by Nancy Revell
‘Can I read her a bedtime story?’ Bobby asked.
‘Storiee … Bobbieee,’ Hope’s voice chirped up, although she was already starting to slur with tiredness.
Dorothy opened her mouth to sanction the reading of just a few pages, but Gloria managed to beat her to it. ‘Course yer can. There’s a stack by her cot.’
As Bobby read the story of The Tale of Two Bad Mice, Gloria tidied up the cups and saucers and the crumb-strewn plate that had been piled with biscuits. She was glad to see her boy still had a good appetite. Perhaps next time he’d stay for a proper meal.
Dorothy stood guard at the end of the short hallway, watching as Bobby sat next to the cot with the book open on his lap. The child’s chair he was on made him look like a giant. He was good with Hope, she’d give him that.
Seeing him give Hope a goodnight kiss on the forehead, Dorothy went back into the living room.
‘I’m off, Mam!’ Bobby ducked his head into the kitchen. ‘You take care in that yard,’ he added. It was another reason he didn’t like Jack. If he was any kind of man, he wouldn’t let Bobby’s mam work in a shipyard, of all places. ‘Oh, and Mam?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m gonna write Gordon a letter tonight.’
‘It’s all right, I’ve already written to him. Told him everything,’ she said. She’d actually written it the night Bobby had turned up – after he’d left. Better late than never.
Bobby wondered what Gordon would make of it all – hopefully, he’d write soon and tell him.
‘I’m off as well, Glor,’ Dorothy said, picking up her handbag and gas mask. ‘I need to drag Angie off that phone and out on the town.’ Dorothy had told Gloria on arriving that Angie wouldn’t be coming as Quentin had called, which meant that ‘the whole world had to stop’. Gloria had laughed and said, ‘Just as it does when Toby calls.’
‘Enjoy yerselves,’ Gloria said. ‘See yer tomorrow.’
Dorothy pulled a face. ‘One of these days we’ll have a Saturday off,’ she said.
‘Not while Rosie’s on a mission,’ Gloria laughed.
Bobby waited by the open door, allowing Dorothy to leave first.
‘Oh, and Glor,’ Dorothy said, turning as she left, ‘say hi from me to the devil incarnate – sorry, I mean, Jack.’ She threw Bobby a stinging look. ‘Send him my regards.’
After they’d both left, Gloria continued to stand in the middle of the flat, staring at the closed door, shaking her head. She’d give her son one thing – he had the patience of a saint.
Dorothy looked at Bobby as he too turned right when they reached the top of the stone steps from Gloria’s flat.
‘You don’t have to walk me home, you know? I’m more than capable of putting one foot in front of the other.’ As she spoke, she demonstrated by lifting one foot and putting it down on the pavement. She repeated the same with her other foot.
‘It’s how I’ve been brought up,’ Bobby explained. ‘Like Hope being taught to share, Mam taught Gordon and me that we must always walk a woman home, especially at night.’ He smiled at her as they continued to walk the short distance along the Borough Road before turning right into Foyle Street. ‘If you have any complaints, you’re going to have to take them up with my mam.’
As they walked across the cobbles, Dorothy nearly went over on her ankle. Bobby caught her arm before she went flying. Once again, just like last week, there was a shock of static as they touched.
‘Whoa, nearly,’ Bobby said.
‘I’m fine,’ Dorothy said, yanking her arm away from him and carefully walking over to the pavement. ‘What is it with you?’ She rubbed her arm. ‘You give me a shock every time we touch.’
Bobby laughed. ‘Perhaps it’s you that’s giving me the shock.’
Dorothy tutted. As they approached the entrance to her flat, she eyed him. ‘I just don’t understand why you don’t like Jack?’
Bobby looked at Dorothy. ‘So, it’s the Ritz tonight, is it?’
‘So, I’m guessing your way of getting out of answering a question you deem too personal or too intrusive is to simply ignore it, or pretend you haven’t heard?’
Bobby infuriated her more by simply smiling.
‘Do you realise you are exploiting a disability?’ she sniped.
