by Annie Murray
Daisy felt a pang of grief. This was something that was never going to happen to her now – love and marriage.
‘Married. You know – married. But not just yet – not while the war’s on, anyway.’
‘But who on earth to?’ Margaret’s bewilderment was obvious. She sounded a bit cheated, Daisy thought, that this had all somehow crept up on them.
Annie told them then about Dr Fergus Reid, the nerve specialist who she was to marry but who was already, by now, at one of the casualty clearing stations in France.
Margaret was still asking questions about getting their father’s permission and was she sure – as if Annie ever did anything she was not sure about – when Philip stood up. He went to Annie, pulled her to her feet and embraced her.
‘Good for you, Annie,’ he said. ‘That’s one nice bit of news at least.’
‘Thank you, Philip.’ She smiled up at him.
‘He must be quite a feller,’ Philip added teasingly.
‘Congratulations, Auntie Annie.’ Daisy went and gave her a kiss.
‘We must go and tell Uncle Eb,’ Margaret said, embracing her sister. ‘It might cheer him up – just a tiny bit anyway.’
When she and Margaret went next door, Watts’s had also just finished a tea break and Uncle Eb was in the office with Bridget Sidwell and the others.
When he turned to them Annie was deeply shocked. She had not seen him for some time and he was so much thinner than before. He looked hollowed out, like a man who had not slept in weeks. The demands of the business were always relentless, but Georgie’s death on top of that seemed to have aged him by ten years. His once iron-grey hair was almost white and his face looked papery and fragile. Margaret had told her that while Aunt Hatt grieved endlessly for her boy, she thought that in his quiet way, Uncle Eb had taken it even harder.
‘Hello, wenches!’ He greeted them warmly as usual, then his face fell into a wary look. ‘What brings you – no bad news, I hope?’
‘No, Uncle,’ Margaret said, smiling at him. ‘Something good for a change. Go on – tell him, Annie.’
Annie felt bashful delivering her news.
‘Ah, well, that is good! Now –’ he began teasing her and they saw a flicker of his old self – ‘if I’m not mistaken, is this not the young suffragist who was never going to get married?’
‘I’m still a suffragist – by inclination anyway, Uncle,’ Annie said. ‘But Fergus . . .’ She felt self-conscious even saying his name, but she loved it. Fergus. It sounded crisp and interesting, and as if brushed against the Scottish heather of his birthplace. ‘He seems to have swept me off my feet! Anyway, this is him.’
She drew out the picture they had had taken, of herself and Fergus arm in arm, he in his RAMC uniform, she in a summer frock and simple straw hat, both smiling with a look of almost outrageous happiness at the camera.
Everyone admired it and Uncle Eb repeated the same sort of sentiments Philip had mentioned, about how this Fergus Reid must be quite a man, it taking some doing to get Annie to agree to marry him, and so on. He was trying his best to be jolly and happy for her, Annie could see. But under this, you could not fail to notice the heartbreaking change in him, the amount it was costing him to keep going day after day, to try and find purpose in his life with his boy gone – his boy who was to inherit the business.
When they were back in number twenty-four, she said tearfully to Margaret, ‘Oh, poor Eb. It’s terrible seeing him like that.’ Their uncle had always seemed to them one of the happiest men in the world – happy in his marriage and family, content and prosperous in his work.
She gathered herself together. ‘Look, I’d better get over to Lizzie. See you as soon as I can.’
‘Bye, dear,’ Margaret said, kissing her. ‘And – well, I hope we get to meet this astonishing Fergus Reid soon. I’m very happy for you, Annie.’
A few nights later, Margaret woke, startled by something out of a deep sleep. The noise, which had seemed far away at first, sharpened. It was knocking, heavy and insistent.
‘Philip?’ she whispered.
There was no reply. Listening, she heard it again. It sounded as if it was coming from their own front door.
On the landing, wearing shoes and a gown thrown hurriedly over her nightdress, she saw that Daisy, similarly attired, was already on her way down the stairs. Daisy turned, hearing her footsteps, and waited.
‘I’d just put Hester down again when it started,’ she whispered.
