The Wayward Wife

by Jessica Stirling

  ‘Sore?’ said Breda.

  ‘Stiff.’

  In other circumstances she might have teased him with a suggestive remark but she had too much respect for what he’d been through, whatever it was, to do so now.

  She gave him the towel to finish himself off, lifted his boots, spread the tongues and placed them carefully in the hearth. She picked up his trousers and, stepping to the sink, tried to wring them out, but the serge was too heavy to release much water. She would hang them, and the tunic, out on the line to dry in the sunlight as soon as he went upstairs.

  He wrapped the towel about his waist and stood quite still while she dabbed Germolene on to his Adam’s apple and tied one of Billy’s old baby bibs around his neck to keep the ointment from soiling the bed sheets.

  ‘There!’ she said. ‘You niff a bit but you do look better.’

  ‘Is Billy okay?’

  ‘He’s out in the yard shootin’ down Germans.’

  ‘Tonight,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘What about tonight?’

  ‘You can’t go back to your ma’s place.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Ron shook his head. ‘The building isn’t safe.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Came round that way.’

  ‘Did you talk to the old man?’

  ‘He wasn’t there. Nobody was there except coppers.’ He clutched the towel with one hand and, frowning, said, ‘Listen to me, darlin’. I mean what I say. I saw what happened to Stratton’s an’ I’m tellin’ you, the building isn’t safe. It may look okay but it’s shook to the foundations an’ one big blast will bring it down on you.’

  ‘What do you want us to do?’

  ‘Stay ’ere.’

  ‘You think the Jerries are comin’ again?’ Breda said.

  ‘I’m sure they are.’

  ‘Right.’ Breda nodded firmly. ‘Here we stay.’

  ‘Fetch your mother an’ my old man,’ Ron went on. ‘Bring them down here too. It’ll be a tight squeeze but our shelter’s well protected an’ the vent’ll keep the air sweet.’

  ‘You won’t be ’ome tonight,’ Breda stated.

  ‘No,’ Ron said. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back. Wake me at three. I’ll have to shave before I go out.’ He looked around the kitchen. ‘Be careful with that loose window, Breda. Keep Billy away from it. I’ll fix it when I—’

  ‘Stop frettin’ about the window an’ go to bed,’ Breda said. ‘You do what you gotta do. I’ll take charge of things ’ere.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I know you will.’ He drew her to him and kissed her. ‘Three o’clock, love?’

  ‘Three o’clock, it is,’ said Breda.

  ‘Calm down, Basil,’ Robert Gaines said. ‘It wasn’t her fault. I dragged her away.’

  ‘You can’t simply go haring off without a word to anyone. Where were you?’ Basil said, then added, ‘No, don’t tell me.’

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ Susan said. ‘We were working.’

  ‘Working? Where? Not here, that’s for sure.’ He leaned forward on his chair, planted his fists on the desk and glowered up at Bob. ‘I thought you’d gone to Dover for the weekend.’

  ‘That,’ Bob said, ‘is one story.’ Digging into his jacket pocket he brought out his notebook and flapped it in Basil’s direction. ‘And this is another. Gold, my man, solid gold. We’ve been down in the East End collecting hot copy from the horse’s mouth. Give me fifteen minutes air time and I’ll deliver you a programme that’ll really make our listeners sit up.’

  ‘Trust you, in other words?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Bob. ‘I’ve never let you down before.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Basil conceded. ‘I must have the script first thing tomorrow. Do you need a desk and a shorthand typist?’

  ‘Nope,’ Bob said. ‘I’ll hole up in my apartment, catch a few hours’ sleep then get down to it. You’ll have the material by nine Monday, I promise.’

  ‘I trust you’re not planning on taking Susan with you.’

  ‘She’s your girl, Baz, not mine,’ Bob said. ‘Anyhow, I prefer not to be distracted.’

  ‘Quite!’ Basil said. ‘Well, don’t let me keep you. You’re not the only one with a lot to do. Susan, do you have everything you need for a long stay?’

  ‘I could do with an hour off to pick up some clean clothes.’

  Ostentatiously, Basil consulted his wristlet watch.

  ‘Four,’ he said. ‘I need you back here by four. All right?’

