Women on the Home Front (30 page)

‘I don't think for one minute that anything like that is going to happen, Nancy. Tilly and Agnes have simply taken Christopher under their wing a bit because they are being good neighbours.'

‘Well, you can say that, but—' Nancy began.

Her neighbour was like a dog relishing a particularly juicy bone it did not want to give up, Olive thought ruefully as she determinedly changed the subject.

‘Has Linda settled in with her in-laws in Sussex now?'

Linda, Nancy's daughter, and her son-in-law, Henry, had evacuated themselves and their seven-year-old son to Sussex to live with her in-laws shortly after war had been announced.

‘Oh, yes. Ever so glad to have her there, Henry's mother is, and Henry's got a job working in partnership with an electrician that's already set up there. Mind you, Linda says that it's Henry that's bringing in most of the work, not this other chap, and she reckons that it's Henry who should be the senior partner. Henry's mother's lucky to have them living with her. There's nothing Linda doesn't know about running a house like it should be run. Of course, she's got me to thank for that. I have to say that Henry's mother doesn't have the same standards I've taught Linda. When we went and stayed with them the Christmas before last, there was that much dust on the picture rail in her hallway that she couldn't have dusted up there all year.'

Olive nodded. She knew from experience that there was nothing Nancy liked more than boasting about her daughter, but the weight of the laundry was beginning to make her arms ache so she excused herself and unlocked her back door.

Once inside she made her way straight upstairs so that she could put the clean linen in the airing cupboard, ready to change the beds on Monday.

When Nancy had first found out that Olive was sending her sheets and pillowcases to the Chinese laundry instead of washing them herself, she had affected to be shocked, but Olive didn't care. With five beds to change it would have been impossible for her to get all the bedding washed, dried and ironed every week, on top of everything else she had to do, including her WVS work.

Once she'd put the clean laundry away, Olive glanced at her watch and, seeing that it was almost half-past ten, she hurried back downstairs so that she could make herself a cup of tea and then sit down and enjoy it whilst she listened to
Music While You Work
on the wireless.

It was whilst she was listening to that that Olive found her thoughts wandering to the Longs. She wondered if she should call and ask Mrs Long if there was anything she could do to help, such as fetching her shopping for her. She didn't want her to think that she was being nosy, though, especially when Mr Long was so obviously poorly. Olive had no fears that Tilly might be getting too involved with Christopher in the way that Nancy had tried to imply. She knew her daughter and it was perfectly plain to her that Tilly thought of Christopher only as a friend. She certainly wasn't attracted to him in the way that she had been to Dulcie's handsome brother. Thinking of that reminded Olive of her exchange with Dulcie. She hadn't intended to get Dulcie's back up, and in fact she had actually, to her own surprise, felt concerned for her when she'd seen her cuts and bruises, but Dulcie wasn't someone who made it easy for others to be sympathetic towards her, Olive thought wryly. Quite the opposite.

She would go and see Mrs Long after she had had her dinner, she decided. It wouldn't be neigh-bourly not to do so. Olive could still remember how she had felt during the final weeks of her own husband's life. Of course, she had been younger than Mrs Long, and they had been living here with her in-laws, but you never forgot the awfulness of knowing someone you loved was going to die. She would certainly never forget the hours she had lain awake at night listening to his racking cough, and then the silences that had followed it, hardly daring to breathe herself as she listened desperately in the darkness for the sound of his breathing and only relaxing when she heard it.

Olive had decided to do a ham salad for every-one's evening meal, seeing as it was so warm, so she opened the tin of ham she intended to use, taking a thin sliver off the ham to make herself a sandwich for her lunch. The thin scraping of margarine she put on the bread didn't look very appealing, but Olive knew that with a bit of mustard and some lettuce her sandwich would be nice and tasty.

Once she'd eaten she checked the larder to make sure that there were enough boiled potatoes left over from the previous evening's meal for her to make some potato salad to go with the ham.