As they reached the door a voice behind it shouted, ‘Police – open up!’
‘Oh, Lord,’ Margaret said. She was glad Daisy was up as well. ‘Whatever now? Here – let me open.’
In the poorly lit street she saw the unmistakable outline of a policeman, a middle-aged, reassuring-looking man. Only the older men were left these days.
‘Sorry to trouble you, madam,’ he said, standing as if to attention. ‘Nothing for you to be concerned about regarding this property. But I’m trying to gain access to the house next door and I’m wondering if you have a key? Otherwise I shall be forced to kick the door in.’
‘Gracious,’ Margaret said. ‘What’s happened? Has there been a burglary?’
‘Do you have a key, madam?’ the policeman said patiently.
‘Oh – yes. Daisy, you know the drawer in the office? But please – what’s the problem?’
‘We had a telephone call from a Mrs Watts,’ he said stiffly, ‘to report that her husband has not come home. And,’ he added with an air of disapproval, ‘even the public houses are shut at this hour.’
‘Oh, he’s not a drinker,’ Margaret assured him as Daisy rushed back with the key. ‘At least not to excess.’
The policeman made a sound which could have been scepticism or mere acknowledgement of what had been said.
‘Right.’ He looked at the two of them in their hastily covered-up nightwear. ‘Perhaps the man of the house would be better to accompany me?’
‘He’s asleep,’ Margaret said, irritated by this. ‘And Mr Watts is my uncle. My daughter and I will be happy to come with you.’
Daisy unlocked the door of number twenty-six. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The lights were off and they lit the gas in the hall.
‘If the door was locked he’s not likely to be here,’ Margaret said. ‘They tend not to lock it until going-home time. Unless he was going to leave by the entry. I don’t know . . .’
‘Oh,’ Daisy exclaimed from along the hall. ‘The light’s still on at the back.’
‘Oh, dear,’ Margaret said. ‘Poor Eb – he’s so tired these days.’
But surely, she thought, Uncle Eb was not still working at this time of night? It was one o’clock in the morning! Worry gripped at her and she wished now that Philip had woken up and was here with them. Annie had said what a change she had seen in their uncle. Had he been trying to push his terrible grief for Georgie aside by overworking, burning the candle at both ends? But would Aunt Hatt not have said something about this?
‘He’s probably sat down at one of the pegs for a moment and fallen asleep,’ she said. ‘Bless his heart.’
The three of them trooped across into the workshop. Some of the lights were still burning at the front, as if Eb had been working his way back through, putting them out as he normally did at shutting-up time.
Margaret, leading the way, was tempted to call out, but she didn’t want to startle him. She looked round at the benches for his burly figure hunched over one of them, but Daisy gasped behind her.
‘Oh, Margaret – look!’
Ahead of them, right in the middle of the workshop, between the tightly packed pegs, Margaret caught sight of what Daisy had seen: first the sole of a boot, then an ankle, a trouser leg.
They dashed over, past the lathe and one set of pegs, and in the hissing gaslight saw their uncle prone on the floor, in the passage between two sets of benches.
‘Uncle!’ Margaret flung herself to her knees at his feet and leaned over him in the narrow
space. Eb was on his back, sprawled, his eyes closed. She shook him, crying out. ‘Oh, no . . . No! Uncle – wake up. Wake up, please!’
As Daisy and the policeman stood nearby in appalled silence, Margaret felt Eb’s hands, his neck, her fingertips feeling their way in the desperate hope of a flickering pulse which would belie the heavy lifelessness of his body.
‘No,’ she kept saying, hardly knowing she was speaking at all. ‘No, this can’t be, he can’t be dead, Uncle, please, please . . .’
There was nothing. She tried the wrist. But already she could feel that he was stiff and chill.
She bent forward and rested her forehead on his ribcage, feeling how shrunken was the once barrel-like body of this lovely, kindly man. And she knew that he was gone.
