by Juliet West
Bea was tempted to mention Tom. She could simply say that her son had talked of a girl called Hazel, and might she by any chance know him? But something had gone on between Hazel and Tom – that was clear from his letter. She’d let him down in some way, for whatever reason, and it might embarrass Hazel if she brought his name into the conversation. Better to keep quiet for now, she sensed, and wait for the right moment.
‘So your family has moved back to London?’
Again Hazel hesitated. For all her pleasantness, there was something guarded about her manner. ‘I share a flat with Lucia,’ she said.
Ah. Bea couldn’t help feeling surprised. Hazel was young to be living away from home, sharing a flat with another girl. Perhaps she’d fallen out with her family – they may have disagreed over her politics. There were plenty of families split in that way. Mrs Beggs’s brother, a diehard trade-union man, hadn’t spoken to his sister in over two years.
‘That must be great fun,’ said Bea, dunking a sticky plate in the water.
‘Yes,’ said Hazel quietly.
‘And I expect you have a sweetheart?’
‘No . . . not at present.’
Hazel pulled a plate from the draining rack and Bea turned to look sideways at the girl. It was unmistakable. There were tears in her eyes, and she was blinking them back as fast as she could, but it was no use because a great fat one had already dropped onto her cheek.
She was a lost soul, poor thing. Bea wished she could do something to help. But it was unlikely they’d meet again soon, not unless Bea joined the drum corps or started coming up to HQ more often. Neither option appealed. But she knew she must somehow stay in touch with Hazel. It was clear to her now that there had been a mix-up or a misunderstanding between Hazel and Tom. She seemed too sweet and sincere to have let him down purposely. Perhaps she, Bea, could set things right between them. It was just a case of treading gently. Smoothing the way, without interfering. What had he written? If you would only explain, then at least I could understand. She could try to understand on his behalf. And then, tactfully, she could let Tom know.
Bea put the broom back into the store cupboard and untied her apron. Now that the idea had taken root, she felt happier than she had since October when Tom announced he was leaving. Surely he’d come back from Spain if he thought Hazel was waiting for him? The winter was getting cold out there, and although she tried to avoid all news of Spain, it seemed the Republicans were struggling. He stayed cheery in his letters, of course, just as Jack had when he wrote from Flanders.
In the kitchen Lucia was holding court, her posh voice echoing off the scrubbed white tiles.
‘Takings for the refreshments are good,’ she said, clanking coins in a canvas money bag. ‘Up on last year. Bric-a-brac is down. Overall a success, but did you see those women haggling over the prices?’ She sighed and wrinkled her nose.
‘Did somebody let the Semites in?’ said Eleanor.
Alexia snorted. ‘I thought there was a strange smell at one point. Blasted cheek, coming here.’
Bea flinched. She thought of Mr Perlman and the two frightened children, great-nieces of his late wife, who had arrived from Germany the previous weekend.
‘Quite,’ said Lucia. ‘But apart from that unpleasantness, it was an excellent afternoon. Well done, ladies.’ Lucia leaned towards the girls. ‘See you on Wednesday evening for envelope duty?’
‘Envelope duty?’ asked Bea.
‘Oh, just a little gathering at my flat,’ she said with an airy wave of her hand that made it clear Bea was not included. ‘Stacks of members’ Christmas cards to address.’
‘I’m happy to help,’ said Bea.
‘You?’ Lucia looked at her as if she doubted her ability to write.
Hazel broke the silence. Her cheeks had pinked – at least she had the decency to feel embarrassed, thought Bea. ‘That’s very kind, don’t you think, Lucia?’ said Hazel. ‘Many hands and all that.’
‘Yes, I suppose an extra pair of hands . . . It’s Kensington, though. You’re from the districts, I gather?’
‘I can find my way around town, dear.’
‘Of course. We’ll look forward to seeing you.’
It was a pig of a journey but she arrived in good time. The flat was on the ground floor of a mansion block, just off High Street Ken, a nice part of town. Bea rang the polished brass bell for Flat 1, and stood waiting on the chilly doorstep for half a minute. She was about to ring again when the door was opened by Hazel, dressed in a velvet evening gown with a green silk corsage pinned to the collar. One half of her hair was styled and curled, the other half frizzed in all directions. A cigarette dangled from her left hand.
