Ellie

by Lesley Pearse

  Bonny had learnt a great deal more about John’s character in three months of marriage, however, and that knowledge had transformed her own. So often she wished she could tell him how he had changed her, but she couldn’t, not without admitting exactly what she’d been before.

  It was love which had changed her. Day by day, night by night, it had grown, cutting away the calculating, greedy and selfish side of her. John was no longer a meal ticket for life, but friend and lover, a man she never wanted to be parted from. Alone with him she’d found another girl, one she liked a good deal better than the old Bonny. This new person had an entirely new conception of pleasure. To run out barefoot on dew-covered grass to hang out the washing, to plant out flowers and watch them flourish, to share picnics, country walks, cooking and going to bed nightly with a man she knew she would always care for, meant so much more than glamorous living.

  Sometimes at night John stroked her belly tenderly and whispered his hopes and dreams for their child and at those times her deceit almost choked her. Another twist of fate was conspiring against her, punishing her in a way she had never anticipated.

  In the first few weeks of marriage she’d waited anxiously for a period, intending to use it as a fake miscarriage. When it didn’t happen, at first she believed she really was pregnant and almost sank to her knees with prayers of gratitude. But as the weeks slowly passed a sixth sense told her this wasn’t so, that her body was merely playing up as it had so often in the past. The absence of periods was a symptom of something fundamentally wrong with her womb, and she couldn’t tell John.

  John paused now in the bedroom doorway, surprised to find Bonny staring out of the window, her slim shoulders hunched up, one foot tucked beneath her on the window-seat. Their bed was strewn with shirts and underwear, and a half-packed suitcase lay at the foot of the ottoman.

  ‘Such a sad face!’ he chuckled. ‘I thought you’d be throwing my stuff in it happily, hardly able to wait to get rid of me.’

  Bonny turned to him and her eyes were as bleak as the rain-filled sky. ‘Everything I put in the case reminded me how long you’ll be gone.’ Her voice trembled. ‘Then I looked out at the garden and saw the summer had gone too.’

  John crossed the room and sat beside her, taking her hands in his. He sensed the real meaning of her last sentence and he searched for the right words of reassurance.

  He didn’t want to go to America, but if the results of the preliminary tests he’d done last year in Texas turned out to be as important as he suspected they were, it would mean huge profits for his company and further promotion for him. He couldn’t turn it down: he was in a specialised field and if he refused to go now he would ruin his future prospects. If he went to work for anyone else, he wouldn’t be able to keep this house, or maintain the standard of living he’d been used to.

  ‘We’ve got dozens of other summers ahead of us,’ he said gently. ‘After this trip I promise I’ll wangle it so you can come too next time. I know it’s awful that you’ll be alone for the baby being born, especially over Christmas, but I can’t help it, and we both knew I’d have to go when we set the date for the wedding.’

  ‘But I’m a different person now,’ she said, a tear rolling down her cheek. She understood he had to go. His work was very important and a great many other men’s jobs would be affected too if he refused. ‘I never used to look ahead beyond the end of the week. I didn’t expect to find you’d become my whole life.’

  John swallowed hard, fighting against an unreasonable desire to telephone his company and tell them he was quitting. Bonny had more than fulfilled his dreams: she’d given him more happiness than he’d ever imagined.

  He could hardly credit that the girl sitting beside him, wearing a cotton dress and cardigan, her hair tied up with a blue ribbon, was the same glittering showgirl he’d once been so wary of. All those friends who’d shaken their heads and said he’d regret it were quite wrong. Maybe she hadn’t had any skills aside from dancing and looking pretty until their wedding, but she’d learnt so many more now. Downstairs on the kitchen table was a cake cooling from the oven. Furniture gleamed with polish, water-colours she’d found in the attics were hung on the walls. Just looking at the pile of shirts on the bed made him smile. Who would have thought she was capable of washing, starching and ironing shirts and then folding them so they looked as if they came straight from the laundry?

  But although these housewifely skills pleased John, they weren’t what really made him happy. It was the way she ran to his arms when he came in, her excitement at new challenges, the love she showered on him.