Bobby laughed. ‘Well, it’s got to have some advantages.’ He turned to leave. ‘See you tomorrow at work.’
‘Not if I see you first,’ Dorothy mumbled, knowing it sounded churlish, but not caring.
‘The coast clear?’ Jack joked as he let himself into the flat.
Gloria walked over to him and kissed him on the lips.
‘One child is fast asleep in bed. The other two have left.’ Gloria smiled. ‘The coast is well and truly clear.’
Jack pulled her close.
‘Everything will sort itself out, you’ll see,’ he told her. He knew Gloria was hurt by Bobby’s refusal to accept her new family in its entirety, but it had also not been as traumatic as it might have been. Bobby wanted to see his mam and be a big brother to his little sister. If his mother’s new fella didn’t figure in the equation, that didn’t matter. He wasn’t going anywhere. Nothing would ever take him away from Gloria or part him from Hope again. As long as he could be a father to Hope and hold the woman he loved in his arms every night, he could put up with just about anything.
Bobby, he was sure, would come round in time.
Jack understood how it might look. Gloria was divorced and he was still married – to one of the richest women in the town to boot. Those who didn’t know him might think he was hanging in there, wanting to be taken back into his wife’s arms – even more, back to a life of luxury. Just the thought of it made Jack feel ill. He would rather sleep on a bed of nails for the rest of his life than ever live under the same roof as Miriam, let alone share a bed with her.
As he watched Gloria go into the kitchen, thoughts of Miriam pushed their way into his mind. When was she coming back from Scotland? And when was she going to serve divorce papers? He’d have expected them to plop on the doormat well before now, especially as she clearly had undisputed grounds for a divorce: her husband had committed adultery, he had fathered a child by another woman and he was living in sin. She certainly had enough evidence, so why was she being so slow off the mark?
Chapter Eighteen
Standing with the phone receiver pressed against his ear, Miriam’s brother-in-law, Angus Campbell, looked down at the glass of whisky he’d placed on a coaster next to the glossy black Bakelite phone. He hadn’t touched a drop of it yet – it was to be his reward for getting through this conversation. A conversation he had put off for as long as he could. But it was time, as his wife Margaret had said to him last night when they were in bed. She had said it in that way of hers, soft and gentle. Not a demand or an order, simply a statement that he knew to be true.
Angus heard the ringing tone end with the click of a connection.
‘Charles Havelock speaking.’ The voice was gruff, superior and intimidating, which just about summed up his father-in-law.
‘Hello, Charles … Angus here.’ He looked down at the single malt and then up at the clock. He hoped the conversation would not be a long one.
‘Ah, Angus, old chap, good to hear from you. Shame you couldn’t make it down for Christmas, but I know how you don’t like driving in the bad weather.’
Angus shook his head in disbelief. Charles had smashed his record for inserting a put-down into the conversation within a matter of seconds.
‘Bad weather being a bit of an understatement, old man,’ Angus countered. ‘Three feet of snow put paid to us getting out the door, never mind on the road.’ Angus knew Charles would not like his retort, nor being referred to as an old man, but after what he’d heard about his wife’s father, Angus was amazed he could bring himself to speak to him at all. The heavy snowfall had been a blessing in disguise. He and Margaret had been saved from a nightmare of a Christmas Day, according to what Miriam had told them
.
‘So,’ Charles said. Angus could hear him blowing out smoke and guessed he was puffing away on one of his expensive cigars. ‘I’m guessing you’re calling about that daughter of mine. Is she ready to come back to the land of the living? She’s been gone long enough.’
Angus marvelled at Charles’s ability to get yet another disparaging comment into the conversation so quickly. He’d made no secret of the fact that he saw Angus’s estate in one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland as some kind of backwater hamlet, stuck in the previous century.
‘Well, if by the land of the living you mean Sunderland, old man, no, she’s not ready to come back.’ Angus felt a rush of anger, which was unusual for him. But this was not a normal conversation.
‘What do you mean? She’s been away for well over two months! She’s not thinking of staying up there, is she?’ Charles snapped, irritated by what he was hearing. ‘She needs to get herself back down here – sort out this debacle of a marriage.’