‘Bea,’ she said. ‘Please come on through. I’m sorry I look such a sight.’
‘Not at all. That’s a lovely dress.’
She wondered why Hazel was dolled up, and why her nerves seemed jangly, but there was no need to ask because Hazel began to gabble, all the while standing at the hall mirror fiddling with the corsage between puffs of her cigarette.
‘I got completely muddled with my dates,’ said Hazel. ‘My mother’s coming in half an hour. She’s taking me to dinner, so I can’t help with the envelopes after all. Thank goodness you volunteered. I don’t have to feel so guilty.’
Oh, glory, thought Bea. The whole point of the exercise was to get to know Hazel better. Now she was going to be stuck for the evening with Lucia and the other two.
‘Not to worry,’ she said. ‘I suppose you can’t let your mother down.’
Hazel smiled and showed Bea into the living room. The girls were sitting at a table where cards and envelopes were stacked in a dozen or more piles. ‘Here’s Bea, good as her word,’ said Hazel. ‘Got the hair irons on in the bedroom. Must go.’
Bea took off her headscarf and unbuttoned her coat. No one offered to take her things, and so she laid them on the arm of a settee. She noticed something silver wedged under a cushion. A baby’s rattle? Queer.
With her stockinged foot, Lucia nudged out a chair from under the table. ‘Do take a seat,’ she said. ‘We’re drawing up a system. You can be R to Z.’
Bea felt in her bag for her fountain pen, marvelling at the manners of these supposedly well-bred girls. She hadn’t even been offered a cup of tea. Still, she was here now, and she’d have to get on with the job in hand. At least it was warm in the room, with the heavy brocade curtains drawn and all the bars glowing on the electric fire. Unscrewing her pen lid, she took her section of the list and began to copy out the first address. She was proud of her handwriting – it was better than Alexia’s untidy scribble – but then a loud bell sounded and her pen jumped with the surprise, splodging a blob of ink directly on the H of Hillingdon. She reached for the blotting paper.
‘The door again!’ said Lucia. ‘Hazel’s mother must be early. Alexia, can you let the witch in?’
Bea’s back was to the living-room door. She twisted around in her seat, ready to smile at the woman as she walked into the room. The witch. There was a man beside her. The ceiling light was bright, and the table lamp was burning. There could be no mistaking this couple. Immediately she turned away, staring back down at the envelope, pressing the blotting paper onto the smudge of black ink and praying that Lucia would not suddenly remember her manners and introduce Bea to the visitors.
‘Mrs Alexander, how lovely to meet you,’ said Lucia. ‘Hazel won’t be a moment.’
‘You must be Lucia?’ said the witch. She pronounced it Looseeya.
‘It’s Lucia, actually,’ she said. ‘Ch. Italian.’
‘Very well.’ She sniffed. ‘Please don’t let us interrupt anything. Just that I thought if I were a little early I might see Jasmin.’
Bea’s cheeks blazed. Jasmin? Who might Jasmin be? She wanted to look around the room again – had she missed someone? – but she kept her eyes fixed downwards, her fingers firm on the blotting paper.
‘She’s fast asleep,’ said Lucia. ‘I doubt Hazel will want to
wake her. Oh, here she is now. Your mother’s arrived, with—’
‘Charles. Charles Lassiter,’ said the man. His heels clicked on the floor as he stepped forward. ‘Charmed to meet you, the mysterious Lucia.’
Bea’s spine stiffened. She realized she was holding her breath and she exhaled, quietly, quietly, praying again that no one would notice her. This prayer, at least, was answered.
Sleep was impossible. Harold was dozing, sick with a winter bug, a fever that wouldn’t go away. He slept on his side without his pyjama top, the skin loose and wrinkled on his back, and she could feel the heat from him creeping along the sheets. In the early hours she slipped out of bed and wandered onto the landing. There was no sound but the slow whirr of the meter wheel in the cupboard. She wished for something shocking and sharp: spears of rain attacking the windowpane; a cat fight; even a dog whining to show that she was not the only creature awake and suffering. It was a cold night but her skin was burning hot. Perhaps she was catching Harold’s bug. She would get into Tom’s bed. The linen was freshly made up; the sheets would be cool.