  ‘Your whole life?’ he teased her, taking a tendril of her hair in his hand and winding it around his finger. ‘That’s a bit dramatic, even for you!’

  ‘Bonny tried vainly to smile.

  ‘Don’t cry, darling.’ John held her close, smoothing back her hair. ‘Your parents will come and stay, you only have to ask them. I’m sure your mother would be tickled pink to help you when the baby comes.’

  Bonny quaked inwardly. If only she’d pretended to lose this ‘baby’ right after the honeymoon, regardless of bleeding to back it up! It hadn’t occurred to her that John would broadcast the news quite so soon as he did. Now her mother was knitting, posting nasty little cuttings from magazines about preventing stretch marks, varicose veins, cracking nipples and worst of all, piles. It was Bonny’s biggest fear that her mother might turn up on the doorstep with two dozen nappies, intending to stick at her daughter’s side until the delivery.

  What was she going to do? Her mother and Aunt Lydia would be suspicious of her when the news got out she wasn’t pregnant after all. She would be five months gone now. Was it feasible to fake a miscarriage at that late date? Surely women had to go to hospital that far on?

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Bonny sniffed. She’d think of something in the day or two after John had left. She just wasn’t thinking straight right now. ‘Women had to put up with their husbands being away for longer than this during the war, I’m just being silly. I don’t want my mother here fussing over me, not yet anyway, she’ll just get on my nerves. But I will miss you terribly.’

  ‘Well, if you won’t ask them, how about getting some help in daily?’ John asked, his face soft with concern. ‘It’s so isolated here. I get worried you might have a fall or be ill.’

  ‘I don’t need help in the house,’ Bonny scoffed. The Chestnuts was huge by her council house standards, with four bedrooms, three rooms and the kitchen downstairs, but three of the bedrooms were still shut up waiting for redecoration, and anyway, she liked looking after it herself. ‘Enoch comes in to do the garden nearly every day, and there’s always the telephone. You mustn’t worry about me.’

  ‘I can’t help worrying,’ John said, his brown eyes anxious. ‘But if it gets too much for you, ask Mrs Perkins in the post office to find someone for you. And if you want furniture moved, ask Enoch.’

  ‘He’s doing a grand job on the garden.’ Bonny turned on the window-seat to look at it, glad of an opportunity to change the subject. ‘We’re going to start putting in daffodil and tulip bulbs next week.’

  Bonny had grown attached to the funny old man John had employed as a gardener. He was nearly seventy, spoke in an almost unintelligible Somerset accent and he could neither read nor write. But through him Bonny had found deep pleasure in the garden, watching as he pruned and dug, listening when he told her about the plants. John said he was a substitute for her own father, and perhaps he was right.

  ‘It’s beginning to look like it did when I was a boy,’ John said thoughtfully. The majestic chestnut trees towered over the grey stone wall. Enoch had dug out brambles, scythed down the long grass and nettles and now at last a lawn was reappearing. John had so many good memories of the garden, of helping his father build the arbour and indeed securing roses to it which were still there, as vigorous as ever. The pond had always been a delight as a small boy, watching tadpoles turn to frogs and the dragonflies shimmering ove
r the surface.

  ‘In London boys would kill for all those conkers.’ Bonny pointed out the carpet of them under the chestnuts. ‘There was only one chestnut tree in Dagenham and they used to poke it with sticks to get them.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll have lots of boys,’ John said, putting his hand on her stomach. ‘I’ll hang a rope for them to swing on like I used to do. Maybe I’ll even get around to building a tree house.’

  ‘Don’t wish lots of boys on us.’ Bonny felt a renewed pang of conscience. His hand felt so warm and loving, and she wished there was a baby in there. ‘Two is enough, maybe a girl too.’

  ‘You don’t seem to be getting much bigger,’ he said, almost wistfully.