After removing her apron, Olive went upstairs to comb her hair and make sure that she looked tidy, setting her neat off-white straw hat on top of her newly brushed curls, and then opening her dressing table drawer to remove a clean pair of white gloves.

As she opened her front door, the Misses Barker from next door were walking up the Row, and naturally Olive stopped to speak to them. Spinster sisters and retired teachers, they always looked spick and span. Physically the sisters were very different. Miss Jane Barker, the elder of the two, was tall and thin, with a long bony face, whilst Miss Mary Barker was smaller and plump. Olive's late husband, who had been taught by them at the local church school before they had retired, had often said that whilst Miss Jane favoured the stick, Miss Mary favoured the carrot, and that between them they had ensured that even the most unruly of boys along with the shyest of girls learned their ABC and their times tables.

Once ‘good afternoons' had been exchanged, it was Miss Mary who told Olive excitedly, ‘We've just seen the vicar and he's asked us if we'd like to think about helping out at the junior school. It seems that with so many families bringing their children back from evacuation, the Government is having to open some of the schools they closed at the beginning of the war.'

After they had parted company Olive reflected that the thought of going back to teaching had brought a definite spring to the sisters' steps.

When she reached number 49 she could see that the curtains were half drawn across the windows of the front room. Rather hesitantly she knocked on the front door, wondering if she had done the right thing when Mrs Long opened it and Olive saw how tired and distressed she looked.

‘I'm sorry,' Olive apologised. ‘Perhaps I've called at a bad time. I won't stay. I heard that Mr Long isn't very well and I just wanted you to know that if there's anything I can do to help – collect your shopping for you, that kind of thing.'

‘Please do come in,' Mrs Long urged her, holding the door open wide, so that Olive felt obliged to step inside.

The immaculately clean hallway possessed a smell that Olive instantly recognised: the smell of carbolic and sickness and a certain fetid lack of air that came from trying to keep an invalid warm and a house clean.

Olive followed Mrs Long to the back parlour, in shape and size the same as her own but, because this house was tenanted, slightly shabby and down at heel. Dark curtains hung at the window, making the room dim and depressing. The small leather settee under the window had shiny patches on its arms where the fabric had worn thin, and the cupboards either side of the fireplace were painted dark brown, like the skirtings and doors. A table covered in a chenille cloth was pushed up against the wall adjoining the two rooms, three chairs tucked into it so that there was just enough room for the old-fashioned winged armchair with a leather footstool in front of it drawn up close to the fire: Mr Long's chair, Olive guessed.

‘I'd offer you a cup of tea, but I'm expecting the doctor any minute,' Mrs Long told her. ‘It's kind of you to offer to help but Christopher, our son, is very good and he calls and gets the shopping for me on his way home from work.' An expression of sadness shadowed her face as she spoke.

Poor woman, she was no doubt as anxious about her son as she was about her husband, albeit in a different way, Olive thought compassionately. Christopher's views on the war were bound to make life difficult for him, and what mother wouldn't wish for a happy easy path through life for her child? Olive felt so sorry for Mrs Long. Thin and careworn, with an anxious expression and grey hair pulled back into a bun, she was looking into the hallway through the door she'd left open the whole time she was talking to Olive, her voice barely raised above a whisper. Olive, who had once been in her position herself, knew exactly what she was going through but was reluctant to say anything about her own experience. Mr Long was, after all, still alive, and Olive knew how desperately one clung to that and how desperately one hoped for a recovery. Telling her that she had lost her own husband might not be a tactful thing to do.

‘Yes, this is the very latest colour,' Dulcie assured the customer who had spent the last half an hour hesitating over which lipstick to choose.

‘And you can assure me that this lipstick was made here in England and not America? Only my husband wouldn't approve at all if I'd bought a lipstick that had taken up space in one of our convoys that could have been used for something much more essential to the war effort. He has a cousin in the navy, you see, and he's very conscious of the dangers to our brave sailors in crossing the Atlantic.'

