Chocolate Girls

by Annie Murray

  Reaching home, she lit the oven and put in the crock of steak and kidney casserole she had made the day before. The potatoes could wait ’til later. She sat on the old Indian rug in the sitting-room, twisting sheets of newspaper in her hands to lay in the grate, sighing as she remembered the happy expectation with which she and Martin had moved into the house. She remembered something Edie had said to her recently about the day the war ended and how she’d felt.

  ‘Thing was, I was happy, like everyone else. But suddenly everything felt really bleak and frightening. All that time I’d had you and Frances and Davey, all safe together and not much choice about what we did because of the war. And now it was all going to break up and we’d have more freedom and have to start deciding things for ourselves again. I felt terrible that day, even though it was the best day ever.’

  As it turned out, Edie’s fears had not been realized. Janet knew she had been frightened of someone coming to find Davey, a father in the services perhaps, or an uncle. But months passed, the servicemen trickled home, the prisoners of war, and still no one came, even though her name was recorded with local doctors and the police. Frances had gladly let her stay on as a lodger, especially with Janet marrying. She said it would be like losing two daughters at once if they both went.

  Janet hadn’t felt the fear then, the flatness. She was caught up in the atmosphere of street parties and rippling strings of Union Jacks and Welcome Home banners across the streets, as she waited for her turn. All she could think of was Martin coming home.

  He was given early release from the army in early 1946, on grounds of ill health. Remembering that first sight she had had of him always stirred up the feelings again, the passion, yet the pity of it. It was a grey, freezing day in February when they met on New Street Station. She had not wanted him to come to the house. Not at first. She waited on the platform in the best clothes she had been able to scrape together in those austere times, a straight navy skirt and home-knitted pink twinset, her old camel coat and a handbag over her arm. The train was so late she began to believe he would never come. When she saw him at last, in those split seconds her understanding fought to catch up with the evidence in front of her eyes. It wasn’t that she didn’t recognize him – his height, his face, were too distinctive for her to mistake him for anyone else. But he was transformed. She saw a gaunt man dressed in civvies which hung several sizes too loose on him, skin stained a sickly yellow, a face old beyond its years. Janet felt her knees go weak at the sight of him, her emotions a mixture of joy, tenderness and also a kind of dread. His sickness had drawn his face in, emphasizing the full mouth, making his nose appear almost like the beak of a bird of prey. He looked temporarily alien, almost grotesque. But his eyes lit with emotion at the sight of her. For a moment they just stood in front of each other without speaking. Then he reached out and touched her cheek. Full of tenderness she held out her arms, the sight of him blurred by her tears. The long, lonely months and years, the shameful thought of Alec, none of that mattered now. It was past. ‘Thank you for coming back to me,’ she sobbed, as they clung to each other.

  Later, he told her, ‘I saw so many chaps after they’d had a “Dear John . . .” letter from home. Terrible, when you’re out there. I can’t describe it. I don’t know what I would have done . . . You’re what kept me going, my love.’

  The early years of their marriage had been spent in adjustment. Martin was very keen to marry as soon as possible and the wedding took place in June 1946. Over the next years he flung himself with almost obsessive enthusiasm into the birth pangs of the new National Health Service. He worked punishingly long hours, even when he was not well himself, and often came home with stories of the people who had come to him with health problems neglected for years.

  ‘It’s absolutely incredible what some people have put up with!’ he would exclaim. He was passionate about the NHS, about getting help and care to the poorest. He knew his work was worthwhile. But behind all the frenetic activity, Janet knew he was profoundly unsettled. The yellow from the jaundice and mepacrine tablets faded, but his inner turmoil remained. Once he did allow himself some free time, he couldn’t sit for long, or relax. Couldn’t allow himself just to be. And sometimes his temper flared and he said cruel things about which he was pathetically contrite afterwards. At the beginning she had found a deep, unexpected well of patience within herself. He wouldn’t talk in any detail about what they’d experienced during the siege at Imphal, surrounded by the Japanese, barely eating and working in a field hospital day and night in conditions Martin said he could barely begin to describe. In those early years she had not worried so much about the lack of a child, thinking that perhaps Martin would be under par for some time after all his illness. And they needed to spend time together on their own, getting to know one another properly. She was understanding, careful with him. Their lovemaking had been passionate, easily overcoming the initial clumsiness. At times it was very tender. She was deeply moved when he cried in his sleep, tormented by dreams, then half waking, reached out for her, moving his hands hungrily over her as if desperate for warmth and comfort. But there had been times also when he was very distant, closed in on himself, and he did not touch her for days and nights at a time.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said one day, when they had been married for almost two years. He was standing by the window at the back of the house and she could only see him in silhouette. Things had flared up between them over something trivial – the state the garden was in – when they both knew the row was really about the fact she still wasn’t pregnant. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ He turned his back on her and stared out. ‘I’m trying to settle. Should be through it by now, I know. Civilian life is so different. So small and . . . stifling after all we went through.’

  The word ‘stifling’ cut her deeply. He wasn’t happy with her: he found their life petty and stifling!