  ‘Good job too.’ She laughed lightly. In fact she had put on weight. With regular meals and no dancing she was almost two inches bigger round the waist and there was a curve to her belly. ‘I’ll get fat soon enough. My mum said she didn’t show till she was seven months.’

  It was John’s old-fashioned prudishness which had made it so easy to carry on the deceit. Like so many men of his class he believed pregnancy and the subsequent birth to be an entirely female province. If he knew anything about it at all he was far too gentlemanly to discuss it. Bonny had heard him admit she was in a ‘delicate condition’ once to a friend on the telephone and that just about summed up his attitude to the situation. Fortunately this meant he also took her word for it that she had attended the doctor in Wells and he never asked for any information.

  ‘I never thought I would hate leaving you so much.’ John pulled her into his arms and hugged her fiercely. ‘I used to love travelling once. Now I’d rather work as a postman or something just so I could be with you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t really like that,’ Bonny said and kissed him lingeringly. ‘Besides, think how wonderful it will be when you come home again? But I’d better finish your packing or you won’t be going anywhere.’

  Bonny waved until John’s taxi was out of sight, then closed the wrought-iron gate, wiping away her tears. It was eight in the morning and the sun was out, steam rising from the bushes and the puddles in the drive. Yesterday it had seemed as if autumn had set in for good, but now it was glorious summer again.

  She paused before going in to clear the breakfast things. She thought her house was the loveliest in England. Large graceful windows with arched tops, two either side of the central porch: such perfect symmetry, like the rather grand doll’s house that Belinda Noakes used to have back in Amberley. Wistaria grew up the front and trailed along under the bedroom windows. It had finished flowering by the time their honeymoon was over, but she’d seen one or two blooms, enough to guess how if would look next year. Round the back of the house honeysuckle and jasmine scrambled up everywhere.

  It was funny that she’d taken to gardening; when her father had been so proud of his it hadn’t meant a thing. But of course there was a great deal of difference between a Dagenham garden and this one. Here nature did what it wanted to, no tidy rows of salvia and alyssum, but clematis winding its way into an apple tree, ivy covering the old shed where John had left his car, clumps of dog daisies jumping up wherever they could find space.

  There had been moments since their wedding day when Bonny had half expected to find this was just a wonderful dream, that she’d wake and find herself back in grim digs. She still found it baffling that a city girl who had once believed she couldn’t survive without a daily visit to the shops could actually adore such isolation.

  Who would have thought she would suggest keeping chickens? But she had, and she fed them and collected the eggs. She had made strawberry and raspberry jam when she discovered a few pounds of sugar stashed away in the pantry, and she got more pleasure hearing Enoch say it was better than the jam his wife made than she used to get from the applause in the theatre.

  Bonny hadn’t missed dancing at all. Sometimes when John was out working she’d put on her tap shoes, wind up the old gramophone and dance just for fun, but she had no yearning to do it in public any more.

  The click of the letter-box and the sight of Ellie’s familiar large flowery handwriting on the doormat banished Bonny’s intention of scrubbing the kitchen floor. She rushed across the hall to pick the letter up, then returned to the kitchen to sit and read it with a cup of tea. Bonny loved her kitchen almost as much as the bedroom. It was large and sunny, with windows looking out on to the back garden and she’d made dainty blue gingham curtains for them. She had never seen a kitchen with so many cupboards. Some had panels of glass in them and she’d raided the boxes of china up in the attic and displayed pretty plates, jugs and glasses with great care. She often dreamed in here, as she worked through a step-by-step cookery book which John had bought her, of the days when meat rationing would end, when she could cook a lavish meal for some of John’s friends and lay the dining-table with all the old family silver.

  Since Bonny’s wedding, Ellie’s letters had been infrequent and short. She said little about her predicament, and it seemed as if she was just taking one day at a time, hoping for some miracle which would solve her problem overnight. Usually her news was all centred on the cast of Oklahoma – funny, light-hearted stories about the girls in the chorus, or her digs.

  But as Bonny read this letter she grew alarmed, quite forgetting her own worries. She could sense that Ellie was nearly at the end of her tether. Even though she tried to make jokes about it, Bonny knew she couldn’t possibly cope in such a situation.

