The Second-last Woman in England

by Maggie Joel

  ‘India, my boy!’ the old man had said, practically shouting the words and it had seemed as though he had been leading up to this point throughout the whole unpleasant visit.

  Harriet had got up and walked away.

  ‘It’s still the best option, boy! It’s still the jewel in our diminishing crown! It will be the making of you. It’s been the making of better men than you.’

  Meaning himself, presumably, Cecil had thought, a little uncharitably. Really, the old boy was quite insufferable.

  ‘If there’s going to be a war, one hardly wants to be shuffling paper in Calcutta, does one?’ Freddie had replied laconically, which had only infuriated the old man further.

  ‘There isn’t going to be a war!’

  Mr Paget had spoken and Herr Hitler had jolly well better listen.

  ‘You can still get into the Civil Service, despite having a second-rate degree,’ he had insisted. ‘I still have some influence, you know. These old hands can still pull a few strings.’

  The old hands he was referring to were curled, claw-like, around the top of a knobbly cane planted on the ground between his knees. They were wizened things, the fingers narrow and dried up, the knuckles swollen, the nails an unpleasant yellow. Like dragon’s claws from some childhood fairytale.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Freddie had replied, unwinding his long legs and reaching for the sherry decanter. ‘Refill, anyone?’

  ‘Thirty-five years of my life I gave to India!’ the old man had shouted, thumping the floor with his cane, and Cecil had shifted uneasily.

  ‘And Mother gave her life,’ Harriet had said, reappearing at his elbow. Cecil remembered flinching at that. But the old man had not heard, or had chosen not to hear.

  ‘And it was a wild place back then. By God, you’ve no idea. The natives were little more than savages in some places. Head-hunters, cannibals, uprisings, mutinies. Butchered, we were, whole families, whole settlements. And we had come to save them!’

  ‘There’s ingratitude for you!’ Freddie had remarked, refilling his glass and putting the stopper back in the decanter.

  Increasingly agitated, the old man had lifted his cane and pointed it angrily, almost violently, at his young son.

  ‘I was glad to serve my country, my Queen. And some of the men who went out there never came back. They never returned!’

  This was clearly Freddie’s fault.

  ‘I remember one young man, about your age. Fresh out from Chatham. Bright future ahead of him. Only been out a few weeks. Just a few weeks. Butchered. In broad daylight. Not in the jungle, in a park in the middle of a city. Struck down in broad daylight.’

  Harriet, quite suddenly, had become almost hysterical.

  ‘He’s not going to India! He’s not! Don’t you understand? There’s nothing there for us, nothing! It’s dead. Gone!’

  Her words had rebounded off the walls of the small, over-furnished flat and echoed around them like a cannon shot. They had all sat there in horrid silence, Freddie staring wordlessly at the floor, his jaws clenched tightly; the old man, his face purple, his mouth opening and closing like a great, stupid carp in a pond; and Cecil, clutching the arms of his chair and hearing his heart beating too loudly.

  ‘Come, Cecil. It’s time we were off,’ Harriet had announced, and even though they had not even eaten lunch and he had been horribly, horribly embarrassed at the thought of simply getting up and leaving, he’d been relieved and had jumped up, too quickly, to join her.

  Afterwards—what? They must have returned home. Had they walked or taken a cab? Did they talk about it? He couldn’t remember.

  By the following Christmas they had had Julius, and a nanny of course, and that dreadful woman, Mrs Flowers, Mrs Thompson’s predecessor, who had cooked and kept house for them. By the following Christmas the spell had been broken. He had made one of the rooms his study, another was the day nursery, another the night nursery. No one roamed from room to room anymore. And by the end of the war Harriet had her own bedroom.

  Inside the house all was silent.

  Mrs Thompson did not stir before dawn for anyone, Christmas or no Christmas, and Julius and Anne had never been the sort of children to rise before dawn on Christmas Day, even when they were very small. Would Harriet be up? What time did she awaken usually? She had been a late riser in the early years of their marriage, had resented the dawn. But now? Did she lie in bed for a time, reading, smoking, thinking? Did she stand at the window and look out at the world? He realised he didn’t know.