There was a time when the memory of Charles was something to savour, a treat Bea might allow herself on those long afternoons when Tom was at school and Harold was working at the factory.
To see Charles again, to be in that warm room with him – it was too much to take in. He looked a little older, of course – the fair hair had darkened, and his skin was weathered – but in essence he was unchanged. Had he noticed her, sitting at the table, gripping her fountain pen so hard that her thumbnail scored the barrel? No, he wouldn’t have noticed her, same as he hadn’t noticed her in the Aldwick pub, and even if he had he wouldn’t recognize her because she looked decades older – transformed into a dumpy sack of a woman whose long shiny hair had become an unkempt bob flecked with suet-grey strands.
Tom’s sheets were too hot now. Hot and damp and heavy. She tiptoed downstairs and into the front room. On the mantelshelf was the photograph from Margate – Tom in the middle holding their hands, the wind blowing his fringe across his eyes.
Next to Margate was the snap taken by a street photographer in Greenwich: Harold with his arm draped around her shoulder, a few months after he’d been sent home from the war. They were standing near the river, a barge drifting behind them. They looked happy, and she supposed they were, in a cautious kind of way. Harold’s injury was a terrible pity but they were making the best of it. Bea felt she could manage without the act itself, and in any case they could still be close: a kiss and a cuddle and other things she’d never known about in their newly-wed days.
What she couldn’t manage was the thought that she’d never be a mother, and it was worse to bear because she’d once come so close, the summer of 1914. Perhaps it was the shock of the war being declared, the worry that Harold or her brother might have to fight, that led to the disaster. The poor scrap was born four months early. She’d caught a glimpse of its tiny body as the doctor wrapped it in muslin and hurried out of the bedroom door. ‘A boy or a girl?’ she asked the doctor when he came back into the room empty-handed. ‘Best not to ask,’ he answered. ‘Least said soonest mended.’ Oh, how she wished that were true.
Later, when Harold was called up, they convinced themselves that losing the baby was a blessing in disguise. All those mothers around the world, driven half-mad trying to cope single-handed. It was hard on the kiddies without their dads around. No, there was plenty of time to start their family after the war. It would happen eventually.
Harold never saw the front line because of his poor eyesight. They had him working as an orderly at a military hospital near Rouen. He wrote letters from his dorm in an old chateau. There were some terrible goings-on, he said, but weren’t they lucky that he was safe here, miles behind the line, though often you’d feel the ground shake with the shelling.
Meanwhile Jack was in the thick of it, a gunner in the Royal West Kents. From his postcards you’d think he was on a jolly to Brighton. Bea knew the forced cheeriness meant things were really bad, because Jack was a serious boy in truth. He wasn’t given to daft jokes.
Their parents were both dead and Jack wasn’t married, so Bea was down as next of kin for her brother as well as for Harold. That meant double dread when she heard next door’s terrier barking: the signal that the postman was on his way.
The first letter was typewritten and signed by Jack’s C.O. It is with the deepest regret that I have to inform you . . . Poor, poor Jack – the sweetest baby brother. Eyes the colour of lightest amber, dimples to melt your heart. She felt the grief might end her. There was only one way of coping, she discovered, and that was to pretend it wasn’t true. She collected Jack’s things from his Catford lodging house and stored them under the spare bed, ready for the revelation – the stories weren’t unknown – that the C.O. had got it wrong, mixed up the identity discs in the chaos of battle.
And then came the telegram. Harold had been injured and he was on his way to a hospital in England. Bea sat on the bottom stair and cried. The injury was grave, they said, but his life was not in danger.
It was not until he came home, just before Christmas 1916, that Harold was able to explain. A patient in the hospital, a young Frenchman, had taken against Harold, something to do with a sleeping draught and Harold not fetching a nurse quick enough, and the patient had somehow hidden a knife beneath his sheets. When Harold came up to his bed to take away a screen, the Frenchman attacked him with the knife, plunged it right into Harold’s groin and another cut down his thigh. The patient stabbed himself next, straight through the heart, which finished the job at least, said Harold, because if he hadn’t done himself in, it would have been the firing squad.