  It started off cheerfully enough, a funny story about colliding with a piece of scenery in the middle of ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’. But then she began to write about Edward, who had a walk-on part as a butler in a West End play.

  ‘I caught the matinée the other day. I found myself just watching him, wondering if I could tell him about the baby and get him to marry me. I bet he would too! But that’s a bit like shooting yourself through the foot. It might save me from disgrace and give the baby a name, but I still wouldn’t be able to work.’

  From then on the letter became even more disturbing. She spoke of finding a cheap room and eking out her savings with some waitressing or cleaning work until the last possible moment. Then she went on to say how she’d discovered that most hospitals could arrange adoptions, even taking the baby at the moment of birth. There was no agonising over whether she could really bear to do this, just that level-headed acceptance that this was her only possible route.

  But finally, at the end of the letter, she dropped all pretence of stoic optimism. ‘I just don’t know what to do, Bonny. Sometimes I think I’m going to just fall apart with worry. I can’t possibly hope to conceal it after October. I’m lacing myself into a tight corset now and sometimes I can barely breathe, let alone sing and dance. I’ve got to come up with some good reason for leaving. If I just disappear without any adequate explanation I’ll never get work again after the baby’s born. You were always good at making up plausible stories, work on that one for me!’

  ‘You won’t go to a cheap room,’ Bonny said aloud as she put down the letter. One of the three spare bedrooms upstairs was in quite good shape, the only one which hadn’t been damaged by the leaking roof. She would set to work today and clean it out. ‘You’ll come here, Ellie Forester. I owe you.’

  Ellie clattered down the stairs from the dressing-rooms after the matinée with an enormous sense of relief. It was now the end of September and at lunchtime she’d been in to see the producer with the tale that she had to go to Canada to see an old aunt who was terminally ill. Mr Brascott had been very understanding, asking only that she stayed on another couple of weeks. He had been extremely complimentary and had even suggested she contact him again when she returned to England.

  Ellie intended to go and have something to eat, then telephone Bonny to tell her the plan she’d devised had worked, before returning to the theatre for the evening performance. She wasn’t absolutely certain about Bonny’s idea that she should go and stay in Somerset with her. But she thought s
he might make for a city like Bristol where no one would know her, find a room and a job and contact a welfare organisation.

  She refused to even think of any alternative but adoption for her baby. She didn’t dare. If she let herself imagine holding it, she knew she would waver. Being an unmarried mother wasn’t just frowned on, but considered almost a crime. Now she fully understood why her mother had taken Tom Forester’s name and acted the part of a widow. That really was the only way of protecting her child and herself from malicious gossip.

  Ellie didn’t immediately see Sir Miles as she reached the stage door area. A group of dancers and several stage-hands had gathered to chat there and the one light was rather dim.

  ‘Miss Forester!’ The booming voice made her jerk her head round just as she was about to open the door to leave. ‘I’m glad I caught you. Have you got a moment?’

  Ellie could never see the man, even from a distance, without feeling a lurch in her stomach. At Bonny’s wedding they had spoken briefly, but meeting him at a social event hadn’t made things easier. He still addressed her formally, as ‘Miss Forester’.

  ‘I was just going to get something to eat,’ she said, colouring up.

  He was as formidable to her now as he had been at their first meeting. He wasn’t a man given to smiling much and his ruddy complexion, heavy jowls and bulbous nose all seemed to speak of a bad temper. Today he wore a rather flamboyant embroidered waistcoat beneath his dark suit. Although it accentuated his big belly, it also suggested he wasn’t quite the reserved man she’d initially taken him for.

  ‘Well, let’s talk while you eat,’ he said. ‘I know of a little place quite nearby.’

  Ellie was relieved that the place he took her to was only an ordinary café as she wasn’t sure whether he intended to treat her to the meal.

  ‘I can recommend the Toad in the Hole,’ he said as they sat down at a table by the window. ‘I quite often come in here for supper. They make superb gravy.’