‘No.’ Cora took a step backwards, away from him. ‘You don’t understand. It’s not as simple as it looks. It’s difficult, complicated . . .’ She left the sentence unfinished because it was impossible to finish.
‘Complicated or not, I know one thing, Cora.’ He wanted desperately to take her in his arms again, even though it had called on resources of resolve he hadn’t known he was capable of. ‘I would never have gone away and left you.’
‘Oh, Wilfred.’ She shook her head.
‘No.’ His voice came deep, thick. ‘Don’t “oh, Wilfred” me. I wouldn’t have left you, Cora. Believe that if nothing else. The devil himself couldn’t have made me.’
She stared at him, a mixture of emotions washing across her face, but it was the flash of uncertainty, almost fear, that enabled him to take on the persona he had given himself, the one she was comfortable with, and say steadily, ‘I happen to believe in family, although with my mam an’ da that might sound strange. But you and Horace and the others, you’re my family – and family, real family, is worth dying for. It’s nothing to do with blood being thicker than water, in fact blood has nothing to do with it. It’s about folk being there for you, caring, no matter if your surname is different to theirs. Am I making sense, lass?’
He was relieved to see her nod as her face relaxed. It was too soon to declare himself, much too soon.
‘I know you’re at odds with your mam but she was more of a mam to me all my life than my own and I appreciate that, more than she’ll ever know. How many times did she feed me, eh? A poor little waif and stray covered in bruises with his backside hanging out?’
He continued to talk in the same vein, keeping it general with comments about her parents, Horace, Maria and the little ones, claiming himself all the time as part of them. His reward was her arm slipping through his again as they began to retrace their footsteps.
His time would come. It was a promise to himself. From when he could remember he had had their future mapped out and nothing and no one would stand in the way of it. They were bound together, him and Cora; no one could love her as she deserved to be loved but him. It didn’t matter that he would always care for her more than she cared for him. All he wanted in life was her but her needs were greater, it was part of what made her Cora. Her energy, her intelligence, her vivacity and strength; she was in love with life and it would always be so.
Just for a moment a little voice at the back of his mind said, ‘In love with life? She might have been before Jed went away but she’s lost her sparkle and you know it,’ but he brushed the thought aside. He only wanted the best for Cora and he was the best because no one could love her the way he did. He could make her happy, he knew he could. Once they were back in Sunderland and he got a job he’d work his socks off for her and provide them with a home, a nice little place where it could be just the two of them until the bairns came along. And he was in no rush for bairns. He knew lassies always wanted their own babies, it was natural, but if it was just him and Cora for the rest of their lives that would suit him down to the ground. Not that a little Cora with red hair and brown eyes like her mam wouldn’t be the icing on the cake.
When they reached the farm, Cora reached up and kissed his cheek. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said softly.
‘Of course I came.’ The kiss meant nothing beyond a sisterly caress, he knew that, but it had sent the blood singing through his veins.
‘I’d better go in.’
‘Of course, go on. I’ll watch till you’re in so I know you’re safe.’
Just a day or two ago his proprietorial attitude might have slightly jarred; tonight she was grateful he cared so much about her well-being. ‘See you Sunday?’ she said quietly.
‘I’ll be here.’ It was the first time she had asked him; normally it was he who said it, or sometimes he would just arrive at the farm. There had been times, shortly after Jed had gone, that Cora had merely humoured him by going for a walk on a Sunday, he knew that. She would never have hurt his feelings by refusing to accompany him or asking him not to come, but he had known she would rather be by herself. He had felt it was essential that he set the pattern for Sundays straight away though, because he intended to stay at the forefront of her life. Initially he had sometimes persuaded Horace to come with him and suggested to Cora that Maria and the others join them too, but gradually he had done this less and less and Cora had accepted that it would be just the two of them.
A steady drip-drip. As he watched Cora walk across to the house, he nodded mentally at the thought. They already had the foundations of what could be a good marriage although she didn’t realize it yet, but one day she would. He would make sure of it.
