When the Lights Go on Again (23 page)

‘But, Marcus, he’s my son. My son, and not hers. My son, who I thought was dead.’

As she spoke Fran’s voice trembled with pain and anger. How could another woman have claimed Jack? Had she no pity, no compassion, no understanding of how she, Jack’s real mother, might be feeling, believing that her child was dead? But underneath her anger Fran was battling not to listen to the critical inner voice telling her that she had never been a proper mother to Jack and that she had let him down. This was a voice she didn’t want to hear.

‘Jack’s mine. He belongs with me. With us, Marcus,’ she insisted.

Marcus squeezed her hand, but did not make any response.

Emily hadn’t been surprised when Francine had rung to say that she would like to talk to her. She’d been expecting her to make contact, and, of course, dreading it. Emily knew in her bones that Tommy’s auntie would want to make a claim on her nephew. Emily had seen it in her eyes when they had met in the lane. Emily had no proper legal right to Tommy, not really, even if she did have those false papers she had managed to get when she had first taken him in, claiming that he was the son of her dead cousin. They wouldn’t stand up in a court of law if things were to get nasty. Emily’s stomach was twisting itself into painful knots. She hadn’t said anything to Tommy about her fears. The poor lad was upset and worried enough.

‘Your auntie wants to come and see me,’ she had told him after the phone call, and immediately he had got all upset.

‘She can’t take me away. I won’t go with her,’ he insisted in a panic.

‘No one’s going to take you away from me, Tommy, unless you want them to,’ Emily had tried to reassure him, forced to acknowledge deep inside herself that whilst Tommy was saying now that he wanted to be with her, he might change his mind. His auntie was his own blood, after all, even if she, Emily, hated having to acknowledge that fact.

Determined to put him first and do her best for him, she had told him, ‘Listen, I’m going to make you a promise now and then I want you to make me one, all right?’

He had nodded and waited.

‘I promise you that whatever you want to do, whoever you want to be with, I will make sure that you can. Whatever you want to do, Tommy, do you understand? And in return I want you to promise me that you will tell me honestly what it is that you want. Not now…not just yet…but you’ll know when the time is right. Promise?’

When he flung himself into her arms and replied gruffly, ‘Promise,’ Emily had held him tightly. Parting with him would break her heart, but far better that her heart was broken than his.

However, she certainly wasn’t going to have his auntie crying all over him and making him feel bad, so she’d sent him out of the house with Wilhelm and the dog – for his own sake – whilst she heard what his auntie had to say.

‘This is the house.’

Francine looked at the pretty Georgian building, and then took a deep breath. Jack was her son. Twice now she’d allowed others to overrule her and to take him from her. Well, she wasn’t going to let it happen a third time.

Francine looked round the warm comfortable kitchen, a proper family kitchen, her critical inner voice pointed out, not like the cold clinical kitchen of Vi’s house.

She looked at Marcus. She was so thankful that he was here with her and that this hadn’t happened whilst he had been away on duty. He was holding
her hand firmly in his own, his presence helping her to stay calm.

Emily had intended to take them into the front room after she had let them in, and he, Tommy’s auntie’s husband, had introduced them both, but then she had told herself that she had nothing to hide from Tommy’s auntie and that she certainly wasn’t going to put on airs and graces for her.

Tommy had told her already that he didn’t know the man who’d been with his auntie, so Emily guessed that they couldn’t have been married that long.

‘I’ve sent Tommy out whilst we have our discussion,’ Emily told Francine, lifting her chin determinedly. ‘Proper upset, he’s been, begging me not to let you take him back to those parents of his who don’t seem to have cared tuppence about him, from what he’s told me.’

Francine looked at Marcus. They’d discussed the necessity for her to reveal her real relationship with Jack, and that it was his mother that was claiming him and not merely an aunt, but now that the moment had come to do so, Francine was uncomfortably aware of how her past would appear to another woman. Her heart was thudding into her chest. Emily’s blunt accusation made her feel so guilty.

‘There’s no question of Jack going back to live with Vi,’ she told Emily immediately. ‘He will be living with us in London, won’t he, Marcus?’ she appealed to her husband.