  ‘What if there’s another raid?’

  ‘Do the best you can,’ Basil said.

  Bob opened the office door and ushered Susan into the corridor just as Basil called out. ‘By the by, how did you get into the East End?’

  The van was back safe and sound in the yard, and no one seemed to have missed it.

  ‘Taxi,’ Susan said. ‘We hired a taxi.’

  ‘I hope you’re not going to charge it to expenses?’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Bob Gaines said and chased Susan towards the lift before Mr Willets could ask any more awkward questions.

  It took Breda all her time to persuade her mother that Stratton’s was unsafe. Only a declaration by an inspection officer that the building needed shoring before it would be habitable again finally convinced Nora that, with Matt at work on the dock, spending a night in Pitt Street with Breda and Billy was preferable to going alone to a public shelter.

  She packed a canvas shopping bag with food scoured from the ruins of her kitchen, including a piece of boiled ham that, when washed, would do nicely for supper, and collected clothes and sheets from the bedrooms in spite of Breda’s warning about the shaky state of the stairs.

  There was still no gas or electricity in Pitt Street but men were digging under the macadam at the street’s end and water from the taps in the sink had been restored. Breda built up the fire in the grate, filled a kettle and, using an old piece of wire mesh as a grid, set the kettle on the coals to boil, then, seizing her chance, nipped out to the lavatory to make sure that the cashbox was still safe behind the cistern.

  On returning to the kitchen she found Nora setting out plates for an early supper. Billy, hungry as usual, had been given a slice of bread and marmalade to keep him going and, seated cross-legged on the carpet, contentedly watched the kettle come to the boil. Breda lit a cigarette and, perched on an arm of the fireside chair, said, ‘Ma, do you ever think about Dad?’

  Nora polished a fork with a dishcloth before she placed it on the table. ‘Not after what he done to me, no.’

  ‘It wasn’t ’is fault.’

  ‘Sure an’ who’s fault was it then?’

  ‘Oh,’ Breda said. ‘You mean what ’appened years ago. I was thinkin’ of what happened more recent, like.’ She paused. ‘Ever wonder what ’e’s up to these days?’

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t care.’

  ‘What if ’e was to walk in that door right now?’

  ‘I’d send him packing.’

  ‘What if I was to tell you ’e might be dead?’

  ‘More likely he’s in the jail. Serve him right.’

  ‘If ’e was dead, though,’ Breda pressed on, ‘I mean, if we knew for sure ’e was dead …’

  ‘Would I marry Matt Hooper, is that what you’re asking?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Sure an’ I would.’ Nora placed the fork on the table and squared it precisely. ‘You wouldn’t mind, would you, dear?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ said Breda. ‘I’m all for it.’

  ‘What about Ronnie?’

  ‘Ronnie’ll do what ’e’s told,’ Breda said, then, laying it on a little thicker, added, ‘Anyway, Ron’s always looked on you like you was ’is mother.’

  ‘Does he?’ said Nora, pleased. ‘He’s a good man, Breda. You’re lucky to have him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Breda said. ‘I reckon I am.’

  She went to the window and tucked the blackout curtain around the shaky frame, then,
by candlelight, they sat down to eat. A half-hour later the big Sunday night raid began.

  There had been some damage to a railway bridge that crossed the King’s Road and a gang of workers in brown overalls were noisily unloading scaffolding from a lorry parked at a corner of the Gardens. There was activity around the mouth of the ground shelter too but, thankfully, no sign of fire engines or ambulances. Aware that Basil had done her a favour by turning a blind eye to her absence that morning she’d summoned a taxi to bring her home and, with the meter ticking away like a time bomb, had asked the cabby to wait outside to return her to Broadcasting House.

  To her surprise no windows in her flat were broken and the lights still worked. The bed tempted her, the bath more so, but with Basil waiting and the taxi meter eating up her salary, she settled for a cold-water splash and a change of clothes then packed a suitcase with everything she might need for a long stay in the stuffy corridors of Broadcasting House.

  She grabbed Maugham’s The Painted Veil and Compton Mackenzie’s latest, which Vivian had insisted she read, and stuffed them into her case. Looking round, she suddenly became aware how empty the flat seemed in the afternoon light and, yielding to impulse, fished a fountain pen and notepad from her bag and dashed off a brief letter to Danny.