  He sat up, wondered whether to venture as far as the window, decided it was too early yet. His toes pushed against the cold hot-water bottle and it slid out of the bottom of the bed and fell with a sloppy thud onto the floor. A draft of cold air shot in through the gap in the sheets and he pulled them more closely about his legs. In the old house in the days before the Great War they had required a housemaid to start a fire in each of the bedrooms and to pour hot water into a large enamel washing bowl on the dressing table before they would even think of getting up, and still the cold had chilled the bones. He shivered. The past was always colder than the present.

  And yet still one wanted to return there.

  The tolling of the church bell had given way to a peal. He got out of bed, thrusting his feet into slippers and reaching quickly for his dressing gown. It really was bitterly cold; even the carpet seemed icy. It got colder still as he crossed to the window and drew the curtains aside. Had it snowed?

  It hadn’t. The dawn was hidden in the greyish-yellow smog. Frost laced the windows and glistened wetly on the lawn below.

  From down the hallway a door opened. A muffled voice could be heard—Julius? Then a reply, in a higher voice—Anne, presumably. A thump followed, then silence. The children were up, discovering their stockings. He sighed. He had carefully wrapped the presents the night before, sometime after midnight, and had silently entered their rooms and placed one bulging stocking at the end of each bed. The task ought to have brought pleasure but it had saddened him.

  The bells ceased suddenly and silence fell. It was Christmas morning—it hadn’t snowed and once again Father Christmas had not come.

  Chapter Fourteen

  DECEMBER 1952

  She could have sat in the same pew as the family but Jean chose the pew behind, from where she stared at the back of Mr Wallis’s head for the duration of the Christmas morning service. No one had asked her to move. No one had said, ‘Nanny, why are you sitting there? Why don’t you sit with us?’ Instead, Anne had said, ‘But Mummy, I don’t want to keep my gloves on, it’s too hot!’ And Julius had said, ‘Oh, look what some wag’s drawn on the front of this hymn book!’ Mr Wallis had pretended not to hear and Mrs Wallis had sat down looking cross and announced in an aside, ‘Really, the hypocrisy of it all makes me sick.’

  And that appeared to sum up Christmas for the Wallises.

  Jean closed her eyes. She did not hold out much hope that the Church of England Christmas morning service, nor the fresh-faced and eager-looking rector who was going to deliver it, would provide the sort of nourishment her soul craved on such an important day.

  The pews had cushions on them: red lipstick-coloured cushions of a velvety material tied to the wooden pews with lengths of gold cord. In her own Chapel in Stepney the pews were pews: long wooden benches, and Dad used to say if you sat on them for an hour you remembered God’s grace and that Christ had died for you on the Cross. Here, you thought about Christmas dinner and the presents in your stocking and how much your neighbour earned and what hat his wife was wearing.

  Sometimes it was hard to love your neighbour.

  In the pew in front of her, Mr Wallis sat very straight, his hymn book resting in his lap, an attentive look on his face as the rector spoke of the three wise men. The bringing of gifts, of course, appealed to this congregation. The gold, the frankincense, the myrrh—the children sat up on their cushions imagining the wonders that such words implied; imagining the presents that were awaiting them in th
eir homes. How the service dragged on when there was a splendid dinner to consume and splendid presents in brightly coloured paper to unwrap!

  A child dropped her hymn book with a loud thud and everyone turned to look—a congregation so easily distracted from the word of God. Mr Wallis did not turn, he continued to stare at the eager-faced rector, but the rector’s words surely did not penetrate; it seemed his attentiveness was on his own thoughts, with no room left for God’s word.

  She could have gone to her own Chapel for the Christmas service; Mrs Wallis had said as much, had seemed surprised that Jean had not wanted to take the day off. But why would she, when she had no family to go home to? She had gone to Chapel last Christmas eager for the word of God to fill her as it had always done on this holy day. But instead the ghosts of Mum and Dad and Gladys and Nerys and Edward and little Bertie had surrounded her and she had left before the final prayer. She had craved their presence, sought their spirits every day for seven years, and yet when she had found them—when they had found her—she had fled.