She turned and waved before opening the back door and he waved back, and once she had gone inside, his shoulders went back and he exhaled in satisfaction. Progress had been made tonight and it was all turning out as he had planned. Thousands, millions, had died and were still dying in this war, so why not Jed? Missing presumed dead. They were beautiful words.
Chapter Sixteen
‘Oh, come on, lad, you don’t want to be seeing the New Year in all by yourself, now then. Come round to mine and we’ll have a bevvy together, eh? I dare say Patrick and Kitty’ll be popping in and Mrs McKenzie now she’s on her own, and likely Mr Johnson from thirty-two. He drops in for a chat now and again.’
This last was pointed and Gregory knew why. Beryl was hoping Ronald Johnson’s interest towards her might prompt him to come up to scratch, as no doubt she’d put it, but he had no intention of taking the arrangement they’d begun when he’d first come back to Sunderland to the next level. Beryl was a nice enough woman and a good cook, but there it ended for him. She, on the other hand, had been dropping broad hints for some time that she would be quite prepared to warm his bed as well as see to his washing and ironing and the rest of it. He’d managed to bring into the conversation several times in a roundabout way that he was still a married man and content for things to remain as they were, but Beryl being Beryl wouldn’t give up. Short of saying he would rather be hung, drawn and quartered than make the woman his common-law wife, he didn’t know what else to do.
‘I’ll see how I feel, Beryl, all right?’ His tone was purposely abrupt but he knew it’d have no effect. The woman had a hide like a rhinoceros when it suited.
‘Aye, you do that, but I’ll nip round later and make sure you haven’t dozed off in the chair like last year.’
Gregory would have smiled if he wasn’t so irritated. That was the excuse he had given the year before for not joining her and she had never let him forget it. Several times he had tried to pull out of their arrangement, saying now that he was better he was quite capable of seeing to the house and the meals himself, but she’d brushed it aside as only Beryl could. Of course, it didn’t help that some days he still didn’t feel too good. The doctors had said it would be a long recovery – the blast that had taken his eye and mangled his arm had done a bit of damage to his chest too – but he was getting there. Aye, he was getting there.
Once Beryl had bustled out and he was alone, Gregory sat back in his chair in front of the glowing fire in the range and sighed deeply. The woman would drive him mad before she was finished. He only hoped that when Archie came back from where he had been evacuated, Beryl would turn her attention to her son. But then she wasn’t too pleased with Archie. Apparently the lad had settled into where he was living in the country like a duck to water and had resisted his mother’s efforts to get him to come home for some months. Quite a few of the parents he knew had brought their bairns home in the last year or so after no bombs had fallen in that time, but much as he’d like to have Cora and the other bairns home, he wasn’t about to risk it. The Nazis had bombed the hell out of London with their V-1s and V-2s this year; who was to say they wouldn’t begin bombing the northeast again? Just because Sunderland had been enjoying a break in the bombing thus far it didn’t mean old Hitler was finished with them yet.
He reac
hed for yesterday’s paper. It was still full of the news that the Allies had been caught on the hop by the Germans’ surprise attack through the Ardennes forest towards the Allied front in Belgium. A spokesman at the Allied HQ in Paris was maintaining that the offensive was merely a desperate attempt by Hitler to delay the inevitable, which was probably true, but it convinced him further that it was right to leave Cora and the others where they were. A dying scorpion was a darn sight more dangerous and unpredictable than a healthy one in his opinion and he wouldn’t be surprised if the Nazis had a sting in their tail yet.
There was also a short paragraph on the third page about the search being called off for Glenn Miller who had gone missing over the Channel two weeks before. He had been sad when he’d read about the band leader’s probable demise. Nancy had always liked Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington and the other masters of jazz and big-band swing, and he could still picture her dancing in this very kitchen to one of Miller’s records on the wireless. It didn’t seem right that a man who had taken the Miller Orchestra all over the world in war zones like the Pacific and Europe and the UK should have been killed when his plane was lost on a routine flight to France so late in the war. But then this damn war had destroyed so many lives in one way or another.
