Sisters Three

by Jessica Stirling

  ‘I do believe,’ Hughes said, ‘that the Law Society is best left out of it.’

  ‘I won’t sell,’ Polly said. ‘I will, however, lease the warehouse.’

  ‘Lincoln Stephens do wish to purchase.’

  ‘I will not give up ownership,’ Polly said. ‘Nominally the property may be mine but we both know that it’s Dominic’s and one day he’ll come back for it.’

  ‘If there’s anything left,’ said Carfin Hughes.

  ‘A blackened patch of ground,’ Polly said, ‘will still be his.’

  ‘What sort of rental would you be looking for?’ Carfin said.

  ‘Two hundred and forty pounds a month,’ Victor Shadwell said.

  ‘Oh, come now!’

  ‘Two-year lease,’ Polly said. ‘Insurance to be met by the tenant.’

  ‘That is usurious. Insurance rates have doubled in the past three months.’

  ‘There are eight senior staff on the payroll,’ Polly said. ‘I would expect them to be employed by the new management.’

  ‘No, no. You’re asking too much,’ Carfin Hughes said.

  ‘If,’ Polly said, ‘if you weren’t an interested party, if you were acting exclusively and objectively on my behalf, wouldn’t you consider it a good deal?’

  ‘I might,’ the lawyer admitted. ‘I might at that.’

  ‘Will you put my proposals to the appropriate party?’

  He laughed, an odd little haw-haw-haw. She knew that she had been tested and had passed with flying colours and that Carfin Hughes was gentleman enough to acknowledge it.

  He said, ‘Is there room for negotiation, may I ask?’

  ‘None,’ Polly said. ‘Would you like the terms in writing?’

  ‘That would,’ Carfin said, ‘be handy.’

  ‘Good,’ Polly said. ‘Thank you for your time, Fin.’

  ‘You mean…’

  ‘You may go now.’

  She rang the bell on the desk and the secretary opened the door to show the lawyer out. Carfin hesitated before he got to his feet.

  ‘Am I to assume,’ he said, ‘that my services to Manone Enterprises are to be terminated and another legal adviser employed in my place?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Polly said. ‘Better the devil you know, Fin. In fact, if you aren’t otherwise engaged you may take me to dinner on Saturday evening.’

  ‘May I really?’

  ‘You may.’

  ‘Eight o’clock?’

  ‘Eight will be ideal,’ said Polly. ‘Will you send a car?’

  ‘I will,’ he said. ‘Of course I will.’

  Then, smiling sardonically, he gave her a little bow and left.

  Polly closed the glass-panelled door then turning to Victor Shadwell pulled a face and burst out laughing.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t say it, Victor, please.’

  ‘Don’t say what, Polly?’

  ‘That Dominic would have been proud of me.’

  ‘The thought,’ the old man said, ‘never even crossed my mind.’

  * * *

  On that Thursday morning the newspapers were filled with the latest developments on the border of Poland and Silesia and the wide-ranging powers that the British Prime Minister had been granted to ‘arrange’ for war. Mobilisation had begun in earnest and Central Warehouse had lost all but a handful of its staff to call-up. In consequence the change of management had been effected much more efficiently than Polly had anticipated.

  She had got what she’d asked for; Fin Hughes had seen to that. Unless the British economy crumbled completely at least she wouldn’t starve. She was relieved to be rid of the warehouse. It smacked too much of Dominic, was too much his domain. She also nurtured a certain patriotic pride in having surrendered the building to a small-arms manufacturer and felt that by her sacrifice she had already made a contribution to the defeat of the Nazi dictator.

  Evacuation of women and children was inevitable. In August, after the schools reopened, little was being taught but discipline and drill. Babs had no scruples about keeping her three out of class for an afternoon. In fact, she was dying to get behind the wheel of the big Wolseley, to try her hand at driving something more powerful than a three-wheeled Beezer. She jumped at the chance to take the family on a picnic and allow Polly to do a little business at the same time. She guessed, of course, that Polly was up to something, but Polly was always up to something these days.

