Where the Heart Is

by Annie Groves

  Hellfire and damnation, Con thought angrily. It was ruddy typical of Emily to turn up when she wasn’t wanted, causing him even more trouble than he already had. Women, the whole lot of them, were sometimes more trouble than they were worth. He did want to see Emily, of course. He wanted more money from her. He had quickly realised that by keeping up the pressure on her, he could force her to continue to give him money. Not as much money as his card game racket had been giving him, but enough to keep Ed Mulligan and the other bloodsuckers at bay. Not that he’d need to do that for long. Con had plans, big plans. Plans he wasn’t intending to share with anyone, least of all Eva, whose jealousy seemed to grow stronger by the day.

  What he intended to do was slip away quietly from Liverpool and set himself up in London, and for that he needed Emily’s money, but typically she’d chosen her time badly. Any minute now Eva would be here for rehearsal, and if she found Emily with him, there’d be hell to pay. Con was beginning to seriously regret ever having got involved with the fiery singer, with her circus background.

  She was tired of touring, she kept telling him pointedly. She wanted something more permanent, somewhere more permanent and someone more permanent, and that someone, she had made very plain, was Con. That was the very last thing that Con wanted.

  Con’s ‘office’ was extremely small. The large desk upon which he liked to rest his feet took up most of the limited space, and now when someone suddenly thrust open the door, Emily was almost knocked off her chair with the force of it slamming into the back of it.

  The woman who burst into the room, was heavily made up, with a mass of dark curls.

  ‘Ah, my dearest love,’ she began theatrically, clasping her hands to the expanse of bosom swelling over the top of her low-necked blouse, only to stop speaking when she saw Emily, an expression of mingled fury and grief worthy of a pantomime dame replacing her previous look of adoration.

  ‘Who is this?’ she demanded.

  ‘Oh, I’m nobody, my dear,’ Emily tried to calm the emerging Virago, only to recognise that the other woman had no intention of being calmed. Con would involve himself with these highly strung and oh-so-dramatic women. Personally Emily thought it must be dreadfully wearing.

  ‘Look, Eva, why don’t you go and rehearse? Emily means nothing to me. She’s just my wife, that’s all,’ Con said hastily.

  ‘Your wife! But you cannot be married. I intended to marry you and be your wife.’

  Too late Con realised where his desperation to ward off Eva’s fanatical jealousy had taken him. He had treated his marriage in such a cavalier fashion and cared so little about it that it had simply not occurred to him that it would matter to anyone else. For all Eva’s talk of wanting someone permanent, he had never imagined that she was seriously thinking in terms of marriage.

  Poor woman, Emily thought sympathetically.

  If only Con was the honourable sort who would now agree to ‘arrange’ to be caught as the guilty partner in their marriage, then they could divorce and this Eva would be welcome to him, but knowing Con as she did, somehow Emily thought that marriage to his current mistress wasn’t likely to be part of Con’s plans. The trouble with Con was that he lived in his own imaginary world where the things that mattered to other people didn’t intrude into his fantasy of how he wanted his life to be.

  ‘You have broken my heart, dishonoured me with your false promises, and now there is nothing left for me but this.’

  Emily’s eyes rounded as she saw the knife the other woman was now brandishing wildly, holding it as though she was about to stab it into her own heart.

  Poor dear. She wouldn’t do it, of course. It was all play acting–anyone could see that–but she did have her pride to think of so Emily was willing to play along out of sisterly solidarity and beg her not to hurt herself.

  The minute Con saw the knife he panicked. She was going to do it, she was going to kill him just like her father had killed her mother, just as she was always warning him she would do if she caught him with someone else. She had him up against the desk with no way to escape because she was standing between him and the door. He was stronger than her, though. He could overpower her, take the knife from her.

  ‘My dear—’ Emily began, but then stopped as Con suddenly launched himself at the woman, reaching up for the knife. For a few seconds they both struggled for possession of it and then the woman burst into tears and released it, leaving Con holding it before throwing herself against him, begging him not to break her heart.

