house in exchange for a penny, and she would reuse the greaseproof paper many times. Peter, she knew, would have tossed such remnants into the nearest rubbish bin, because he had been brought up the son of rich parents who had never had to scrimp and save in their lives. His uncle had been captain of a Cunarder and Peter had lacked for nothing at Epsley Manor, either as a child or as a young man. He had told her that there were greenhouses and a walled kitchen garden behind the house and that his parents had employed a gardener and two assistants, and that there had been an indoor staff of three maids and a cook. Emmy still had not visited her parents-in-law’s house though she was hoping to do so during Peter’s next proper leave; he had promised her that they would do so and her husband was a man of his word. She was looking forward to the visit though she was secretly sure she would be overawed by the servants and might well feel out of place, but Peter would protect her as he had always done.

The rattle of the arriving tram brought Emmy’s mind back to the present. She and Diana scrambled
aboard and got a seat near the door. Emmy sank on to the hard, slatted seat with a sigh of pleasure and pulled Diana on to her knee, for despite the lateness of the hour the tram was quite crowded, and seats were scarce. Diana leaned against Emmy’s shoulder and Emmy rested her chin on top of her daughter’s dishevelled hair. ‘If you weren’t so tired, I’d get you into a nice, hot bath, but I think we’d best leave that till morning,’ she murmured. ‘What a blessing your bathing suit was dry enough for you to change into so that Aunty Beryl and meself could spread your wet clothes out on the deckchair. By the time we’d ate our tea and you kids had played a few running and jumping about games, they were dry as tinder. You’re a lucky girl, you know, Di. You might’ve drowned, only Charlie saved you from that, and you might have contracted pneumonia wearing wet clothing, only the sun was as hot as your daddy says it is in that Africa place he goes to.’

She gave her daughter another squeeze. ‘Only two more days and your daddy will be picking you up and giving a great shout and telling me how much you’ve grown while he’s been away. Oh, Di, I do love it when your daddy’s home.’

‘So does I,’ Diana murmured sleepily. ‘What’ll he say when I tell him I were nearly drownded, Mammy? I ’spects he’ll buy me something lovely to make up. Or he might take us to the pictures . . . I do love the pictures, Mammy.’

Emmy laughed but tilted her daughter’s face until they were looking straight at one another. ‘I don’t think we’ll say anything about going to New Brighton, or falling in the water,’ she said. ‘You see, it would only worry Daddy and make him think I wasn’t taking proper care of you. He – he doesn’t
understand that a boy of Charlie’s age is – is really very responsible and sensible. He’ll say I should have stayed with you, stopped you playing on the rocks.’ She paused; she had not asked Diana just how the accident had occurred, but now realised she should do so. ‘What exactly
did
happen, queen?’ she asked, rather apprehensively. ‘I know it were an accident, but I don’t quite know how you fell in.’

‘Oh, I were followin’ Charlie out along the rocks,’ Diana said readily. ‘He telled me not to, Mammy, but I like to go where he goes, so I followed. The sea was up round the rocks an’ I trod on a patch of weed and went straight in where there were a deep pool. Charlie must’ve seen me go, ’cos he grabbed the neck o’ me dress an’ pulled me out an’ said as we shouldn’t worry you. Only as soon as you saw me, you knew I’d fell in, didn’t you? But it weren’t Charlie’s fault,’ she ended hastily. ‘He’s the best boy I know, is Charlie, and the bravest one too.’

‘I see,’ Emmy said, nodding slowly. She did see. Her small daughter had always admired Charlie, wanting to do everything that Charlie did, so perhaps the near drowning would be a lesson to her. She said impressively: ‘But it’s time you got some sense, sweetheart. Little girls of five can’t possibly do as much as big boys of eight, and boys were made by God to be stronger than girls, because when they grow up they have to do hard, difficult things, like your daddy does. When girls grow up, they do gentle things, like your mammy does. So you see, if you try to imitate Charlie, you’ll end up getting hurt again, and I wouldn’t want that.’

There was a long moment of silence whilst Diana obviously considered her mother’s remarks, and when she spoke, it was thoughtfully. ‘But Aunty Beryl
does hard things, an’ she’s a lady like you,’ she observed. ‘And Lucy does hard things, too. They scrub floors and black grates, and light fires, and cook meals . . .’

Emmy sighed. Reasoning with Diana was clearly not going to be easy. In fact, perhaps it was a mistake to try. Instead, she said firmly, ‘Never mind all that. Just don’t try to do what Charlie does and don’t tell your daddy you fell in the sea. Is that clear?’

‘Why not?’ Diana’s voice had the dreamy note of one who is almost asleep, but Emmy found she was tired of answering questions and trying to be tactful.

‘Because I say not,’ she snapped. ‘And what I say goes, understand?’

Diana giggled. ‘I weren’t goin’ to tell Daddy anything, anyway,’ she murmured.

Emmy could see that the tram was nearing the stop. She slid Diana off her lap, picked up her basket, and, holding the child’s hand in a firm grasp, joined the line of people about to descend. ‘Good girl,’ she said, as the two of them descended from the tram at the corner of Arundel Avenue and began to walk towards Lancaster Avenue. She realised there was little point in discussing the matter further tonight but decided that she would go over it again in the morning.

Later, when Diana was tucked up in bed and fast asleep, Emmy ran herself a warm bath and climbed, thankfully, into the tub. A proper bathroom was an undreamed-of luxury for people who lived in Nightingale Court, but after more than five years of living in the Avenue, Emmy took it for granted. Yet now, as she soaked in the warm water, letting her aches and pains dissolve along the way, Emmy
realised all over again how very fortunate she was. She had a wonderful husband who gave her everything she could want, a beautiful home and a delightful daughter. It was a pity that she could not talk freely to Peter about her friends in Nightingale Court, but that was probably her own fault. She should have insisted that he go with her to her old home. Because his times ashore were usually short, he avoided such meetings, but on this occasion she would tell him that he really must accompany her to Nightingale Court to meet the Fishers. He would both like and approve of them, would admire their sturdily independent children, and then she need no longer feel guilty when she visited at No. 4.

Satisfied on this score, she climbed out of the bath, reached for a towel and was very soon in bed.

Diana was on the back lawn, picking daisies, when the doorbell rang. For a moment, she stopped in her task, wondering who could be calling in the middle of the morning – and coming to the front door, furthermore. If Mammy had ordered something from a shop, then the tradesman would come whistling round the side of the house, basket on arm, to deliver at the back door, and have a chat with Lucy at the same time.

This was obviously not a tradesman and morning callers held no interest for Diana. None of the neighbours had children her age, and though her mammy sometimes took her to the local park where she met other children, they were not in the habit of coming to the house – probably did not even know where she lived.

She wished that the caller could have been Charlie, or even Becky, but she knew it would be neither. Charlie and Becky would not undertake the long journey from Nightingale Court to Lancaster Avenue just to see her, for she knew, without bitterness, that her affection for Charlie was one-sided indeed. He had told her the other day that girls were a bloomin’ nuisance. ‘But you saved me life, Charlie, so I’ve got to love you,’ she had wailed, dismayed by the thought of her affection’s being spurned. But Charlie had only snorted and repeated his assertion that girls were a bloomin’ nuisance,
adding that she was not to foller him around or else she’d get a thick ear.

Diana did not know what a thick ear was but she gathered that it was a sign of disapproval and resigned herself to worshipping Charlie from afar. Becky, of course, was a very different kettle of fish; being younger than Diana it was she who tended to follow the other girl around when the two families were together. Diana approved of Becky and would have been delighted had she come round to play, but she knew Becky was too young to leave the court, and anyway, why should she? There were dozens of children there; Becky would never lack a playfellow in the way that Diana did. Oh, there were no lovely gardens, no daisy-starred lawns, no trips to the park to feed the ducks, but there was companionship in plenty.

Having settled in her own mind that the caller could be of no possible interest to her, Diana sat back, spread out the skirt of her yellow cotton dress, and regarded her daisy harvest. She meant to make the longest daisy chain in the world so that when Daddy came home he would be able to admire it. She knew that daisy chains, if put in the cool of the big scullery, could last for as long as three days, so there was no fear that this one would fade and die before Daddy’s arrival. Frowning with concentration, Diana began her task.