  She signed it, hastily added a kiss, found an envelope and addressed it and then, with the suitcase in her hand and the letter in her pocket, left the flat in Rothwell Gardens for what, as it happened, was the very last time.

  Three was bearable, Breda thought, but with Ron and his old man in here too, vent or no vent, the atmosphere would be suffocating. She’d purchased a box of batteries from the same shifty source as she’d purchased the tinned fruit but half of them turned out to be duds. Wary of running out, she extinguished the pocket torch and lit a candle instead, a candle that stank the place out and, in Breda’s imagination, sucked up air like a vacuum cleaner sucks up dust.

  Nora was propped up on the bunk, Billy by her side. She had started out with a blanket over her legs but the heat in the shelter under the stairs didn’t take long to build up and she’d soon discarded it. Even Billy was sweating. Nora peeled off his pullover and shirt and fanned him with one of his comics while crooning her version of a South Sea Island ditty that still managed to sound like ‘The Rose of Tralee’.

  Such diversions did not distract Billy for long. When the bombs began falling in earnest he too became agitated. He kneeled on the bunk, braced like a runner in the starting blocks, and neither Nora nor Breda could persuade him to lie down.

  Breda was never sure at what point in the course of the raid it dawned on her that the outhouse might be a target and that if it went up in smoke her father’s cash and her son’s future would go up in smoke with it.

  ‘Ma,’ she said shrilly, ‘I hafta pee.’

  ‘Hold it in, dear. It can’t last much longer.’

  ‘I hafta pee. I hafta.’

  ‘Use the pail. That’s what it’s for. We’ll close our eyes.’

  ‘No, I gotter go to the toilet,’ Breda cried, petulant as a child, and wrenched open the shelter door before her mother could stop her.

  Cool air rushed in. The window above the sink had been blown halfway across the kitchen, the tattered shreds of the blackout curtain plastered against the guard that Breda had hooked over the grate. The wireless set, Ron’s pride and joy, had toppled from the dresser to the floor where it lay in a tangle of valves, wires and splintered wood.

  Crouched in the doorway, Breda hesitated.

  She found her pocket torch, switched it on and played the beam on the carpet of debris in the corridor. She could hear guns barking in the distance and the strange, soft, sifting sound of the breeze billowing through the hole above the sink but, at that moment, no planes and no explosions.

  ‘Two minutes, Ma. I’ll only be two minutes,’ Breda called and, stepping over the junk, stumbled through the kitchen and ran across the yard. She tugged open the outhouse door, clambered on to the pedestal and, with the torch between her teeth, fumbled for the cashbox and brought it down.

  She felt better at once. With the box under her arm, she stepped down from the pedestal and backed out into the yard.

  She didn’t really hear the bomb.

  First thing she knew of it, the lavatory door was bowling over and over, like the page of an old newspaper, her skirts whipped up around her waist, her mouth was pulled open and her hair felt as if it were being ripped out by the roots. Then, punched square-on by the blast wave, she was hurled backwards into the sludge that poured from the roots of the outhouse.

  She lay spread-eagled on the ground, blinded, deafened and unable to breathe for several seconds, with only the stink of drains and the shrivelling stench of high explosive to tell her that she was still alive. Then, hoisting herself up, she saw that where her house had been there was nothing but a vast heap of debris illuminated by a roaring gas jet that flared up like a beacon into the smoke-filled sky.

  24

  The announcer’s voice was all too familiar to the monitors of late-night Radio Bremen. His tone was, as a rule, smug and scoffing, which no doubt added credibility to the script if you happened to be German. Tonight, however, there was an added element in the mixture of rant, cant and threat that the Nazi propaganda machine churned out.

  Shaking off fatigue, Kate made careful note of it and, for the benefit of editorial, underlined one tell-tale statement: ‘It is a question of time – a few short weeks, then this conflagration will have reached its natural conclusion.’

  Danny didn’t miss the trick. He passed the transcription down the table to Mr Harrison, his supervisor, who scanned the notes and looked up, frowning.

  ‘And the natural conclusion is?’ he asked.