  To Emily the observer, helpless to intervene, knowing what must happen when the full weight of such a well-built woman fell against the knife now clasped in Con’s hand and pointing towards his body, time seemed to have slowed down, each second of intolerable length as she saw the woman’s expression change from theatrical drama to bewilderment and then genuine shock. Her hands went to Con’s chest and were removed, her eyes widening, as she looked down at them and saw the blood on them. She began to scream, an awful high-pitched, terrified sound, like an animal caught in a trap, Emily thought as she went first to the telephone, quickly telling the operator who answered that a doctor and an ambulance were needed, giving her the theatre’s address, and then going to the woman, gently but firmly urging her away from Con, who, supported by the desk behind him, was slumped over, his hands still clutching the knife, which was buried deep in his chest.

  The woman had stopped screaming now and was simply sobbing loudly, but Emily could still hear the steady drip of Con’s blood onto the floor.

  His eyes were wide open–shocked with disbelief. He was still alive, though, because as she went to him Emily heard him saying her name, like a child lost and afraid and not understanding what had happened.

  Poor Con. He never meant any harm, not really. He was just foolish, that was all.

  None of the cast had appeared yet to see what the screaming was all about but then they were probably used to angry females screaming at Con, and had learned not to get involved.

  He was trying to say something, Emily saw, his hands on the knife as he looked imploringly at her.

  Blood had started to trickle from the corner of his mouth. Emily opened her handbag and removed her handkerchief, gently dabbing it away.

  She could hear the sound of an ambulance siren growing louder as it got closer, and then ceasing; its silence was followed the sound of the outside door being opened, and then male voices.

  ‘Up here, she called out, relieved to hear feet pounding up the stairs.

  One look at the face of the doctor who had come with the ambulance confirmed how serious things were. But Con was still conscious, still watching and looking so terribly afraid, silently begging for comfort and reassurance, that she couldn’t say anything.

  Whilst they were taking Con downstairs to the waiting ambulance Emily put a telephone call through to Whitchurch post office, and asked if a message could be sent to ask her neighbour to take Tommy in for the night because she had been delayed in Liverpool and couldn’t get back.

  Strangely, she had no anxiety about Tommy’s welfare. Somehow she just knew that he would be safe and looked after, and that she need have no fears on his account.

  ‘I do wish you would marry me, Francine.’

  ‘Marcus, we’ve already been through that, and you know how I feel. I’m afraid that if I marry you then I’ll lose you and that the best way for me to keep you and our love safe is for us to stay as we are. After all, there’s nothing I haven’t given you that I would give you if we were married; there’s nothing I’ve held back from you.’

  They were in the apartment and alone, so Marcus was free to take her hand and carry it to his lips to press a fierce kiss into her palm before saying thickly, ‘No. You have given all of yourself to me with more generosity and love than I had any right to expect, but I still wish you would marry me, Francine, for your own sake as much as mine. The world is not always kind to a woman who lives outside society’s rules.’

  ‘You mean tha
t society will shun me because I am your lover and not your wife?’ Francine gave a dismissive shrug. ‘Let it. I don’t care. We are both adults, Marcus, and old enough to choose for ourselves how we live our lives.’

  ‘There is your family to think of. You may not care, but they will. One day the war will be over and what is permitted and permissible now will not be then.’

  ‘Marcus, it’s no good. Please try to understand. I love you too much to marry you. It’s silly of me, I know, but I have this superstitious feeling that if I marry you …’

  ‘I might die? Because you married Brandon and he died?’

  ‘No … I … I don ‘t know. I don’t know why I feel the way I do, I just do.’

  ‘It’s illogical and crazy and, God, Francine, have you thought of what could happen? If there were to be a child … my child?’