  ‘I’ve become hard in a way I don’t like. I’m ashamed of it.’ He turned to her. ‘Please, darling, don’t get upset. I hate myself for making you unhappy.’

  Tears came to her eyes again as she knelt by the fire, thinking of that day. It was then that she had decided to go to work again. Staying at home alone was too unbearable. To everyone else they seemed settled, Martin developing a fine career as a doctor. It was only to Edie that Janet confided how much they were struggling, and Edie told Ruby some of it.

  ‘Sod’s law, isn’t it?’ Ruby said sympathetically. ‘I get pregnant at the drop of a trouserleg with no husband and poor old Janet’s having no luck when she could give a child everything it needed. It’s not fair. I wish there was something we could do to help.’

  It was over the past three years that she had truly begun to despair. Martin seemed more and more distant. She sat trying to think when they had last made love. He was always so tired. She felt at the lowest ebb she could remember. Her marriage seemed to stretch in front of her like a white track across a desert, isolated, unpeopled by anyone she could be really close to. Terrible thoughts came to her sometimes. What if she were to go and find Alec and persuade him to give her a child? Pass it off as Martin’s? Or some other man? Someone who could help her ease the lonely ache inside her. She was appalled at herself for thinking this way. And what made it all the worse was that she knew Martin was suffering too, and they just couldn’t seem to reach each other.

  That night, laying kindling and some small knobs of coal in the grate, she felt so low, so worthless as a woman. She couldn’t have children, couldn’t seem to make her husband happy. She had always felt sorry for Edie, bless her, but even Edie seemed better off than her now. At least she had David, whom she adored. And she never seemed interested in marriage: there’d been quite a few interested in her over the years, but Edie just brushed them aside. It was only David who mattered. Janet scraped a match viciously along the box and lit the fire. The paper blackened, shrivelled, glowing at the edges, and she watched, trying to reach a place of calm inside. She needed to get the potatoes on, but
Martin was bound to be late. He seemed to live on half-burnt dinners. She wasn’t a great success at that side of things either, though Martin never complained.

  A moment later the front door opened and she jumped violently. Disorientated for a moment, she wondered whether she’d dozed off in front of the fire and it was now nine or ten o’clock. But the clock said only ten to seven.

  ‘Janet?’

  He came in, blowing on his hands, his nose pink with cold, coat still on, flapping open. ‘Ah good, a fire. It’s freezing out.’

  ‘You’re home early,’ she said cautiously. ‘I’m afraid the supper’s not quite ready.’

  ‘That’s all right – never mind.’ He took his coat off, flung it over a chair and stood with his hands on his hips, staring at her for a moment, as if gauging her mood. She wondered if he could tell she had been crying, but he didn’t appear to notice. And there was something new in his face.

  ‘Look, Jan. I – I just . . .’ He shrugged, a large, helpless gesture. ‘I can’t go on like this.’

  She looked him full in the eyes. Face it. You have to face it, she told herself, taking a deep, desperate breath. ‘You mean . . . our marriage?’

  ‘What? No, darling!’ He swooped down to kneel on the floor beside her. ‘No, no, no . . .! Oh God, Janet, it’s not you. I mean I know things have been difficult and we can’t – I mean let’s face it, we’re not going to have children.’

  Something tightened inside her, as if her very being flinched, even more than when Dr Aitchison had said it. It was the first time he had ever fully acknowledged what had become so cruelly obvious.

  ‘But it’s not that. I’ve come home early to tell you something, or rather, ask you. There’s a job I could take, an offer from someone Jonathan knows – in Africa. The Belgian Congo. We could both go – have a new start, wider horizons . . .’

  Janet looked up at his face, saw it shining in the firelight. She knew he could see life spreading out, opening up. He was like someone reborn.

  ‘You want me to come with you? Really?’

  ‘Yes. Oh my darling, how could you think anything else? Of course! I want you at my side whatever I do!’

  Quietly, calmly she said, ‘Then we’ll go.’

  Over the stew and potatoes, Martin told her what he knew about the job, which at that stage was not a great deal, except that he would be in principal charge of a new medical centre in a village called Ibabongo. The village had a mission station, maternity care and a leprosy hospital, but although there were qualified nurses, there was as yet no doctor. He knew his experience in the tropics would count in his favour. ‘Although, of course, Africa has a repertoire of diseases all of its very own!’ he laughed. ‘There’ll be a tremendous number of challenges.’

  Janet drank in everything he was saying. She would go to the Congo. That she was agreeing to leave everything behind for an entirely new life, taking a risk of immense proportions, was not something she could fully take in. They could worry about what was ahead later. But what was so wonderful about the evening was their sitting talking, laughing together, planning a future, and seeing Martin so excited. Letting something new begin. She began to fold her preoccupation with children away in her mind. It would always be an ache, a deep sadness, but somehow they had to make a new kind of life.

  When they got into bed that night, Martin lay on his back and let out a long sigh, as if a great load of tension in him was beginning to melt away. She lay facing him, smiling, and he put his arm round her and looked into her face with a slightly puzzled expression.

  ‘I bet not many people would just say, “OK, let’s go to Africa,” like that, straight away.’