Thirty-One
As the news spread, people came to Watts’s to pay their respects from businesses all round the quarter. Eb Watts had learned his trade from his father and they were a well-known family, sociable and much liked in the district. Anyone who had ever worked with Eb Watts, like expert enameller Sam Lieberman, and all his pub cronies, called at the door. Bridget Sidwell, who worked in the office, had to deal with this, trying to master her own tears, since there was no Georgie to take over his father’s role. Aunt Hatt remained at home, in shock, waiting for her husband’s body to be brought to her.
Margaret, who had in any case been up all night, left that morning to go to Aunt Hatt in Handsworth and to get a message to Annie at the hospital, telling her about their uncle’s death. It seemed his heart had given out as he went round the works locking up, and that he must have died almost instantly.
Daisy, who was supposed to be teaching that day at Vittoria Street, had to leave Hester in the care of the office staff, who seemed glad to have distraction from all the surrounding grief and pain, in the shape of a lively nine-month-old.
The shock of seeing Eb Watts lying stone cold on his workshop floor stayed with Daisy. She had to keep dragging her mind back to teaching the remaining students in the school. Most of the people she taught these days were young – too young to fight – and the school was battling on, trying to keep everything running.
‘Mr Thomas has gone into the army,’ the new silversmithing tutor, Mr Grant, told her when she arrived. He was an older man, short and stocky, with tufty white hair. He was very experienced in smithing, though less in teaching. Mr Thomas had taught die sinking.
‘Oh, dear,’ Daisy said. ‘Whoever are they going to get now?’ She thought for a moment of Caleb Turner, who now worked at Watts’s. But he seemed to be very busy and it was hard to imagine the lugubrious Mr Turner teaching a class of young students.
Mr Grant chatted on, saying had she heard that the school were thinking of installing a gas annealing muffle because the council were complaining that there was a shortage of them for annealing small articles made of sheet metal for the war effort and the school needed to do its bit . . . He broke off, seeing that Daisy did not look too interested in this information.
‘Sorry, my dear – not of great moment, I’m sure. Are you all right, Miss Tallis?’
Daisy, though annoyed with herself, felt her eyes fill. But it was good to tell someone and she poured out to him what had happened.
‘Oh, you poor dear,’ he said. ‘What a shock. And poor Mr Watts. I must say I never knew the gentleman, but . . . how very sudden.’
‘He was so kind,’ Daisy sobbed. Only now, as she told a stranger what had happened, the full agony of it released itself in her. ‘And his poor wife – their son had just been killed as well.’
Mr Grant stood in front of her, sympathetic but helpless.
‘These are dark days.’ He sounded angry. ‘In other times I would tell you to go home and not attempt to teach today. But sadly I really don’t think we can do without you.’
She staggered through the class somehow. None of the students seemed to notice and once they were all cleared up and she was left alone, for a moment she even had a pang of missing James Carson’s appearance in the room. It would be so nice to see a familiar face. He had let her down, betrayed her and used her – she knew all that. But for a time, he had been the one man she had ever thought she was in love with and she missed that feeling of excitement, of someone paying her attention. And then she remembered Den, his telling her he loved her, and this brought on such a confusion of feelings that she pushed the memory away.
As she stepped out of the school in Vittoria Street, she tried to shut any thoughts of the future, let alone love, out of her mind, because thinking about it filled her with despair. You made your bed – now lie on it. That was what people said. And what choice was there, in any case?
When she reached Chain Street she saw that Bridget had draped even more black crêpe across the window and above the front door of number twenty-six. She was about to walk into twenty-four, filled with dread, when a sudden, light, guilty feeling of joy came over her. Hester. She was coming home to her little girl. How joyful that felt in the face of all this death – her little one who had no notion of how terrible the world could be.
And there was her own work, snatched moments in the attic. She had been up working last night when the policeman arrived, though she had not told Margaret this. Slowly, so slowly, she was completing her tea set. The teapot was proving the most challenging – the oval shape she had chosen.
As she stepped into number twenty-four, the office door was ajar and she heard voices. She looked inside, a smile ready.
But it froze on her face.
