Wartime Family (40 page)

‘In the po. Why do you call it a jerry?’

He smirked. ‘Looks like a German helmet – don’t you think so?’

He didn’t hold it up in front of her for long as there was work to be done. He’d changed into his favourite grey suit over which he wore a navy-blue overcoat. He slipped the gun into his inside pocket. ‘I’ll find a home for this.’

Mary Anne didn’t ask him where that home was likely to be. That was his business. Harry was what he was and nothing was going to change him.

Henry Randall’s death was treated as an accident. No one noticed the hole in the ceiling where the bullet had smashed through to the rafters. No one knew what had really happened except Mary Anne, Harry and young Stanley.

As they walked back from the cemetery after the funeral Harry took hold of his mother’s arm. ‘You alright, Ma?’

His eyes slid sidelong when she didn’t answer straight away. His breath caught in his throat. No woman had ever stirred him like his mother did. There was serenity in her eyes, composure in her fine features. Silver strands ran like fine threads through her honey-coloured hair. Her beauty had been enhanced by age rather than diminished. To his mind, she was not just the perfect woman, but the perfect person, one he had loved and would love all his life. He knew her so well, and without her saying anything, he also knew what was troubling her.

‘You’re wondering about Michael.’

She sighed. ‘Michael hasn’t been on leave for a long time and the last letter I had was three months ago.’ She hung her head. ‘Perhaps it’s funerals that bring it on, but I’m beginning to wonder … After all, your father was right. I am a lot older than him …’

‘Don’t say that.’ He tugged her arm closer. ‘Michael will be back. There’s been a lot going on …’

There was something about the tone of Harry’s voice that jolted her out of her mood. ‘What is it, Harry? Where is he? Is he in danger?’

Harry smiled in that lazy way of his that only slowly reached his eyes, almost as though he was holding something back, withholding the final truth that would make everything alright.

‘There’s a lot going on in the Mediterranean and North Africa.’

‘He’s there?’

‘You know I can’t tell you where he is – not that I’m saying I know where he is, only that I couldn’t tell you even if I did.’

Mary Anne fixed her eyes on the road ahead of them. The winter sun glowed that little bit brighter. Green shoots were erupting from grey branches and bare stems. Birds were singing. She told herself she should be feeling happy. Harry had hinted at where Michael might be. All she wondered now was whether he was alive or dead.

‘I had a letter from his parents,’ she said, purposely eradicating the worry from her voice, adopting not exactly a smile, but at least a casual fortitude. ‘They believed I was his landlady and asked that I forward their letter on to their son. They said something about him being engaged to a pretty English girl. He had sent them a photograph.’

‘How do you know it wasn’t your photograph he sent to them?’

‘I’m not a pretty young English girl.’

‘You’re pretty, you’re English and you’re female. Besides, you take a very good photograph. Any young chap would fall in love with you. I certainly would.’ He gave her a peck on the cheek.

‘You’re biased,’ said his mother, laughing and warmed by his concern.

‘Not at all.’

Harry’s secretiveness about Michael and his comments about the Mediterranean helped restore her spirits, but at the back of her mind the suspicion remained. Who was the lovely young girl in the photograph he’d sent to his parents? And why hadn’t he written? She wanted to know that above anything else.

Gertrude Palmer’s face was ashen. They were sitting in the kitchen at the back of the shop, the door between the two rooms tightly closed so the other voluntary staff couldn’t overhear.

Gertrude still had her hat on. It was grey and emblazoned with the insignia of the WRVS. She looked at her tea before pursing her lips over the brim of the teacup, her sips small and considered.

‘I do not want a word of our conversation going beyond this room,’ Gertrude began. ‘Do you promise not to breathe a word to a living soul?’

This was certainly something different to discussing how best to market ancient underwear or jars of home-made polish.

‘I won’t tell a soul,’ promised Mary Anne.

‘I do not make a habit of discussing personal problems with professional colleagues. However, I think we know each other a little better than that so I can tell you why I have reached the decision I’ve come to.’

Mary Anne sipped thoughtfully at the tea she was drinking from a rose-patterned cup. Both cup and saucer were gilt edged, from a set Gertrude had brought from home.

‘This may come as a bit of a shock, but I’m going to have to give up the shop.’

Gertrude always got straight to the point, her words firing out of her mouth like bullets from a machine gun. Today the words came just as quickly, yet Mary Anne sensed a slight trembling of her voice.

‘That’s a great shame,’ she said, putting her cup down in the saucer, and both back on the table. ‘Does this mean the shop will have to close?’

Gertrude looked at her askance. ‘Don’t be a dunce! You’ll take over, of course.’

‘Oh!’

She could have said ‘Why me?’ or expressed her gratitude at being chosen, but Gertrude’s reasons for leaving the shop had not yet been disclosed. What dreadful thing could have happened to bring her to this decision?

Prying into Gertrude’s reasons was not an option. The woman had never responded well to personal questions.

Gertrude’s shoulders suddenly seemed less broad, her stance less stiff, and her features no longer resembled the hard lines of a smoothing iron.

‘The fact is that my nephew, Christian, has been incarcerated by the Japanese. His wife is beside herself and alone with three children. I have to go to her. I’m sure you can see that. Family comes before duty to one’s country.’

‘Family is as much about one’s country as duty,’ blurted Mary Anne. ‘We have a duty to both, and both, in their own way, are about family. The country is a family. I suppose so too is humanity – don’t you think?’

For the first time ever, she saw the softer side of Gertrude Palmer. There was pain in her eyes and fear for her captured nephew.