  He said it with such passion and longing that Francine knew immediately how much he hoped for that. But then wasn’t it natural for any man, knowing that he must face war and possibly death, to want to feel that he had left something of himself behind him in the living form of his child? She couldn’t blame him for that and she didn’t.

  ‘We haven’t always been as practical as we might,’ Marcus reminded her.

  ‘Be careful,’ Francine warned him, ‘otherwise you’ll have me suspecting that you’ve deliberately been “less than practical".’

  ‘The last thing I think about when I hold you in my arms is tactics–of any kind,’ Marcus told her truthfully. ‘The reality is that whilst the battalion is currently posted to home duties, the way the war is now progressing means that the threat of invasion is more or less over. However, we are going to need more troops in Europe if we are fully to rout Hitler and win this war.’

  ‘You mean that you are likely to be posted overseas?’

  ‘I didn’t say that and I can’t answer that question. You know it’s against regulations,’ Marcus told her.

  Francine didn’t want to think of him being posted abroad and her not being able to see him with the freedom they were currently enjoying. Perhaps she was being selfish but she couldn’t help it.

  ‘Let’s just stay as we are, Marcus. Please?’ she begged him.

  ‘Very well,’ he agreed, but Francine could sense that he was disappointed.

  * * *

  ‘Well, at least your mum has said that I can talk to your dad about us getting engaged,’ Bobby tried to comfort Sasha as they sat together at a table in the Grafton, watching the dancers jitterbugging.

  ‘If he agrees,’ Sasha replied. She felt so miserable and low, so frightened deep down inside herself that she was going to lose Bobby to a bomb.

  Sasha was beginning to think that the only thing that would make her feel better was the war ending, but even when it did there would still be bombs that needed defusing. There were so many of them lying out of sight, hidden and dangerous, deadly, killing people. Sasha could feel the panic starting to grow inside her again.

  ‘Let’s dance,’ she said, pushing back her chair and reaching for Bobby’s hand. Perhaps if they were dancing and Bobby was holding her close she might be able to stop thinking about bombs and Bobby being killed.

  THIRTY

  One of the mechanics on the ground removed the blocks keeping the training plane’s wheels and thus the plane itself static, whilst the other spun the propeller for her, both of them standing back as Lou gunned the engines, her heart thudding almost as fast as the propellers were spinning, or so it seemed to her, as she eased down the throttle until the small two-seater training plane, with her instructor in the back, and Lou herself at the controls, bumped across the grass and then began to taxi down the runway.

  This was what it was all about–all those hours of lessons and diagrams in the base’s classrooms, listening intently to lecturers explaining the actual workings of flight to them–this rush of adrenalin and delight, mixed with awe and fear of failure. Determinedly Lou increased her pressure on the throttle, whilst the engines whined in response, and she listened intently for that note in them that would tell her that she had the right combination of speed and power to enable the plane to lift into the sky. It was a ‘sense’ that good pilots developed, they had been told in the classroom, an awareness, a feeling that went beyond anything that any fancy equipment inside the cockpit of the plane could replace; a skill that could mean the difference between life and death for a pilot with nothing to guide them other than their own well-honed instincts. Would she develop that ‘sense'? There it was, the infinitesimal drop from a high-pitched whine to something slightly deeper, the sound throbbing through her as Lou held her breath and gripped the wheel as she gave the engine more power.

  There, the bumping had stopped and the nose of the plane had started to lift as though by magic. She was so excited and thrilled that for a second Lou almost felt as though it had happened by magic and forgot that control of the plane lay with her, but once again her attentive ear caught the warning increase in pitch of the engines and she quickly gave them the power they were demanding.

  She’d done it. They were airborne! What a thrill! She hardly dare let herself believe that she had actually done it, but she had.

  Relief hollowed out her stomach that, after all these weeks of lectures, schoolroom lessons and tests, followed by bumps and lifts over the training school’s grass airfield, she had finally done it and had got a plane successfully into the air. This was no time to relax, though. Instead she must concentrate on what she was doing, on feeling the controls of the plane respond to her touch, on listening to the sound of the engine.