Angus heard the clink of a glass stopper and knew Charles was pouring himself a brandy. He looked at his own untouched glass of Scotch.
‘People are going to start talking. She’s lucky that husband of hers is keeping a low profile – a very low profile. No one’s got wind – yet.’
Angus heard the strike of a match and the sound of Charles puffing on his cigar.
‘Bloody hell, if she’d just got the divorce papers filed before she left, it might have gone through by now.’
‘There’s a problem,’ Angus said finally.
‘What do you mean, there’s a problem? She’s not ill, is she?’
‘Well, she is, and she isn’t,’ Angus said.
‘Well, what is it! She either is or she isn’t!’
Angus clenched his jaw.
‘Miriam’s a mess,’ he said simply. ‘She arrived on our doorstep tanked up on gin and she’s been that way ever since.’ Angus reckoned she must have drunk the entire contents of the bar in the first-class carriage on her train journey there, considering the state she’d turned up in.
There was silence at the other end of the phone.
‘Your daughter seems to be trying to drink herself into oblivion and to be honest, Charles, she’s doing a pretty good job.’
There was more deathly silence from the other end of the phone. For a second, Angus thought he’d hung up.
‘Bloody hell!’ Mr Havelock suddenly barked, making Angus jump. ‘What’s the matter with her?’
Angus felt like telling him, the matter was that his daughter was reeling from the fact that she had just found out her father had raped underage girls, spawning God knew how many illegitimate children, and had incarcerated his own wife in a mental institution – having lied to his own daughters, and everyone else, by telling them Henrietta was mad.
‘Miriam is struggling with what she discovered on Christmas Day,’ Angus said, desperately trying to keep the disgust he felt for this man out of his voice. He had promised his wife he would deal with the situation in as civil a manner as possible. This now felt easier said than done.
‘All lies!’ Another bark from Mr Havelock. ‘A load of lies.’
Angus thought that his father-in-law actually sounded as though he believed his own words.
‘Regardless,’ Angus said, ‘your daughter is still in a bad way and to be honest, Margaret and I are at a loss to know what to do.’
‘My God! Am I going to end up with a daughter as well as a wife in the local madhouse?’ Mr Havelock exhaled through his nose.
Angus felt himself stiffen. ‘Not unless you decide to get Miriam sectioned as well.’
Mr Havelock said nothing and Angus wondered whether his father-in-law was seriously considering getting his daughter locked up.
‘Dry her out and get her back here,’ Charles said. ‘I don’t care how much it costs, or how you do it – just do it.’
And then the line did go dead, and Angus was left listening to the burr of the disconnect tone.
He put the receiver down, picked up his tumbler of Scotch and downed it in one.
Chapter Nineteen
Over the next two and a half weeks, every man, woman and boy at Thompson’s shipyard – and the eight other shipyards dotted along the hem of the Wear – worked flat out to get ships sent down the ways. The month so far had seen the town’s biggest shipyard, William Doxford & Sons, send two tank-landing craft into the river, followed by Short Brothers and Pickersgill’s, who had launched one each.
The women kept up their classes in current affairs during their lunch breaks, their eagerness to hear what was happening in the world fired on by hopes of victory. The news, however, seemed to bring only death and destruction. Hundreds of British bombers hit Berlin and Essen, the Italian town of Monte Cassino was destroyed by Allied air strikes, a U-boat sunk the British corvette HMS Asphodel in the Atlantic Ocean, killing ninety-two of the ninety-seven men aboard, and in France, the former minister of the interior for the Vichy regime, Pierre Pucheu, was sentenced to death for treason and shot by a firing squad. Even Nature seemed bent on destruction when Mount Vesuvius erupted, killing twenty-six people and causing thousands to flee their homes.