  She looked seriously into his eyes. ‘I can’t bear to see you so unhappy. I want us to be happy and I want to be with you. It’ll be an adventure.’

  Putting her hands each side of his face, she kissed his lips. She saw him close his eyes, felt his hands begin to move over her breasts, and she pressed close to him, hearing his happy sigh of desire.

  ‘I want to see you,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you for so long.’ She knelt up and he lifted her nightdress over her head, exposing her rounded body, full hips and breasts, hair curling down over her shoulders.

  They made love that night in a way that they hadn’t in such a long time. As they lay together afterwards, warm and close, Martin kissed her and murmured, ‘What a woman you are.’

  Thirty-Two

  A few days later, Edie experienced another of those moments which threw her so badly off balance that for a few seconds she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  David waited, across the table from her. Between them lay a dish containing the golden remains of a bread and butter pudding.

  ‘Well, yes, of course you have – somewhere,’ she managed, after a moment.

  ‘Where is it?’ He watched her in his intense way. ‘Can I see it?’

  Edie could feel Frances’s eyes on her. She took a deep breath. ‘The thing is, Davey—’

  ‘Oh, please don’t keep calling me that!’

  ‘David. Sorry, love . . .’ Edie spoke as lightly as she could. ‘Of course I’ve got your birth certificate somewhere. But what with moving here from Stirchley, and the war, I’m not sure I could lay my hand on it . . .’

  Edie felt as if someone had their hand squeezed round her heart. A blush seeped up hot through her cheeks. God in heaven, he must know she was lying! How could anyone mislay their only child’s birth certificate? She forced herself to smile.

  ‘I’ll have a look through my things, see if I can find it.’

  ‘OK.’ David scraped up his last mouthful of pudding and pushed his chair back. ‘Thanks, Frances, that was lovely. And I will come and dry up. Just want to get my last bit of maths finished.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Frances said. ‘Don’t rush it. The drying up will wait.’

  The two women watched him go. David had grown into what Frances called the ‘in between stage’, tall and thin, when the body’s growth seems to have temporarily outpaced its ability to coordinate itself. His eyes were still large and dark brown, the most attractive feature of his face, which had otherwise long lost its boyish chubbiness for the more chiselled outline of adolescence. He was a lovely-looking boy, Edie thought, and would be a handsome man. He was a rumpled-looking character, never quite tidy, the sleeves of his jumpers seldom properly turned back, shirt often hanging out and shoes scuffed. He was always far too wrapped up in passionate interest in what he was doing or reading to bother with appearance. The door closed and they heard him running upstairs, two at a time.

  Edie laid her hand over her heart.

  ‘It shouldn’t be such a shock, should it? Him asking me things. I know I’ve got to tell him some time. It’s just the longer I leave it the harder it gets.’

  It was a conversation the two women had had many times during David’s upbringing. Edie had always said that she would know when it was the right time to tell him, but now it had become a block in her mind. So far as anyone else knew, she was bringing up a boy she’d adopted. People didn’t tend to ask how it had come about and soon it was simply taken for granted that she had a son. The thought of David finding out that he was not her child sent her into a most terrible panic. He had begun to grow away from her in so many little ways: his studiousness, the way he had swept effortlessly into the grammar school and was learning French, Latin, German, his interests in engineering and mathematics, clever books he read, the way he didn’t want to be babied with the name Davey any more. If she told him the truth, he might be angry, and reject her. Her boy, in whom she’d placed all her hopes and who was the focus of all her love. He was still her little Davey in her mind. What would she do without him?

  ‘I expect his birthday coming up made him think of it,’ Frances said, getting stiffly up from the table. Edie immediately got up to help. Frances’s beautiful thick hair had turned almost pure white, with only a few streaks of silver in it, and she still wore it pinned up in a
soft, attractive style. She was still beautiful, though she walked now with a slight stoop.

  ‘Let me do it,’ Edie said. ‘You sit down.’ Frances reluctantly agreed.

  ‘It just all comes over me sometimes,’ Edie said, stacking the plates. ‘I know I’ve been a mother to him, and I love every bone in his body. That should be enough, shouldn’t it? I’m the only mother he remembers. But I hardly know the first thing about him. I can’t see things does and say, “Ah well, he’s like his grandfather or his uncle . . .” Because he’s not part of the bloodline. And here I am telling him it’s his fifteenth birthday tomorrow, and I don’t know exactly when he was born or how old he is . . .’

  Frances watched her face. Though her body was ageing now she was in her seventies, her mind was as lively as ever. She had been a friend, protector and substitute mother for Edie and the two women had long enjoyed a deep trust and comfortable understanding with each another.

  ‘I know it’s hard, dear.’ She passed Edie a dish across the table. ‘It’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. But the time is coming for him to know the truth, isn’t it?’

  The first occasion when this happened had shaken Edie up a good deal more, partly because it was the first time and also because of the intimate nature of his question. It was when David was eleven, only a week after he had started at the grammar school.

  He came home that night, proud in his new uniform. Frances said he had been unusually quiet. When Edie got in from work she went to find him. Putting her head round the bedroom door, she saw him bent over the table in his bedroom doing his homework.