  And now another year had passed; it was eight years since that final Christmas and sometimes she found she could not remember a face, could no longer hear their voices in her head.

  ‘Oh what an occasion it must have been!’ sang out the rector, clapping his hands enthusiastically as he related the story of Christ’s birth to his once-a-year captive audience. ‘A saviour is born! A king is born! And Jesus had no coronation, remember. No golden carriage with horses and footmen to transport him to his throne; no crown studded with jewels awaiting him; no adoring crowds cheering him on.’

  The Coronation. It was less than six months away. Was this the only way the rector could get his message through to his congregation, by comparing Christ’s birth to the Coronation, so that, in their closed and addled minds, they confused the crowning of a new queen with the birth of God’s only son?

  ‘Mummy, if we buy a television set we will be able to watch the Coronation!’ said Anne in a loud voice, and a number of people laughed.

  Jean closed her eyes.

  On that final Christmas in ’44, Dad had read from the New Testament—Matthew’s account of Christ’s birth, as he did each year—and they had sat silently around the table in the parlour, breathlessly it seemed now, listening in awe and wonder. Afterwards Dad had closed the Bible and laid it on the table and looked around at each of their silent faces, his own face shiny with the glory of God, and that glory was reflected in the face of each of them, even Bertie, who was only just five. Even he had sat still and quiet.

  ‘Well, now,’ Dad had said, ‘what a glorious day it was. And we thank the good Lord that we are all here together on this special day to celebrate the birth of His only son.’

  ‘Amen!’ said Mum, squeezing Dad’s hand.

  ‘Amen!’ replied Gladys and Nerys and Edward and little Bertie.

  And in Jean’s memory, Nerys was wearing the buttercup-yellow ribbon in her hair and Edward his dark green cardigan that Mum had knitted the previous winter, two buttons already missing. Mum was wearing her best, sturdy navy-blue shoes and behind them on the mantelpiece was the little china horse Gladys had won at the fair two summers earlier.

  ‘The tin! The tin!’ cried Edward, and Bertie joined in, thumping the table excitedly.

  And Dad reached behind him for the tobacco tin with the dented yellow lid that showed a sailor in a jersey and a peaked cap. He laid the tin carefully on the table with almost as much reverence as he had shown the Bible.

  ‘My turn! My turn!’ said Bertie, his eyes sparkling with excitement.

  ‘It was Bertie on Sunday,’ said Nerys primly, looking to Jean and Gladys for confirmation.

  ‘That’s ’cause it was his birthday,’ pointed out Edward, becoming all serious. Edward believed strongly in fairness and justice.

  ‘It must be Dad’s turn again!’ said Gladys, who was good at sums and had worked out that if Bertie had done it last, then Dad, as the eldest, was next in turn.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind missing out,’ said Dad, with a smile. ‘What about it, girl?’ and he smiled at Jean.

  Taking the tin Dad held out to her, she lifted the dented lid and closed her eyes—she always closed her eyes—and her fingers dipped into the tiny strips of paper nestled within. She didn’t fish about the way Gladys did, trying first one and then another, or dive in with her whole fist like Edward did. No, she allowed her fingers to hover for a moment then reached out, and the first piece of paper they touched, that was the one. She opened her eyes. Unfolding the tiny strip she read aloud:

  ‘You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day: Psalm 91, verse 5.’

  She looked up and saw them all watching her. No one questioned what it meant. They had survived the Blitz when many thousands of others had perished. And now the Germans were sending flying rockets that came in the daytime and destroyed whole streets and whole families.

  ‘Well, by God’s grace, we ’ave made it safely to another Christmas, intact and in one piece,’ Mum declared, saying out loud what they were all thinking. ‘And now it is time to eat!’