Emily wasn’t having that. ‘An auntie he barely
knows and an uncle he doesn’t know at all? Where’s the sense in that? It’s bad enough that the poor lad was treated the way he was by his mum and dad. Begged me to promise him that he wouldn’t have to go back to them, he has. Not that they seem to care much about him. If they did then they’d be here, wouldn’t they?’ Emily demanded with irrefutable logic, which Francine could only contradict by bursting out, ‘The reason they aren’t here is because they aren’t really his parents.’

This wasn’t how she had intended their discussion to go, but it was important that this woman, who was behaving as though she had the maternal right to protect Jack, should know what the real situation was, Francine defended her outburst to herself. She looked silently at Marcus for his support.

He gave it promptly. ‘What my wife has said is the truth. The Firths are not Jack’s real mother and father, even though they brought him up as their son.’

‘Then whose son is he?’ Emily demanded, even though she had already begun to suspect the truth. No mere auntie would behave as the woman in front of her was doing.

‘He’s mine,’ Francine answered. ‘Jack is my son, although of course he doesn’t know it.’

Emily was trying desperately not to let the couple see how afraid what she had just learned made her feel.

‘A mother who turned her back on him and let him be treated badly,’ she couldn’t stop herself from accusing Francine.

Immediately Marcus leaped to Francine’s defence, saying firmly, ‘My wife didn’t know—’

But Francine stopped him, shaking her head and telling him determinedly, ‘No, Marcus, let me explain. She’s got a right to know the truth, and so, when he’s ready to hear it, will Jack.’

Lifting her head Francine looked Emily in the eye and told her unsteadily, ‘I was only a girl when Jack was born. A girl without a husband who’d got herself into trouble. My mother was ill. There was no one for me to turn to except my sister Vi. When she begged me to let her and her husband adopt Jack, saying that they’d love him and look after him, I agreed because I thought I was doing the best thing for him.’

She mustn’t allow herself to feel sympathy, Emily determined, ignoring the tears shining in Francine’s eyes.

‘You thought but you didn’t bother to find out, did you?’ she demanded briskly. ‘You didn’t care enough to see that your sister and her husband were making him unhappy and treating him badly, poor little lad. Scared to death of your sister’s husband, he was, and always being sent to bed supperless and made to feel he wasn’t wanted, from what he’s told me.’

‘Do you think I’d have let that happen if I’d known?’ Francine demanded, white-faced. ‘Vi made me promise not to have any contact with him. She said it was for his sake. I thought that Vi would love him. I went to work in America. Vi encouraged me to go.’

Marcus put his arm round her to comfort her.

This was awful, Fran thought. So much worse than she had anticipated it was going to be. This woman was behaving as though she had deliberately abandoned Jack, and that wasn’t true.

‘I missed him dreadfully. I thought about him every day, imagining him growing up. I wanted to be with him. It was only when I came back that I found out what was going on. Vi had had Jack evacuated, even though Jean, my other sister, had tried to persuade her not to.’

Francine paused to take a deep breath and steady her voice. ‘When he ran away and turned up at Jean’s, too afraid to go home, I thought it must have been meant to be. I wanted to tell him then – I wanted to – but Jean said that I shouldn’t, that it wouldn’t be fair to him, and then Vi started creating and I knew that if I tried to do anything it would only make things worse for Jack, so I had to let him go…again.’ She had to turn into the loving protection of Marcus’s arm as the memory of that awful time came flooding back to her.

When she had herself back under control she turned to look at Emily again. The other woman hadn’t moved. Her face, set and bleached of colour, was devoid of any expression, but Francine knew how Emily would be judging her, and finding her wanting.

‘I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to be with him so much. I tried to see him. I drove out to the farm where he’d been evacuated to, but it had been hit by a bomb. There was nothing left of it…and I thought…that is, everyone said…that Jack
would have been killed along with the farmer and his wife.’

Emily said nothing. The truth was that she dare not speak. The story Francine had told her would surely tear at the coldest stoniest heart, and her heart was far from that. Just because she felt sorry for the woman that did not mean that she should give Tommy up to her, Emily told herself. It was what Tommy himself wanted that mattered, not anyone else.

‘I don’t know how my Jack came to be with you, but you must have realised that he had a family,’ she accused Emily.