He sat up straighter in his chair. He’d allow himself a couple of drinks tonight; it was New Year’s Eve after all. He rarely drank these days – he’d drunk enough to last the rest of his life when he’d first come back from the war and Nancy had left him, but it had got him through those first hellish months. Once he’d begun to pull himself together it had been surprisingly easy to quit the booze, but then he’d never been one for drinking or smoking or gambling. Nancy had been his only addiction. He grimaced to himself.
Levering himself up by his good arm he walked across to the kitchen cupboard and took out a half-full bottle of whisky that had been sitting there since the previous New Year’s Eve. He glanced at the clock. Six o’clock. Not too early. He’d have a couple of quiet drinks, listen to the wireless for a bit and then go to bed after he’d locked up. Beryl wouldn’t like it if she did what she’d threatened and popped back later only to find the door bolted, but that was all to the good.
Before sitting down again he drew the curtains at the kitchen window. It was snowing heavily and a wind was getting up. Pity any poor blighter out tonight, he thought, taking his glass and resuming his seat in front of the fire. Beryl had cooked a nice piece of brisket earlier, it being a Sunday, and he was still comfortably replete, and what with the foul weather outside and it being warm and snug in the kitchen he experienced a rare moment of contentment verging on happiness.
He had barely settled himself in the chair when he heard a knock at the front door which made him frown in surprise. No one round these parts used the front door and even if someone had taken it into their heads to be first-footing, it was far too early. Of course, it could be bairns larking about – knocking on the door or ringing a doorbell and then disappearing was a great prank when you were knee high to a grasshopper – but with the snow coming down the way it was he’d have thought any bairns would be indoors.
The knock came again before he reached the front door and on opening it he found a woman he didn’t know peering up at him, her hat and the shoulders of her coat covered in snow. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said, ‘but you wouldn’t be Mr Stubbs by any chance? Gregory Stubbs?’
‘Aye, that’s me.’ She looked a respectable enough little body, he thought, but what the dickens did she want with him?
‘You don’t know me,’ she carried on, stating the obvious, ‘but I run a boarding house in Woodbine Street near Hendon Junction, and, well, it’s about one of me lodgers that I’ve come. I’ve always known her as Nancy Wright but it appears her name is Stubbs. I only found that out this afternoon, mind you. I didn’t know she was married, she’s always passed herself off as a widow.’
He stared at the woman, his eyes unblinking and his mouth closed, and it was only when she brushed at her coat with a gloved hand that he came out of his shock enough to say, ‘You’d better come in for a minute.’
‘No, I won’t come in, thanks all the same.’ She stared up at him from the pavement, and now there was definite condemnation in her tone when she said, ‘She’s poorly, Nancy, right poorly and I thought you ought to know. She don’t know I’m here but I thought it only right. When I married my Eustace we took each other on for better ’n’ worse and I’m old-fashioned enough to think that’s the way it should be. He wouldn’t have had me living in one room while he was in clover, no matter what we’d fallen out about. Of course it’s none of my business –’ her tone made it quite clear she thought exactly the opposite and moreover where she deposited the blame for their marriage breakdown – ‘and I don’t know what’s gone on, but I thought you ought to know she’s bad.’
He gathered himself together enough to ask, ‘What’s the matter with her?’
‘The flu. We all had it over Christmas, all of us in the house, I mean, but Nancy didn’t throw it off like me an’ my other lady. They sent her home from Blackett’s yesterday morning, that’s where she works. Did you know? Well, she does, and I insisted on calling the doctor although she wouldn’t have it at first. He said she’s got pleurisy and he’s given her some medicine but she’s been coughing fit to wake the dead. I sat with her this afternoon and that’s when she told me about you and her bairns and the lovely little house she used to have. I think it comforted her to talk about it because—’ The woman stopped abruptly.