  The Bible and the tin had been put away and from the kitchen Mum had brought in the Christmas dinner. There had been a rabbit and five potatoes—one for each of the children—a sliced carrot, parsnips and a turnip, all from the vegetable patch in the back yard, and bread too, and Mum had made a custard from two month’s ration of dried egg and a jug of milk courtesy of Mrs McGuiness down the street who had a daughter who worked on the land. Gladys, Nerys and Jean had saved their sweet ration for a month and with their coupons they got two chocolate bars and some gobstoppers which they all ate noisily and happily that evening and for once no one had worried about how little there was in the pantry for tomorrow.

  Dad had worked extra night shifts at the docks that Christmas to provide the rabbit on Christmas day. Other men turned to the black market to get hold of an egg, some bananas, a whole chicken sometimes. But not Dad. His conscience wouldn’t allow it—not when others were starving. He had saved his money and gone up west where there were shops that still had food. He hadn’t said how much he had paid and they had known better than to ask.

  ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord!’ said the rector triumphantly and the congregation rose to its feet, relieved and released, their duty done for another year.

  ‘Mrs Shehan-Knowles wore that same hat last Christmas,’ said Mrs Wallis.

  ‘Pops, I thought I’d stroll over to Alistair Kellett’s house this afternoon after lunch, just to wish them a merry Christmas,’ said Julius.

  ‘You most certainly will not, Julius,’ said Mr Wallis, turning to his son in some astonishment. ‘On Christmas Day?’

  ‘What better day to wish a chap Merry Christmas?’ Julius replied.

  ‘I’ve lost my glove!’ said Anne plaintively.

  And so the service ended.

  The walk back to Athelstan Gardens was made, for the most part, in silence. Anne walked with one hand stuffed into the pocket of her thick winter coat—despite an intensive search the missing glove had remained missing. Everyone had handkerchiefs tied over their faces against the pea-souper, hats pulled low. Ahead of them the houses halfway down the street vanished into a murky fog. Of those houses they could make out, each had a large holly wreath on its front door, glistening with shiny red berries and tied with a scarlet ribbon. A man had come around a week earlier, knocking on each door and selling wreaths from a large barrow, but as most of the residents had already ordered their wreaths from Harrods and Peter Jones and Barkers of Kensington and had them hand-delivered and attached to the front door by a boy, he failed to sell very many at all.

  In Stepney a wreath meant someone had died. Jean had seen them—home-made from daisies, willowherb and roses—in the early part of the Blitz, laid on the remains of someone’s house or hanging from a makeshift cross someone had fashioned from two pieces of timber. By Christmas ’44 you didn’t see them so much—too man
y houses destroyed, too many families wiped out.

  ‘What do I do if Alistair comes here to wish me a Merry Christmas then, Pops?’ said Julius, opening the gate to the Wallises’ front steps.

  Cecil frowned. ‘Then you would return the greeting and invite him in for a hot drink and a mince pie.’

  ‘Even though it’s Christmas?’

  They all trooped up the front steps and waited while Cecil unlocked the front door. A smell of pine needles and roast turkey spilled out.

  ‘Exactly, Julius. We cannot hold ourselves responsible for the ill manners of others in coming to visit us. In that circumstance we show our own good manners by returning the season’s greetings and offering hospitality. By not alluding to another’s bad manners one shows oneself a true gentleman.’

  ‘I see.’ Julius nodded thoughtfully as he followed his father into the hallway. ‘And yet you pointed out my bad manners to me, Pops, didn’t you?’

  ‘Anne, please remove your shoes—you are shedding pine needles all over the floor,’ Cecil said, seeming not to hear Julius’s last remark.

  There were indeed pine needles all over the floor, though they had been there for over a week, ever since Mr Addison, the man who did the garden, had arrived with the five-foot Christmas tree and had dragged it by its trunk the length of the hallway and up the stairs to the drawing room, installing it beside the baby grand. Mrs Thompson had stomped up the stairs after him with a dustpan and brush and a number of colourful phrases, and had succeeded only in embedding them more firmly into the carpet. It therefore seemed a little unfair to blame Anne for this. But Anne seemed unconcerned.

  ‘Presents! It’s time to open the presents!’ she announced, stripping off her shoes, coat, scarf, hat and remaining glove and diving up the stairs.

  Jean stooped to retrieve the various articles.