  Polly was waiting in the driveway when Babs and the children arrived. Miss Dawlish, Polly’s brand new housekeeper, had packed a hamper and stowed it carefully in the luggage boot along with rugs and cushions. It was a magnificent afternoon, hot and still, the sky cloudless. The children, Angus in particular, were excited at the prospect of a drive into the country with Mummy, Granny Peabody and Aunt Polly. Baby April had recently found her voice and babbled happily and gave her aunt coy, twinkling smiles from beneath her sun bonnet.

  Babs tugged on her driving gloves, knotted a scarf over her hair and, leaving Miss Dawlish and Polly to settle the children into the back seat, slid behind the huge steering wheel and cautiously surveyed the array of dials and switches. She had no intention of making a fool of herself or of imperilling the lives of her children. She turned the key in the ignition and with Angus scowling critically over her shoulder, checked the petrol and water gauges.

  Doors slammed; Babs hardly noticed.

  Polly said, ‘Now are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘Aw yeah, absolutely,’ Babs said.

  Miss Dawlish leapt back into the doorway as Babs released the handbrake, depressed the clutch, tapped the accelerator and, tearing leaves from the hedge en passant, lurched the car through the gate into Manor Park Avenue and swung its long snout towards the Paisley Road.

  ‘Nothin’ to it,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘Piece o’ cake really.’

  An hour later Lizzie was installed in the back seat. Bolstered by her grandchildren and with April on her knee, she gazed out at stretches of moorland and hill ridges that she had seen only from a safe distance, a landscape that seemed very different now that she was part of it.

  Signs of war were everywhere; little regiments of school cadets marching along pavements in peaceful suburban villages, a troop of volunteer fire-fighters struggling to tame the ferocious flow from a water main, a convoy of camouflaged lorries weaving down a back road, an open-sided truck with ten or a dozen girls clinging to ropes, all waving, all shouting, their cheeks reddened by unaccustomed sun; also raw brick shelters, emergency water tanks, policemen who weren’t policemen riding about on bicycles, and overhead, floating high above the hills, the first silvery barrage balloons that any of them had ever seen.

  ‘Elephants,’ Angus cried out. ‘Look, Granma, elephants in the sky.’

  There were no flowers left in Bluebell Wood which lay behind the decaying gates of the Garscadden estate, but the trees were old and shady-cool. The Wolseley was parked in shadow, the picnic things spread out on a rug under the boughs of an oak that Polly said had been there for two hundred years, though no one, not even Angus, was going to swallow that tale.

  They could no longer see elephants in the sky, no longer hear the pam-pam-pam of an artillery battery practising in the depths of the hills, could no longer smell the cloudy metallic reek of Clydeside foundries or the tang of the sea from the river, only the hot, fecund odour of weeds and wheat fields and hedgerows rife with flourish and the bland dog-rose.

  ‘I thought you’d business to do,’ Babs whispered to her sister as they set out sandwiches and cake and unscrewed the tops of tea flasks and bottles of ginger pop. ‘What sort of business can you have in the middle of nowhere?’

  Polly got up from her knees and smoothing down her dress looked uphill through the trees to the crest of the ridge.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said. ‘I’ll be about an hour or a little longer. Keep me something to eat, please.’

  ‘Goin’ for a walk?’ Babs said. ‘I’ll come wi
th…’

  ‘Alone.’

  ‘God, it’s a guy. You’re meetin’ a guy. Is it Tony?’

  ‘I’m not meeting anyone,’ Polly said. ‘No one, you understand.’

  Babs wrestled with the stopper of the ginger pop. Angus was lying full-length close by, ostentatiously licking his lips. May and June were prowling around the hamper like two demure little predators. There were flies too, black flies. Lizzie flapped her plump hands to shoo them away from April’s face and tried not to listen to her daughters’ conversation which, she felt, was not for her ears.

  ‘Where are we, exactly?’ Babs said. ‘Are we near Breslin?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My God, Poll, you’ve pulled some stuff before but this…’

  ‘If you must know, Dominic has property near here,’ Polly said. ‘If I’ve read the map correctly I can get to it by taking a path up through the wood.’

  ‘I’ll drive you there by the road.’

  ‘No,’ Polly said. ‘I’d prefer you to stay with Mammy and the children. Please, don’t make a fuss, Babs. It’s something I have to do on my own.’