The news back home was not particularly uplifting either. The Luftwaffe might have become strangers to the town over the past year, but the damage they’d already done was not easily fixed. Many wonderful Edwardian and Gothic structures that had been landmarks for decades had been destroyed: the grand Victoria Hall, the Winter Gardens and Binns, the town’s very own Harrods, had all been either totally demolished or badly damaged. However, it was the thousands of homes that had been made uninhabitable that caused the real problem. Overcrowding was rife.
The only positive amidst all the news of doom and gloom was that Polly’s worries about Tommy had abated tenfold since Gibraltar’s role in the war had shifted down a gear following the successful completion of the North African campaign and the surrender of Italy. This meant that the bomb-disposal unit Tommy was a part of, whose main aim had been to remove Italian limpet mines that enemy divers had attached to the hulls of Allied ships, was pretty much redundant. The work her husband was now doing was more akin to what he had done as a dock diver before the outbreak of war: underwater repair work on ships needed to transport supplies across the Mediterranean.
During this time, Dorothy suggested that Gloria change her own day for seeing Hope to give Bobby time with his mam, so that it would be just the two of them, enabling them to repair their fractured relationship, but Gloria had insisted that Dorothy keep to her normal routine. Seeing Dorothy’s puzzled look, Gloria had justified her decision by saying that it wasn’t that she didn’t want to patch up their differences, but she knew her eldest son needed the buffer of another person there – for the time being, anyway. ‘He’s struggling,’ she told Dorothy. ‘He mightn’t show it, but underneath that happy-go-lucky, cool-as-a-cucumber act, there’s turbulence.’
Dorothy, of course, didn’t mind being a buffer – she’d do anything for Gloria – and if mother and son needed an intermediary, she was happy to oblige. Besides, she was certain it wouldn’t be long before Bobby came round and saw sense. She’d make sure of that. Every time she walked with Bobby back to Foyle Street, she’d argue Gloria’s case and berate him for treating his mam like the Wicked Witch of the West and refusing to have anything to do with Jack. ‘He is Hope’s father,’ she’d say in a slightly exasperated tone into Bobby’s good ear.
Dorothy had told Angie she was convinced that if she could just explain to Gloria’s Neanderthal son that society’s conventions had changed – that the war had altered the way people lived and getting divorced and having children out of wedlock really weren’t anything to feel ashamed of – then all would be well. Bobby and Gloria would be close again and he and Jack would get on – they might possibly even be good buddies. Angie had no idea what a Neanderthal was, but knew when to keep quiet and simply nod and agree with her friend.
Helen also found herself subjec
ted to similar tirades whenever Dorothy would drag her aside for a ‘quick chat’ that ended up being anything but quick. After listening, Helen would tell Dorothy that she didn’t think there was anything any of them could do other than wait it out, and she was sure the situation would sort itself ‘sometime soon’. To which Dorothy would huff and say, ‘Let’s hope sometime this century.’
Helen thought Jack was wise to agree to stay out of the way when Bobby paid his weekly visits to the flat, giving Gloria’s son the space he needed. If Jack went up against Bobby, it would only cause ructions, which would likely make Gloria feel as though she had to choose between her son and the man she loved. And she knew her father didn’t want that. It would be a recipe for disaster.
If Bobby didn’t want him around for a few hours on a Friday night, her father had told her, then that was fine with him. Even if Bobby never came round to accepting him in his mother’s life, then he’d deal with it. There were worse things.
Helen, though, could see that her father was becoming more impatient about when Miriam was going to file for divorce. She knew how desperate he was to make his union with Gloria legitimate. Living with her while still married to another woman did not sit comfortably on his shoulders. Not that it was something he talked about to Helen; she knew he did not want to bring his daughter onto the battlefield of his marriage.
Chapter Twenty
Tuesday 28 March
‘I think we all deserve a pat on the back – or a bonus in our pay packets,’ Jimmy said as the shipyard’s entire workforce slowly made its way over to the far end of the yard to the dry basins.
‘Two in one day,’ Rosie smiled. She was bursting with pride. They’d managed to build two vessels bound for France in record time and they were being launched on the same day. ‘It helps having a full squad,’ she added, cocking her head back. They both looked behind to see the women welders walking alongside Jimmy’s gang of riveters.