Bea replaced the Greenwich photograph and went into the kitchen to drink a glass of milk. Moonlight fell through the window onto the table. There was her purse, the coins for the milkman stacked neatly beside it. The old magazine advertisement was still hidden inside, behind a sewn-up tear in the purse lining. Wives of Wounded Soldiers: Discreet Fertility Service Offered. She had cut the advert out with kitchen scissors and kept it under the cutlery tray for weeks. Eventually she found the courage to show Harold. He scanned the clipping, then handed it back in silence. ‘Is it worth writing off?’ she asked. He said he wouldn’t object, if it was what she wanted. And so it began.
‘Charles Lassiter’ was the name he’d given to Lucia. Bea had known him only as Charles. She’d asked the woman who ran the clinic, Dr Cutler, whether it would be possible to arrange a prior meeting, just so that she might have some knowledge of the man before the meeting proper. Dr Cutler said it wasn’t usual, and frankly it was inadvisable, but not to worry because she had no doubt that Mrs Smart would find Charles charming, courteous and utterly alive to the sensitive nature of the situation.
They arranged to rendezvous outside a small hotel in Bloomsbury, a short walk from Russell Square station. He would be wearing a red-and-white polka-dot handkerchief in his jacket pocket, Dr Cutler said, and a homburg hat. Bea’s heart reared up when she turned the corner into Bedford Place and saw a young man in a homburg leaning against the hotel’s iron railings. It had to be him. He turned to look at her, tipped his hat, and then it was too late to change her mind.
They shook hands and she smelt a drift of citrus-scented cologne. ‘Charmed to meet you, Mrs Smart,’ he said, as the concierge held open the door into the lobby. They went into the bar, and to her surprise no one took any notice of them. She thought she would be shown up in her home-sewn evening dress, but it wasn’t such a flashy place after all, and of course the war had kept everyone to a certain level. She had her mother’s necklace, at least, and the moonstone earrings that Harold had brought back from France, wrapped in a twist of soot-blackened newspaper. Her long hair was piled into a bun, and her dress was laced at the back, pulled tight against her curves. Perhaps it was even possible that Charles found her attractive.
A port and lemon was what she’d normally have, but when he suggested gin and vermout
h, she nodded and said that would be lovely. He chatted about his travels in Europe, and the war, and how it might be over soon, now the Americans were in. His manner was gentlemanly, almost condescending, yet she was certain he was younger than her, twenty-six or twenty-seven, perhaps. Bea wondered why he wasn’t fighting and Charles must have read her thoughts, because he briefly mentioned something about war work – an administrative role, he said. Rather confidential. Never once did he ask a question about her own life. That was part of the understanding, and she was glad of it.
The room was on the second floor. She was breathless when they reached the top of the stairs, her blood rushing with the gin and the strangeness of the evening. He unlocked the door and pushed it wide. When Bea hesitated he smiled: a kind, encouraging smile. She met his eyes and stepped over the threshold.
Quickly she glanced around, taking in the large bed with its cream embroidered linen, the vase of long-stemmed lilies in front of the fireplace, the silver ice bucket in which stood a bottle of uncorked wine.
‘I took the liberty,’ said Charles. ‘Trebbiano?’
She felt tipsy already yet she nodded, hopeful that one more drink would offer the courage she needed. He poured two glasses and handed one to her. Bea stepped towards the window. He followed and stood at her side, parting the delicate lace curtains to reveal a tall chestnut tree that filled the hotel garden. The branches were so close to the window, it was almost possible to reach out and touch the May blossom. Bea’s eyes were drawn to the pink flush at the base of the ivory petals. Such pretty flowers; she had never noticed their beauty before.
She took a sip of wine. ‘Spring is my favourite season,’ she said.
Charles made no reply, and she knew that the time for talking was over.
Afterwards, they had lain in the bed for almost an hour. Charles put two pillows under her thighs. ‘Tried and tested,’ he explained, ‘Helps the fellows on their journey.’ She blushed at the reminder that this was something Charles had done goodness knows how many times before. It hadn’t felt like that, earlier. It had felt as though they were truly intimate. The way he had touched and kissed her . . . it had been all she could manage not to cry out. If this was an act he was a terrific actor, and she did not regret one penny of the ten pounds she had paid to Dr Cutler.