  ‘Invasion,’ Danny answered.

  ‘Who marked it, Danny, you, or Miss …’

  ‘Cottrell,’ Danny said. ‘She marked it.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t much.’ Mr Harrison stroked his nose with the stem of his pipe. ‘But it is something. I take it you have the entire Bremen transcription?’

  ‘I do, sir,’ said Danny. ‘Kate – Miss Cottrell – was right tae mark it up. Somehow it doesn’t fit the context, an’ there might have been somethin’ in the way Fritz said it. She’s done Bremen every night for weeks an’ understands the inflexions.’

  ‘Point taken,’ Mr Harrison interrupted. ‘Does anyone have anything that might back it up?’

  Heads rose from the papers that littered the editorial table but no one had anything to contribute. They were all aware that every scrap of information that might hint at Hitler’s plans to invade before winter was vital and not even the most casual-seeming comment could be discounted.

  ‘How far behind are we?’ Mr Harrison said.

  ‘Forty minutes at most,’ Griff said. He was seated directly across the long table from Danny and, at the mention of Kate’s name, had looked up. ‘Fritz goes off air at ten thirty.’

  ‘Have we heard anything from the fat Field Marshall this evening?’ said Mr Harrison. ‘Goering, I mean.’

  A general shaking of heads.

  Mr Harrison puffed on his pipe for ten or fifteen seconds then said, ‘All right. We’ll headline it. But first, Danny, pop over to M Unit and ask Miss Cottrell for her interpretation.’

  ‘Kate’s our best translator,’ Griff reminded him.

  ‘Spoken without prejudice, of course, Mr Griffiths,’ said Mr Harrison with a smile, and signalled Danny to be on his way.

  Danny darted between the huts, identified himself to the soldier on duty and, careful to show no light, slipped into the monitoring unit. After checking in with Mr Gregory, he tiptoed down the aisle between the cubicles, each one lit by a little cup-shaped lamp. He drew up short of Kate’s desk. Even with a pair of earphones clamped on her head, she looked lovely. At that moment, for only a moment, he felt as if his life were drifting away from him.

  He dropped the slip of paper on to her desk and asked, ‘What does it mean?’


  ‘Just what it says,’ Kate answered.

  ‘How did Fritz sound when he said it? Did he sound as if he knew something he couldn’t let dab about?’

  ‘Let dab?’

  ‘Divulge.’

  She angled her chair to face him. He could make out the shape of her breasts under the white blouse and regret was suddenly tinged with longing.

  ‘Yes,’ Kate said, after a pause. ‘There was definitely something fishy in his delivery. Something I can’t quite put my finger on. He sounded – what? – sly when he talked about a natural conclusion.’

  ‘Natural, not inevitable? You’re sure?’

  ‘Oh, yes, there’s no confusion in German.’

  ‘A few short weeks?’

  ‘Exactly what Fritz said, word for word.’

  ‘Harrison wants to know if we should headline it?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say,’ Kate said. ‘If you don’t trust my translation why don’t you give the wax to someone else and see what they make of it?’

  ‘We don’t have time,’ Danny said. ‘Make a snap judgement, Kate. You’re pretty damned good at that.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Do we go with it, or not?’

  ‘Yes, go with it.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Danny, what do you want from me?’

  ‘A straight answer.’

  ‘I’ve given you my answer.’

  ‘An’ you’re not going to change your mind?’

  ‘No, Danny,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to change my mind.’

  Crafty Basil Willets had secured himself a berth in the lovely old studio dedicated to religious broadcasts. He looked rested, well groomed and smelled of after-shave. He obviously hadn’t had to fight for space at a sink or keep a wary eye open for Matron who was stalking the ladies’ cloakrooms to ensure that the latest memo prohibiting the washing of hair in hand basins was strictly obeyed.

  There had been precious little ‘Dunkirk spirit’ in evidence in the canteen early that Monday morning. Even chirpy young typists had had the pith knocked out of them by the second night-long raid. There had been angry spats over the breakfast tables, tearful apologies and, here and there, smothered fits of near hysterics that even the appearance of Leslie Howard, the film actor, looking slightly less than heart-throb material in a borrowed greatcoat and carpet slippers, had failed to quell.