‘What I realised was that he was like a little starving animal, creeping out of the shadows behind the Royal Court Theatre to live off scraps of food,’ Emily told her, her sympathy for Tommy’s mother vanishing as she remembered the poor little boy’s plight. ‘Couldn’t even speak then – not so much as a word, and so thin that…It took me a good while to coax him round, and with my late husband’s favourite salmon sandwiches as well. Con would have had a fit if he’d known. Well, he did have a fit when I told him that Tommy was coming to live with us, but I soon told him what was what.’

‘Con?’ Francine demanded, white-faced.

Emily looked at her, and suddenly realised why her face had seemed so familiar.

The two women stared at one another, the silence in the kitchen broken only when Emily gave a small sigh.

‘I remember you now,’ she told Francine. She
did remember her, a very pretty, very young girl working at the theatre, one of Con’s girls. Tension replaced the earlier silence. Emily took a deep breath, putting two and two together. ‘So it was Con who got you into trouble, was it?’

Con, Tommy’s father. The thought gave her quite a turn, and oddly, made it seem all the more right and proper in a way that Tommy should have found his way to her, Emily thought.

‘Yes,’ Francine admitted. ‘I loved him and I thought he loved me.’

‘Con never loved anyone but himself,’ Emily told her matter-of-factly, before adding, ‘You’d certainly never have known that Tommy was his. Tommy doesn’t take after Con, thank goodness. Never did have much patience with him, Con didn’t, especially when I first took Tommy in and he couldn’t speak.’

Emily looked directly at Francine, so elegant and smartly dressed, and so ladylike too, with her expensive clothes and her officer husband, who plainly adored her and who equally plainly knew all about her past, Emily acknowledged with grudging respect. It couldn’t have been easy, admitting what she’d done.

‘I’d never have put you down as one of them that were daft enough to be taken in by Con,’ she felt obliged to say. ‘Not looking at you now.’

‘I thought he loved me. I was young and silly.’

‘And he had a smooth tongue and a handsome face,’ Emily supplied for her. ‘Well, you weren’t the first and you certainly weren’t the last. You know he’s dead?’

‘Yes. My sister mentioned it.’

‘There was no real harm in him, just weak, that’s what he was,’ Emily felt bound to say, although there was no real reason why she should defend her late husband, she told herself. ‘Weak and too good-looking for his own good, that was Con. They were the death of him in the end – that weakness and his good looks.’

‘I want my son and I mean to have him,’ Francine told Emily, gathering strength from having told Emily of her claim on Jack. She would never have recognised this trim determined-looking woman as the same worn-down creature she remembered Con’s wife to be.

‘I love Tommy just as much as though I’d given birth to him myself,’ Emily responded. ‘Him and me, we’ve been happy together. He loves it here in Whitchurch. Doing ever so well at school he is too, and the headmaster reckons he could go on to university if he applies himself.’

Francine could hear the love and pride in Emily’s voice. She was still trying to come to terms with the fact that Emily had been Con’s wife, almost as though fate had decided that Jack should grow up living with one of his real parents. She pushed the thought away.

‘A boy needs a father,’ she told Emily, ‘and Marcus—’

‘When this war is over, me and Wilhelm will be getting married. Thinks the world of Wilhelm, Tommy does, and Wilhelm’s been like a proper dad to him,’ Emily immediately defended her own position.

‘He’s my son.’

Emily took a deep breath. ‘You can say that all you like and it won’t make a bit of difference to me, but I’ve made Tommy a promise that I’ll make sure he gets to do whatever he wants, and be with whoever he wants, and I aim to keep that promise. I won’t stand aside and see him dragged away from here if that isn’t what he wants. I know what you’re thinking and you’re right. Of course I want him to stay with me, but I won’t stand in his way if he decides he wants to go back to his family. What he wants matters more to me than what I want.’

Francine’s eyes stung with tears. She felt humbled and helpless, filled with remorse and longing, recognising that this woman truly loved her son, and had probably saved his life when she had taken him in.

But he was her son.

‘What I’m going to suggest,’ Emily continued, ‘is that you leave him here with me for now, to give him time to decide what he wants to do. You can come and see him whenever you want. You can tell him the truth or you can keep it from him, but what I will not tolerate is you or anyone else trying to make up his mind for him. If, at the end of six months, he wants to leave here to be with you then I won’t stand in his way, and by the same token, if you love him only half as much as I do, you’ll feel the same if things are the other way round.’