‘Yes,’ she said, having regained her composure. ‘I suppose that’s what duty and patriotism are all about. We are all one big family – all over the world – except for the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese.’

Mary Anne hid her smile by taking another sip of tea.

Gertrude’s next comment was just as surprising. ‘I see no reason why you shouldn’t move back in to the rooms up above.’

But what about when Michael comes back?
She corrected herself.
If he comes back.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said aloud.

‘Not at all. You’re a widow now. I presume you’ll marry your Michael when he does come back. I would. There’s no point in letting the grass grow under your feet at your age. You can both move back in – once you’re married, that is.’

Mary Anne surprised herself by stating what was on her mind. ‘He may not come back …’

Gertrude raised her iron-grey eyebrows. ‘Really? Well, yes, I suppose you could be right.’

‘I hope your nephew gets through things and comes home.’

Gertrude merely nodded. ‘I hope so too.’

‘We’ll help you move in,’ said Lizzie a few days later, once Mary Anne had told her and Daw what Gertrude had said. ‘Fancy the old bat relenting like that.’

‘Her nephew was captured at the fall of Singapore. She doesn’t know when or if he’ll come home. Families are important at a time like this. Her family needs her.’

Lizzie pretended to tend one of the twins. Both were actually asleep, but if she wasn’t careful her mother would see the look in her eyes and guess.

Each time she looked into the tiny faces lying side by side on the settee, she saw Guy Hunter. He was there in their eyes, in the shape of their tiny noses, the rose-red pinkness of their mouths. She wondered how he was. Had he too been captured at the fall of Singapore? And what about his wife and children? Despite his deceit, she hoped that both Guy and his family were safe. These were not times to hold grudges against past wrongs. Life goes on.

John, Harry and Patrick had all returned to where they were needed. It was left to the women to move the few bits of furniture out of the ruined pawn shop and back into the flat above the Red Cross shop. The bed and other heavier things would have to be moved later, with help from Jack Kitson from the Lord Nelson and the one-legged window-cleaner who’d been at Dunkirk.

‘It’s the least I could do after what happened to Henry,’ Jack had said.

Mary Anne looked back at the tree still growing in the back yard despite the black soot staining its bark.

She welled up at the thought of leaving. Even though it was broken and burned, it was hard to close the door on the old place. It was too special, almost sacred, the place where she and Michael had found love.

Tonight would be her first night back in the flat. Stanley’s single bed had already been taken over there. That’s where she would sleep tonight, and yet when she finally lay in it, sleep wouldn’t come.

Drawing back the curtains revealed a clear sky heavy with stars. Gunfire sounded from faraway Purdown, courtesy of a gun nicknamed Purdown Percy by the local population. Searchlights pierced the night of stars, their arcs of light tracing small, black silhouettes moving like bugs across a counterpane.

The promise of spring mixed with the cloying stench of cordite. There would be other raids, other nights of stars, but tonight somehow felt special. She had moved on. The future was hers, the past consigned to the prospect of nightmares she hoped would never come.

Pulling a skirt on over her nightdress and a coat on top of that, she found her shoes and crept down the stairs and through the shop.

The clothes hanging on rails loomed in dark battalions, like soldiers standing to attention, saluting at her passing.

Her footsteps led her across the road, down the alley and into the back yard of the ruined pawn shop. The first buds of spring nodded at her as she made for the door. It was unlocked, the hinges having shifted and making locking it difficult.

She entered the building accompanied by a feeling of nostalgia for everything it represented. It was her symbol of freedom, a torch in her darkest hours.

Memories of that first time came flooding back. She’d been beaten and injured, the child she’d been bearing aborted and bleeding. Michael had rescued her. Michael had made her whole again.

The curtains drawn back, she sat in the old leather chair in the bedroom where she’d first lain with Michael. The heavens outside the window were a riot of rippling lights, enemy bombers and RAF fighters. She sat watching and praying for everyone serving in the armed forces. Eventually the bombers and fighters disappeared. She was alone in the room with her thoughts and her memories. Eventually, she slept.

What was that?

Mary Anne opened her eyes. Daylight flooded into the room showing up the shabby furniture, the stub of candle and the old bed. Not remembering the moment of falling asleep, she looked in surprise at the arms of the old chair she was sitting in.

Aware that something had woken her, she sat upright. Her eyes went straight to the gap at the bottom of the door: The strip of daylight altered as a pair of feet moved on the landing outside.

Holding her breath, she hugged her cardigan around her. The door knob turned and the door opened. A man stood silhouetted against the light behind him. Suddenly she let her breath go.

‘Michael?’

‘Marianna.’

He was leaner, had more lines in his face, but the look in his eyes and the smile on his lips was unaltered.

‘I’ve been fighting a war,’ he said simply, and fell on to the bed.

His eyes closed. He looked pale and drawn, and she was totally surprised that he could topple and fall asleep so quickly. It worried her. Then she heard him breathing.

While he slept, she put his things away and sorted his washing. A photograph fell out of a book of poetry. It was of her long ago, just after the Great War, a pretty English girl with the future in front of her. She’d saved a few from the fire.

She smiled. At least for now, all her doubts had flown away. He wouldn’t be home for long and not until this war was over would she cease to worry about whether he’d come back.

That was the way things would be. She smoothed his hair back from his forehead. A line from a poem came to her.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may …
For now that was all anyone could do: live for today, for tomorrow might never come. Michael was home and that was all that mattered for now.

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First published in the UK in 2007 as
Secret Sins
by
Severn House Publishers Ltd.

This edition published in 2014 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group Company

Copyright © 2007 Jeannie Johnson writing as Lizzie Lane

Lizzie Lane has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner