Till We Meet Again

by Lesley Pearse

  They had arrived on Saturday evening after a very long and boring drive. On Sunday they’d stayed in all day because all the grown-ups were tired. Beth had been really worried they’d remain the way they were yesterday, with Mother crying and Aunt Rose flapping around making cups of tea and muttering things like ‘I saw this coming years ago, but you wouldn’t listen to me.’

  But today Uncle Eddie had gone back to work. He fitted out caravans, and Aunt Rose said he was a craftsman, in a tone that sounded as if she meant Mother should have found someone like him. As soon as they’d got back from the morning’s shopping trip, Aunt Rose had said Beth could go out and explore and leave the grown-ups to have a real chat. As her aunt gave her half a crown and told her to buy herself a bun or something for lunch, Beth got the idea she was expected to stay out till tea-time.

  It was thrilling at first, so many shops to look in, so many people to watch. A great many of them were foreigners and she made a game of guessing where they came from. But it got a bit lonely after a while, and it was too hot for walking around, so she’d come down by the river to watch the pleasure boats, and that’s when she saw the girl sitting under a tree.

  She was wearing one of those smocked-front dresses, with puffed sleeves and a sash tied at the back, that Beth had always longed for. It was pink with mauve flowers and the smocking was mauve too. Highly polished blue sandals, snowy-white ankle socks and shiny bobbed hair completed Beth’s idea of a kid who had everything, and she thought she was probably waiting for her mother to finish her shopping.

  Girls at home who looked the way this one did always ignored Beth, so it took all her courage to get up the nerve to speak to her. But to her astonishment, the girl seemed to want to make a new friend as much as she did. She said her name was Suzie Wright, that she lived in Luddington, a nearby village, and she was waiting for her father to finish work to go home with him.

  Beth had never found anyone before so easy to talk to. Suzie didn’t put on any airs and graces, not about her clothes, or anything. She said she was pretty dumb compared with the other girls in her class, but she didn’t seem dumb to Beth because they’d read all the same books. In fact, she even knew that Battle was where the Battle of Hastings took place, and explained that William Shakespeare was England’s greatest playwright.

  Yet the thing which Beth liked most of all about Suzie was that she didn’t seem to see Beth as some kind of freak because she was so tall and thin. The thrill of being told she looked lovely in shorts, that her curly hair was beautiful and that she had colouring like Snow White carried her home that afternoon on a cloud. She prayed that Aunt Rose would let her borrow her bike the following day and that she’d be allowed to go off and meet Suzie. She thought she’d just curl up and die if they refused.

  Beth picked up a lot about her mother that holiday that she hadn’t realized before. She was as much of a snob as Father. Aunt Rose said when they were arguing that Alice had only married Montague because she thought he had pots of money and lived in a grand house. Rose said she suffered from something called ‘delusions of grandeur’ and all she was getting now was her come-uppance for marrying a man she didn’t love just so she could have position. Rose said that if she had any guts at all, Alice would take Beth and leave him, but she added that she knew she wouldn’t do that because she was just as bad as Montague and wouldn’t work for a living.

  Mother had insisted that none of it was true, yet the first thing she asked Beth about Suzie was what school she went to. Of course Beth didn’t know, but Aunt Rose seemed to, and she was really sarcastic. She said, ‘You needn’t worry that your daughter’s mixing with riff-raff here, I know of that family. The girl goes to The Croft, a private school. Mr Wright is the manager of a big insurance company and his house is one of the biggest in Luddington.’

  After that information had been digested, Beth was free to meet Suzie every afternoon. Maybe Mother thought she always played in the Wrights’ garden, but then she never actually asked. She was only too happy to be free to read or go out with her sister.

  In fact, Beth only went inside Suzie’s house twice in the whole month. Mostly Suzie was already waiting at the gate with her bike when Beth came along, and she seemed eager to get right away. Likewise, Beth only took Suzie to Aunt Rose’s a few times, and always whisked her out again quickly, using the excuse that the shops or the park were more interesting.

  ‘Looking back, from an adult standpoint,’ Beth said to Steven, after she’d told him about how she met Susan and the impact she’d had on her, ‘we were both hiding our family secrets. I didn’t want Susan to know we were really poor, or that my father was a pompous wife-beater. She didn’t want me to see that her granny was barmy. There was something more, too. We both felt inadequate in different ways. Suzie saw me as fearless, clever, always with a new idea up my sleeve for something exciting we could do. She wanted to be like that too. I wanted to be like her, sweet, feminine and genuinely classy, with the happiest family and the loveliest house in the world.’

  ‘When did you start to wise up about each other?’ Steven asked.

  ‘I don’t think we ever did, or perhaps our simplistic views of each other were actually very close to how we really were then,’ Beth sighed and looked at Steven helplessly. ‘But when you only see someone for a month in the summer, it’s a bit like a holiday romance, isn’t it? You don’t get to see the ugly or boring bits. We did learn some things about each other, we both admitted we hadn’t got any other real friends. She told me her granny was a trial, I told her my father was a bully. But as these things were never witnessed, neither of us could know how bad it was. I suppose, too, when we were together we wanted to forget that for eleven months of the year our lives were pretty miserable.’

  ‘But you kept in touch with letters for those other eleven months?’

  ‘Oh yes, a letter about every two or three weeks. But you must know how kids write to each other? Just sort of statements about what you’ve done, what books you’ve read. I expect when Susan wrote to Copper Beeches she imagined it was quite grand. You see, I used to mention the stables or the long drive in conversation. She didn’t know about the broken windows, the holes in the roof or the mice all over the kitchen.

  ‘Likewise, I only ever imagined her granny sitting knitting in her rocking-chair, with Susan’s mother in a clean apron, making cakes. I certainly didn’t visualize shitty sheets, or the old girl wandering around the house yelling her head off.’

  ‘So you went up to Stratford for how many summers?’ Steven asked.

  ‘Five. After the first one I was put on the train alone. Mother stayed home with Father. But the summer we were going to be sixteen, Father wouldn’t let me go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he was mean-spirited. He didn’t want me to have any fun,’ Beth said vehemently. ‘You see, Susan wrote after her granny died early that year, and invited me to stay at her house. We hoped that we might get to go dancing again – we’d been once the previous year – and chat up some boys.’ She paused and half smiled.

  ‘The year before, we’d spent most of the holiday looking for boys, we’d hang around in coffee bars, pretending to be French, you know, all that silly stuff teenage girls do. We reckoned that as we’d both be sixteen by August, with our exams over, we’d be adults.’

  Beth could see herself reading that letter of invitation from Suzie. It was April, and she was sitting up in her bedroom, reading and re-reading it, her heart thumping with excitement.

  The rain was so heavy she could hear water pinging in the tin bath left out on the landing under the leak in the roof. It was freezing in her bedroom, and she’d got the eiderdown around her. But just thinking about Stratford and Suzie made her feel warmer. She got herself a pencil and paper and huddling back under the eiderdown, worked out how much money she would have by August if she saved every penny of her paper-round money.

  She only got £1 5s a week, and for that she had to cycle over ten miles every day,
starting at half past six in the morning, regardless of whether it was raining or snowing. But she had to do it. When she was fourteen her father had told her he had no intention of paying out for anything for her any more, not even clothes or pocket money. He said it was time she earned her own money.

  That was rich coming from him, as the most pocket money she ever got from him was the odd shilling on the rare occasions he was in a good mood. As for clothes, they were Serena’s hand-me-downs, and mostly so old-fashioned she’d die rather than be seen wearing them in public. It was Serena who gave her mother money for her school uniform and shoes too.

  Beth didn’t mind doing the paper round in the spring and summer. Having some money of her own to buy a few new clothes and not feel ashamed if she bumped into anyone from school at the weekend made up for getting up at half past six. But in the winter it was awful. She had to set out while it was still dark, and some of the lanes she had to ride up were thick with mud. She got chapped cheeks, hands and legs from the cold and wet, and there was no such thing in their house as a hot bath before she went off to school. She had to try to wash the mud off her legs with cold water, then change into her uniform, wolf down her breakfast and cycle off to Battle again, still stiff with the cold.

  Yet with spring on its way, and the promise of August in Stratford, it would soon be all right again, and maybe in September she could get a Saturday job in a shop instead. Turning back to her sums, she thought she could save at least £15 by August, enough to buy a really trendy dress and some shoes to go dancing.

  The cold in her bedroom made her go downstairs again a little later for she had some homework to do. There was no sign of her mother, and Beth assumed she’d gone into the village, so she spread her books out on the kitchen table, as near to the stove as she could get, and began working.

  Ever since she’d seen the Wrights’ kitchen in Luddington, the one at home made her feel terribly ashamed. It was clean – her mother scrubbed at it constantly – but it was so old and scruffy that cleaning didn’t make it look any better. Many of the quarry tiles on the floor were broken, some missing altogether, the paint on the cupboards was dingy and chipped. Nothing shone the way she remembered it did in the Wrights’ kitchen, everything looked as worn out as her mother. The gloom didn’t help either. Two of the window-panes were broken and covered over with cardboard. The only thing that made it bearable was that it was warm from the stove.

  Her father came in a few minutes later. ‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked brusquely. ‘I haven’t had my morning coffee.’

  ‘I’ll get it for you,’ she said, getting up from the table, but wishing she dared ask why he couldn’t get it himself. She had been told by her mother that as a young man her father had looked just like Robert did now, tall and very handsome, with wide shoulders and thick black hair. But there was nothing admirable about Monty’s appearance any more. He was very overweight, with flesh hanging around his jowls like a bloodhound’s and a huge stomach. His hair was thin, grey and lank, he had food stains down the front of his cardigan, and the collar of his shirt was none too clean either. But the thing Beth hated most of all about him was his eyes. They were brown, speckled with green, and very cold. For all his inactivity, they darted round every room, studied every face, searching for something to complain about. If he had ever had any good qualities, Beth thought that he had lost them all now, and it showed.

  Beth had asked Serena if she knew why he was such a pig. Serena said she thought it was all tied up with him failing to match up to his ancestors, and being overindulged as a child. She claimed that like most bullies he was really a coward, afraid to go out and get a proper job in case he failed, and as long as he was still getting just enough rent from the remaining few tenants he had, he could still pretend he was Lord of the Manor.

  But that explanation did nothing to make Beth like him any better.

  She put the kettle on, and while it was boiling went to the pantry to get the coffee. The jar was empty.

  ‘There’s no coffee left,’ she said, immediately feeling tense. ‘I expect Mother’s gone to get some.’

  ‘No coffee?’ he roared out. ‘She knows I always have it at eleven.’

  ‘I’ll make you some tea instead,’ Beth said hurriedly.

  ‘One drinks tea at breakfast. Only labourers drink tea at eleven in the morning,’ Father retorted scathingly.

  He was almost as fond of pointing out labourers’ habits as he was of saying he had ‘a position to maintain’. He said labourers kept coal in their baths, wiped their noses on their sleeves and had a great many other disgusting habits. He was one to talk – Beth had seen him piss out of his study window because he was too lazy to walk upstairs, and he rarely even shaved in the winter, let alone had a bath.

  Beth tried to appease him by saying her mother wouldn’t be long, and even suggested she rode into the village to get some coffee herself.

  ‘Do that,’ he snapped at her.

  Beth glanced out of the kitchen window at the heavy rain and shuddered. She’d already got wet once that morning on her paper round and her coat and outdoor shoes were still soaked. But she knew that if she complained he would clout her.

  ‘May I have some money then?’ she asked.

  ‘Money?’ he roared out. ‘Your mother has the housekeeping money.’

  ‘But she isn’t here,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Then use your own,’ he said.

  Later, Beth was to wonder whatever possessed her to say she was saving her money for her holiday in Stratford. But it just came out.

  ‘You won’t be going there again, my girl,’ he said, his eyes narrowing with malice. ‘You’ll work all through the summer. If you think I’m paying for trips for you to see that shrew of an aunt of yours, you are much mistaken.’

  ‘But Daddy, Suzie has invited me to stay at her house, please let me go,’ she pleaded.

  He moved so quickly she didn’t have time to dodge him. He caught hold of her shoulder and punched her so hard in the face that she fell back against the stove, burning her hand.

  ‘You’ll go nowhere again,’ he yelled. ‘From now on you’ll find a job during every holiday, and you’ll give your mother half of what you earn for your keep. Got that?’

  Recalling that ugly scene made tears spring up in Beth’s eyes. She was left with a black eye and a split lip, the same injuries he’d inflicted on her mother so often. She remembered lying there on the cold floor cursing him to hell and back, and swearing to herself she’d make him pay for it.

  ‘What is it?’ Steven said gently, seeing her tears, and with that Beth found herself blurting out what had happened that day.

  ‘He sounds like an absolute monster,’ Steven said, slipping his arms round her as he’d done earlier and holding her tight. ‘No wonder you hate him.’

  ‘I couldn’t bring myself to admit to Suzie why I really couldn’t go,’ she said, drying her eyes, comforted by his arm. ‘I think I made out in the end that I had been offered a good job. But it hardly mattered anyway, because as it happened her mother had the stroke and I don’t suppose she would have been able to spend any time with me, let alone have me to stay with her.’

  ‘So did you work all the holidays from then on?’ he asked.

  Beth nodded. ‘Saturdays too, in a shoe shop in Hastings. Father used to make me bring my pay packet home unopened. He’d pocket half, it never even went to Mother.’

  Steven smoothed her hair and sighed. ‘You had to stay, I suppose, if you wanted to go to university?’

  ‘Yes. But I think I would have left, found a job and a room, if it hadn’t been for Suzie,’ she said. ‘You see, I often told her in my letters that I wanted to leave home, even if I didn’t spell out why. Each time she wrote back she urged me not to do that, she made me believe I was too clever for a dead-end job, and that was all I’d get without qualifications. Her opinion was the only one I really trusted, even Serena and Robert weren’t wholly reliable. I suppose our father made out
to them I was dumb, as they didn’t seem to have much faith that I’d make it to university. They often suggested it might be better for me if I got a job as a nanny for a couple of years.’

  ‘But they presumably knew how it was for you at home? Susan didn’t, did she?’ Steven pointed out.

  ‘That was all part of it. You see, everyone, my brother and sister, teachers, neighbours, pitied me. I used to see it in their faces. That saps your ambition, Steven, it weakens your resolve, and it makes you feel worthless. Suzie didn’t pity me, she admired me. I told her at thirteen I wanted to be a lawyer after we’d seen a film together about one. I suppose I presented her with a pretty good case as to why I’d be good at it, and she never let me drift away from it. I always felt indebted to her for that, I can remember thinking of her on the day I graduated, and wishing she was there.’

  ‘It was a great shame all round you didn’t stay in touch. If you’d still been friends when her parents died, you could have made that swine of a brother of hers share the inheritance.’

  ‘I know,’ she said dolefully. ‘And maybe if we’d remained friends I could have influenced her to break away from her parents years before and make a life for herself. I’ve thought about that over and over since I met her again.’

  ‘We’ve all got our own “if onlys”,’ he said with a sigh. ‘But I suppose you got caught up with all the social life at university, made more exciting friends.’