Mr Henshaw, seated in his usual place, looked up at her over her spectacles. Muriel Allen was also sitting, but Edith stood to one side of the room with Hester in her arms. Seeing Daisy, Hester let out a squeak of happiness and held out her arms. But Daisy was looking at the visitor, perched uneasily on Edith’s chair. Den.
He was in his blue convalescent’s uniform, and looking much better than when she had last seen him. He had filled out and his hair had grown a little, softening his face. In that moment, he didn’t say anything. He looked at Hester, then at her and back again.
Daisy could see, instantly, that he knew. Even if no one had said anything, Den knew. Her cheeks burned with mortification that he had come here and seen what had become of her. She had told him nothing, had hidden her secret and led him to believe that she was still the same successful Daisy Tallis that she had always been.
Their eyes met and she saw a strange look in his. He gazed steadily at her, as if looking right into her, and in his eyes she read a mixture of pity and of something else which made her cheeks burn even more. A realization. Triumph even. Was it? Or was she misreading him? But it felt like triumph, as if his gaze was saying, So now I know – you’re no better than me. We are equals.
And then she was glad. This is how it is. So his talk about loving her and all that nonsense, his imagining he knew who she was – at least I’ll be free of that, she thought. What does it matter what he thinks? She managed to stare, almost brazenly, back at him.
Without a word, she went to Edith and held out her arms. Hester almost flung herself into them, puttering, ‘Ma Ma Ma!’
‘Hello, Hessy,’ Daisy said, and she held her tight, kissed her cheek, did everything to show she was this child’s mother, that she loved her no matter what anyone thought and that was how it was. Almost incidentally, she added, ‘Hello, Den. How are you getting along?’
‘I’m going along all right,’ he said calmly. ‘Much better. Thought I’d come down and see you all – and Mr Watts. And then I come and ’eard the news.’ He shook his head, looking very upset. Of course, Daisy thought. This was a bigger shock still, for Den. Eb Watts had been his first and only employer.
‘I gather you was one of the ones found ’im?’
‘Yes.’ Daisy cuddled Hester. ‘I expect they’ve told you. Mrs Watts went to the police when he didn’t come home. It was Margaret – Mrs Tallis – and I, who went round there. It was terrible to see him.’
Her voice broke and
she softened towards Den. What did anything matter when faced with all this? She was free of him, now that he knew what she was really like. And they were taking up time in the office.
‘D’you want a cup of tea now you’re here, Den?’
They went into the back and Mrs Flett, who was already brewing tea for the office, brought them each a cup.
‘Dear, oh, dear,’ she kept saying. She didn’t need to say anything else.
When Daisy, still holding Hester, was left alone with Den, she busied herself with the little girl, so as not to have to face him. She put Hester down to sit on the floor and gave her a few little toys.
‘’Er’s a lovely baby,’ he said. ‘Why dain’t yer tell me, Daisy?’ Rather than triumphant, he sounded hurt.
‘Why d’you think?’ She looked up sharply. ‘Not exactly something you go broadcasting round about, is it? Being a fallen woman?’
Den stared at her. Whatever she had seen in his eyes before was gone and he shrugged, as if this was of no consequence to him. Daisy suddenly heard Annie’s voice: Mary Poole, Den’s mother, the babies that appeared when there was no visible sign of a husband . . . She saw that this was less shocking to Den than it would be to many people.
‘You’re not fallen,’ he said sweetly. ‘Not you. Why d’yer say you are?’
‘Well, that’s how people see it, isn’t it?’ she snapped, sitting up straight, wondering why she was directing her anger at him.
‘Who was it?’ The question was so direct that it seemed to bypass any indignation at being asked such a thing.
‘Someone at the Jewellery School.’ She met his eyes. ‘He’s dead. He joined the army, died on the Somme. Before he could marry me,’ she added, for her dignity.
‘Oh, Dais.’ He looked down, leaning forward, rubbing the palm of one hand against the other. His hands were wide and strong looking. Suddenly, tears filled her eyes. This was not what she had expected – that he would be sympathetic.
There was a silence during which she wrestled for control of herself. Was he wondering how to leave now? she thought. She had no idea what to say. Hester tugged at her skirt and she lifted her on to her lap.