A few moments later, whilst she was still working, she heard a most peculiar noise emanating from the house. It sounded a bit as though someone had shut a dog’s tail in the door. Diana distinctly remembered the long, pained wail which Bones had given when Aunty Beryl had slammed the back door on his nether regions by mistake. She stopped what she
was doing and half rose to her feet, but then she realised that if she stood up, the daisies would go everywhere, and sat down again. Since they didn’t have a dog, she supposed that poor Lucy must have cut herself, or shut her finger in the door. I could go and see what’s happened, only Mammy is there and she’s much better than me over cut fingers, she told herself, picking up the next daisy and beginning to thread it through the slit she had already made in the previous stalk. I wish
we
had a dog, her thoughts continued, as her fingers sorted and selected daisies from the mound in her lap. If we had a dog, it could chase a ball, or just sit beside me on the grass and be company. Daddy would like a dog but Mammy’s afraid of big dirty paw marks all over her shiny floors and carpets, and she says dogs need exercising even when the snow’s a foot thick, or the rain’s belting on your head and flattening the flowers in the garden. She says we’ll have a dog when Daddy retires from sea and then they both laugh and Daddy says when I’m six . . .

Thinking about a dog brought Diana’s mind full circle, so to speak. To the best of her knowledge, no one ever exercised Bones. Sometimes he accompanied Aunty Beryl when she went to the shops, sometimes he trailed in Charlie’s wake, or gambolled ahead, keeping an eye out for anything of interest. At other times, he disappeared on his own mysterious errands, but Diana was jolly sure that no member of the Fisher family ever tried to attach a lead to Bones’s collar – indeed, she realised, belatedly, that she had never seen a collar on the Fishers’ unkempt mongrel.

She was still pondering over why her mammy should deny her a dog on account of having to take
it for walks when Bones took care of himself, when Lucy opened the back door. She emerged, somewhat timidly, bearing a tray upon which stood a mug of milk and a plate of sugar biscuits. She kept glancing over her shoulder, as though frightened that she was being followed, but set the tray down beside Diana, saying cheerfully: ‘There’s your elevenses, Miss Di.’ Usually, she chatted for a moment and then went back indoors, but now, with another almost conspiratorial glance around her, she sat down on the grass beside Diana. ‘There’s a gentleman – two gentlemen – in the front room, come to see your mammy,’ she said, lowering her voice until it was scarcely above a whisper. ‘Did you hear that noise? Like – like as if someone were hurt? I ran into the hallway and one of the fellers come out and telled me, ever so sharp like, to make a pot of strong tea and to tap on the door when it were ready. I just took it to ’em, and – and your mam’s sitting in a chair, all scrumpled up like, wi’ her face in her hands. I tried to go across to her but the fellers – gentlemen, I mean – pushed me out of the room and telled me to go back to me work. Oh, Miss Di, I’m that worried – I dunno what best to do.’

Diana got to her feet and shook the daisies, rather regretfully, from her skirt and into Lucy’s. The maid usually knew exactly what to do in every situation. It was not like her to appeal to Diana and Mammy often remarked that they were lucky to have found a servant as sensible and practical as young Lucy. However, this was clearly an occasion when Diana would have to take matters into her own hands. ‘Look after my daisy chain, Lucy, while I go in and see what’s happened,’ Diana said firmly. ‘No one isn’t going to push
me
out of the room.’ She turned
serious eyes on the older girl. ‘Should I take the sticking plaster, do you think? If Mammy shut her fingers in the door . . .’

Lucy gave a watery smile. ‘Yes, you do that,’ she said encouragingly. ‘You’re a good kid, Miss Di. I’ll wait here . . . no, I’ll come into the kitchen, then if you or your mam need me, you can either give a shout or tug the bell. Awright?’

The two of them made their way back into the kitchen, Lucy with her apron full of daisies which she tipped carefully on to the draining board in the scullery. She reached down the First Aid box, which contained sticking plaster, bandages, lint and various other similar items, and handed it to Diana, who took it and trotted confidently across the hallway. She threw open the sitting room door and was halfway across the room when she saw her mother’s face. Emmy was white as a ghost, save for her eyes which were swollen and red. Clearly, she had been crying for some time, and Diana dumped the First Aid box in the arms of a tall man in uniform before rushing across and casting herself into her mother’s arms. She realised that whatever had happened could not be put right with lint or sticking plaster. All in a moment, she found that she was afraid, that she really did not want to know why her mother had been crying so bitterly, because when she knew . . .