  ‘Is that why you brought us here?’

  ‘Yes, partly.’

  ‘An’ I thought you just fancied a nice day out in the country. I should’ve known better.’

  ‘Mother,’ Polly said, ‘I’m going for a little stroll. I shan’t be too long.’

  Lying was easy, lying was simple. She looked at her mother, big and comfortable even in the heat of an August afternoon, at her cheap floral-patterned dress, moth-eaten straw hat, wrinkled cotton stockings and shoes with worn heels, and felt a transient wave of remorse pass through her, the lie within the lie.

  ‘Where?’ Lizzie said. ‘Where is there to go round here?’

  ‘The top of the hill,’ said Polly.

  * * *

  The footpath led over a stile and across an empty back road. Garscadden wood lay behind her, ahead a field of ripe barley whispering in the sun. She followed the path by the side of the field, climbing gradually towards a line of conifers, dense and dark above her. She skirted the plantation, emerged on the edge of another field, and suddenly the valley of the Clyde was spread out below her, from the braes above Paisley to the mountains of Cowal, faint on the horizon and shimmering in the August heat. How small and contained Scotland was, she thought, how precious; then she heard laughter and, moving on, caught sight of the girls she had passed in the truck on the road.

  Bare-armed and bare-headed, one was driving an ancient tractor while the others, six or seven in all, followed along in its wake, dropping seeds into shallow furrows. Polly had no idea what the crop would be. She gave the energetic crew a wide berth, slid between the strands of a fence and headed up the flank of the pasture towards the farm.

  He was leaning on a gate. At first she took him for a farmer. He wore a faded cotton shirt, sleeves rolled up, and a hat, a fedora of all things, set back from his brow. He was smoking a cigarette and a drowsy, rather dusty tabby cat was perched on the gatepost beside him.

  ‘Afternoon,’ the man said, amiably.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Polly.

  ‘Are ye lost, lassie?’

  ‘I’m looking for Blackstone Farm.’

  ‘Ag’n’Fish?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Are you,’ he spoke clearly, affectedly, ‘from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries?’

  Polly laughed, shook her head. ‘What gave you that impression?’

  ‘You’re too dolled up to be here t’ dig for victory. Welfare?’

  ‘Welfare?’ Polly said.

  ‘Aye, the girls’ve a welfare officer. I’ve never met her so I reckoned it might be you.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Polly said. ‘Is this your land?’

  ‘It used to be, aye.’

  ‘May I ask,’ Polly said, ‘who you are?’

  ‘Dougie Giffard’s the name.’ His hand went to his hat, a finger flicked the brim. ‘I think you’re Dominic Manone’s good lady wife. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s mine, the farm,’ Dougie said. ‘All legal. I have the papers in the house.’

  ‘I know it is,’ Polly said. ‘I’m not here to dispute your ownership.’

  ‘Very generous,’ Dougie said. ‘Dominic – Mr Manone – was very generous.’

  ‘What are the girls doing?’

  ‘Ploughin’ an’ seedin’,’ Dougie said. ‘So they tell me.’

  ‘On your land?’

  ‘Naw, I sold most of it off. Fifty shillin’s the acre, thirty-three acres. I kept the farmhouse.’

  ‘Do the girls lodge here?’

  ‘No room here. They’re billeted temporarily down the road in Drumry church hall until better accommodation can be found for them. I give them a bit of dinner at midday an’ let them use the you-know-what, those o’ them who are too modest t’ go into the woods.’

  ‘What do you do for a living, Mr Giffard, now that you’re no longer employed by my husband?’

  ‘I suppose I’m what you’d call a man o’ means.’

  ‘Eighty pounds won’t keep you for ever,’ Polly said.

  He turned away, propped an elbow on the gate and looked towards the farmhouse. There was laundry on a rope in the yard and, in spite of the heat, a thin spiral of smoke rising above the chimney.

  He said, ‘Would you care t’ come over to the house, partake o’ a glass o’ somethin’, take a look round?’

  ‘Thank you all the same,’ Polly said, ‘that won’t be necessary.’

  ‘What will be necessary then?’ Dougie said. ‘What is it brings you here?’