  ‘Right, now level off.’

  Lou nodded in response to the shouted instruction from her instructor. Her palms felt wet and slippery as she eased back the speed just enough to stop the plane from climbing any further; she couldn’t afford to give in to any nerves now. Instead she must listen to the plane and let it guide her and teach her. Beneath her the countryside would be spread out like a patchwork quilt just as it had been when Verity had taken her up for that thrilling never-to-be-forgotten first spin, but she wasn’t passenger now, she was the pilot. Determinedly she scanned the empty sky, shaken by the thought of how it must feel not just to have to fly a plane, but to have to fight in one as well.

  Half an hour later, having brought the plane safely, if somewhat bumpily, down, Lou climbed out of the cockpit, dragging her parachute and its harness with her, feeling both apprehensive and euphoric. Euphoric because she had actually flown, and apprehensive because she was expecting her instructor to tear her performance to pieces.

  Pushing back her goggles, Lou stood anxiously in her overalls and helmet, waiting for his appraisal, not sure whether to feel relieved or disappointed when he merely nodded his head and dismissed her.

  ‘Well, that’s that then, I suppose. I always told him that he’d come to a bad end, the way he carried on.’

  Emily listened quietly to Con’s sister, Alice, with the morning sun pouring into the quiet hospital waiting room, understanding that her apparent lack of concern for Con’s death came not from not caring but from her shock at the unexpectedness of it.

  Poor Alice. She had lost her husband before the war and now she had lost her brother as well.

  Emily thought she’d have been shocked too if she’d been summoned from her bed to be told that Con was in hospital and not expected to survive the night.

  It was strange in a way that the two of them should be here like this, supporting one another, just as they had both supported Con through his last hours, sitting either side of his bed, waiting for what they knew to be inevitable, since they had never really got on as sisters-in-law.

  Alice Mallory, Con’s sister, had never wanted him to marry her. She’d said so right from the start, and of course Emily had been hurt by that.

  ‘He never should have married you. I always said that,’ Alice announced now, as though she had somehow followed the direction of Emily’s own thoughts. She was a raw-boned woman, darkhaired li
ke Con, but without his good looks, the mother of five children, with her eldest son in the RAF. A strong woman; if Con had got the good looks then Alice had got the strength.

  ‘I knew straight off what he was after, and that it would all end in tears. Not that I haven’t admired you for the way you’ve put up with him. He might be my brother but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know his faults. Always was too fond of women, was Con, and too full of himself. Still, I never thought it would end like this. Him being stabbed through the heart by one of them.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Emily told her, repeating what she had already said to the police the previous evening when they had come to the hospital to interview her. ‘She was just play-acting really, wanting to get Con’s attention and make a bit of a fuss. She never meant it to happen.’

  ‘Well, it has, and it was just as well that you were there to do what had to be done, else he’d have probably died in that ruddy theatre.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she told Emily abruptly. ‘Well, wondering really how you’d feel about him being buried with our mam and dad. There’s a space there, you see, unless you wanted him with your parents so that you—’

  ‘No. I think that’s a good idea,’ Emily assured her hastily.

  ‘What about the church and that? Do you want me to sort it all out, seeing as you’re living in Whitchurch now?’

  ‘Why don’t we do it together?’ Emily suggested. ‘I’d like to give him the kind of send-off he’d have wanted, you know, a …’

  ‘A proper wake, you mean? Well, it will be that all right, if all them girls of his turn up,’ Alice told her with dark humour.

  They looked at one another in mutual understanding.

  ‘You’ve been a proper brick and no mistake,’ Alice sniffed, reaching for her handkerchief. ‘I reckon Con was a fool not to have realised how lucky he was to have you, but then that was Con all over, wasn’t it?’

  * * *