‘Our buyer would never countenance buying stock that risked sailors' lives,' Dulcie assured her customer without having a clue as to whether or not what she was saying was true, and privately thinking that her husband must be mean if he hadn't ever bought a bit of something to carry in his pocket and bring home for his wife.

Her reassurance seemed to convince her customer, who told her, ‘Very well then, I'll take the lipstick.'

Last night's attack on the Manellis' shop had left Dulcie with several bruises and the angry cut on her face, which she'd done her best to disguise with some powder. Of course, the other girls had been curious about it, so she'd lied and said that she'd been scratched by a cat.

What had happened to the Italians was all over the papers, and at dinner time there'd been some snide comments from Arlene about the likelihood of ‘Dulcie's Italian' being picked up by the police and imprisoned as an enemy alien.

For her own part, Dulcie had pretended not to notice, whilst talking to Lizzie in a very firm voice about how Raphael was in the Royal Engineers and how he was only at home because he'd been at Dunkirk. Not that she had done that for Raphael's sake, of course; she had done it for her own. She certainly wasn't going to have Arlene making out that she was romantically connected to an enemy alien.

The staff entrance to Selfridges was a dark shadowy place that seemed always to smell of oil and exhaust fumes, from the delivery vans and cigarette smoke from the workmen who hung around the entrance, snatching quick fags, and the late afternoon heat of the city emphasised those odours.

London's air as a whole smelled and tasted dry and dusty to Raphael. For him it lacked the bracing salt tang of Liverpool's air, blown in over the Liverpool bar on winds from the Atlantic.

He'd arrived here well before six, determined not to miss Dulcie, knowing this was his last chance to see her and that he had a train to catch this evening to Liverpool, where his parents were waiting for news of his grandfather. Now he was leaning against a wall in the shadows opposite the store, waiting for her. He had managed to telephone his parents to discuss the dawn raids and they in turn had told him what had been happening in Liverpool. Not to them – Raphael's father was a British citizen, after all. He worked as warehouse manager down on the docks, a good job and one he had wanted Raphael to follow him into until he had realised how determined Raphael was to train as an engineer. That was how he had come to be in the Royal Engineers instead of the regular army.

Raphael saw Dulcie emerging from the building. He pushed himself off the wall, straightening up as he strode purposefully towards her.

Dulcie saw him and stopped walking, a surge of triumph and vindication reinforcing what she told herself she had already known: that although he had pretended not to find her attractive, he had been drawn to her all along. Irresistible, that was what she was, Dulcie decided smugly. Well, if he thought that all he had to do was turn up here to persuade her to grant him the favour of a date, he was quickly going to learn that it wasn't.

She waited for him to approach her, smiling a triumphant smile when he reached her, but instead of pleading with her to go out with him, he told her instead, ‘I haven't got much time. I'm leaving for Liverpool this evening, but before I go I just wanted to thank you for what you did for Mrs Manelli. She's my father's second cousin, and since she doesn't have anyone of her own to thank you I'm doing it on her behalf.'

Raphael looked down at his feet in their polished army boots. Coming here like this was a duty he would rather not have had. Dulcie wasn't the type of girl he admired, and yet last night she had done something he admired very much indeed. He could see his own face in the gloss he worked into his boots.

He exhaled and raised his head, telling Dulcie, ‘I'm not going to pretend that you weren't one of the last people I'd thought would do something like that, and I'm not going to apologise for thinking it either, but I am grateful to you.'

He hadn't come here to ask her out, and far from finding her irresistible he was practically insulting her. Dulcie glared at him.

‘Grateful is it?' she challenged him. ‘Well, you don't sound very grateful, and as for not apologising for thinking I was one of the last people you'd thought would do what I did, that just goes to show that you shouldn't go judging people and thinking things about them that aren't true. Just because I don't go round acting all holy and soft, that doesn't mean I don't know right from wrong. Those lads had no call to go acting like they did. Always kind to us when we were kids, Mr Manelli was, even if he was an Eyetie.'