  ‘I’m looking for Tony Lombard.’

  ‘Tony’s gone,’ Dougie said. ‘Long gone.’

  ‘Do you know where he went?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I think you do, Mr Giffard.’

  ‘Have you not heard from him?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Ask your husband,’ Dougie said. ‘He’s bound to know.’

  ‘Please,’ Polly said, ‘just tell me where Tony’s is.’

  ‘He went away with the girl, with Penny.’

  ‘Oh!’

  She was less than surprised, less than dismayed.

  ‘Tony never told you anythin’ about her, did he?’ Dougie said.

  Polly shook her head.

  ‘He’s goin’ to be a daddy,’ Dougie said.

  ‘A daddy?’

  ‘Aye, sometime fairly soon, I think. October or November.’

  ‘I see,’ Polly said.

  ‘They sailed for Canada when the balloon went up then moved on pretty quick to the United States,’ Dougie said. ‘The last I heard, Tony was lookin’ for work on the docks in Seattle.’

  ‘Not New York?’

  ‘Nope, not New York.’

  ‘Does he write to you?’ Polly said.

  ‘She does. Penny does.’

  ‘Why does Tony have to work? I thought – doesn’t he have money?’

  ‘Not near as much as he might’ve had,’ Dougie said. ‘Aye, there was money. We were rollin’ in money for a week or two, a lot more money than the police ever confiscated. They took away my printer, though.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I could’ve had a nice wee jobbing line set up if they hadn’t took all my stuff away. Still, I suppose I got off light, all things considered.’

  ‘How much money didn’t the police confiscate?’

  ‘Thousands, thousands an’ thousands. None o’ it real, alas.’

  ‘Where is it now, Mr Giffard?’

  ‘Search me,’ Dougie said innocently.

  Polly didn’t care enough about the counterfeit money to press him.

  She said, ‘He can’t marry her, of course. Tony, I mean.’

  ‘Can’t he?’ Dougie said. ‘What’s stoppin’ him?’

  ‘She already has a husband. She’s married to my father.’

  ‘Is she?’ Dougie said then casting pretence aside, turned to face Polly. ‘She�
��s not married t’ anyone, not now. Even a good Roman Catholic boy like Tony Lombard can marry her wi’out a qualm o’ conscience.’

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he? My father’s dead?’

  ‘He might be.’

  ‘Did Dominic – did my husband murder him?’

  ‘Can’t say.’

  ‘Was it Tony?’

  ‘Who knows!’

  ‘You were here, damn it. You know, don’t you?’

  ‘He was kind t’ me,’ Dougie said, ‘your husband, more generous than I’d any right to expect. He left me well provided for. I don’t need much, just enough to keep me an’ the cat fed. I can sit out the war right here, quite comfortably.’

  ‘And do what?’ said Penny. ‘Do what?’

  Dougie thrust out his under lip, shrugged. ‘Keep an eye on things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Just things.’

  Polly closed her hand on his arm.

  Dougie didn’t draw away. He wouldn’t meet her eye, though. He stared across the corner of the field at the land-girls and the tractor, hardly bigger than a toy, churning up the pasture under a milky blue sky.

  ‘He’s buried here, isn’t he?’ Polly said. ‘My God, Dominic’s paying you to make sure he stays buried, that he’s never found?’

  ‘That, Mrs Manone,’ said Dougie, ‘is pure conjecture.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Polly said. ‘Pure conjecture. Am I right, though? Am I not right?’

  ‘You might be,’ Dougie said. ‘An’ then again…’

  ‘I might not.’

  ‘You don’t really want t’ know what happened here that night, do you?’

  She turned this way then that, looking at the plantation, at the shallow furrows that scored the clay, at the knoll above the farmhouse. Anywhere: he could be anywhere. It mattered not. She didn’t want him back, whatever was left of him. She felt only relief that Giffard’s little lies and evasions had finally exposed the truth. Her father was gone for good this time, lost not in Flanders but here on the fringes of the city he had scorned and abandoned.

  She couldn’t mourn and would not condemn. She would take it no further, not one step beyond this place, this point in time. She must leave her father – and Tony – behind, and move on.

  Polly shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t want to know what happened.’