‘What?’
‘Well, I reckon she thinks she’s not long for this world.’
‘She’s as bad as that?’
‘I think so, aye.’
What had happened to this fella she’d run off with and why wasn’t she still in Newcastle? She’d written to him shortly after she’d left him, but he had never replied and since then there had been nothing. ‘How long has she been living with you, Mrs . . . ?’
‘Duffy. Barbara Duffy. How long? Good few months now.’ Barbara Duffy didn’t add here that when the woman she now knew as Nancy Stubbs had arrived on her doorstep asking about a room, she’d thought she must have the consumption or something. Thin as a rake, Nancy had been, still was, but when she’d questioned her before letting her lodge with them Nancy had told her she’d been in hospital for a while. Caught in a bomb blast, Nancy had said, but she’d wondered then and she wondered now if that was the truth. There had been no visible signs of injury, not that there had to be, she supposed. Still, there had been something about Nancy that had bothered her from day one. Not that the lass had been any trouble, far from it. Nancy always paid her rent on time and was quiet and clean and polite. Perhaps too quiet and polite? As though something was missing inside, like the main spring was broken?
‘Could I come and see her?’ Gregory’s voice was flat but inside he was in turmoil now the shock was wearing off. ‘I mean, do you think she would want me to?’
‘You probably know best about that, being her husband –’ again the disapproval was overt – ‘but if you’re asking my opinion, from the way she spoke about you this afternoon I think she’d want to see you, aye.’ Round bright eyes, like a robin’s, fixed Gregory’s in a piercing gaze. ‘But if she gets over this she’ll need looking after properly. She’s nowt but skin and bone as it is, but she’ll be worse after the pleurisy. That’s what did for my Eustace years ago and he was a big strong bloke at the time, not like your wife, Mr Stubbs. A breath of wind could blow Nancy away.’
She wasn’t describing the Nancy he had known. She had never been fat but her hour-glass figure had been beautiful. Gregory cleared his throat. ‘Could I accompany you back now?’
‘Aye.’ Barbara Duffy gave no sign of relenting in her stance of measured hostility. ‘You could.’
‘Would you come in a moment while I change out of my slippers and get my hat and coat?’
This time she accepted the invitation, stepping into the hall, whe
reupon Gregory closed the front door and then as he led the way she followed him down the hall and into the kitchen. He bolted the back door – he didn’t want Beryl in the house while he was gone – and then sat down to change into his boots. This was always a fumbling procedure – he had been right-handed before the injuries – and he was aware of her eyes on him although she did not speak. His cap and overcoat were hanging on a row of pegs to one side of the range – it was always warmer in the kitchen than the rest of the house which often resembled an icebox – and as he donned these, she said, ‘Cop it in the war, did you?’
‘Aye, Tobruk, but I was luckier than most of my pals.’
Her tone softening for the first time, she said, ‘There’s plenty who didn’t come back from them parts, isn’t there.’
‘Aye.’ He nodded. ‘If Rommel had been on our side the war’d be over by now.’
Softening further, she nodded to his muffler still hanging on one of the pegs. ‘I’d put that on, lad. It’s bitter out.’
He left the house by the front door, the first time he had done so for a long time. The snow was thick and still falling steadily and in spite of it being New Year’s Eve and a time when the north-east celebrated, war or no war, the streets were hushed. They walked in silence and Gregory was concentrating so hard on not going headlong that the impending meeting with Nancy was of necessity pushed to the back of his mind, for which he was grateful. The pavements and roads were lethal, ice and snow providing a combination that made it impossible to hurry, and as they passed lighted windows glowing warmly in the darkness he reflected that since the blackout restrictions were lifted in September it had made the end of the war seem within reach at last.
Once, when Mrs Duffy slipped, he grabbed her arm and righted her, and after she’d thanked him, she said, ‘What happened between you and Nancy, if you don’t mind me asking?’
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