by Betty Burton
But Hugh could not bear to think of Georgia doing the things Angela did, crying aloud as Angela did, telling him what to do next and what she was going to do, and afterwards watching him with smoke curling up past her face, arousing him before he was ready again and yet not being able to stop her, nor wanting to. To think of Georgia behaving like a whore was as painful to him as when, as a youth, he had come to terms with the fact of his own conception.
‘You might find it quite a bit of sport, Hughie sweet. A spot of leave will do us both the world of good. A change of scene, change of bed, change of lover. And remove that expression – if you go all frightfully sullen, I shall pick up my knickers and be off. You know that I cannot bear a man who wants to possess me body and soul. I belong to me and I shall give whatever bits and pieces of me to whomsoever I fancy or need. ’
Although she was very young, she knew how to quell him as well as to arouse him. It had been the core curriculum of her finishing school. Arouse and quell. At hunt balls, Henley, Cowes, Ascot and Commem balls. The art of upper-class seduction was not intended to bewitch an ex-Assistant Manager catapulted into a secret and glamorous military operation, but to throw a net over a prospective husband of the right sort, frequently a prospective husband who would prefer not to have to couple with a woman.
Anny St John knew that he loved her accent when it was perfect almost to the point of parody and that, whilst he wanted her exclusively, he could be aroused and excited at the idea of her having other lovers, so long as he was her chosen man of the moment. Again, on that Christmas Eve, she was doing both: keeping him on the knife-edge with promised satisfaction on one side and threat of deprivation on the other.
What Hugh did not know was what she had confided to a roomful of her Cheyne Walk girlfriends on a recent twenty-four-hour pass. ‘I had no idea a man could be so phenomenally attractive. He’s quite a bit older, oh, in sight of forty I should think, yet he’s so unspoiled.’
‘Not now you’ve got him, Anny.’
‘I’ve not spoiled him, not one whit… quite the reverse, I have taken his raw clay and moulded it to my liking… well, of course, and to his also. I have only to…’ She made a moue, raised her eyebrows and left it at that.
‘Mean, Anny, mean. Tell.’
‘What, and have Fiona tattle to her bandage winders? But, it is like having the most virile virgin every time – God, the bloody man is exciting – don’t ask me why, he simply is.’
Her friends, of course, wanted to view this lover Anny had found for herself, this pistol of a Junior Army officer from some rural place in the Home Counties.
‘You should join the Navy and find your own, my darlings – I know that there are plenty more clean-cut types, but I’m not letting you within a mile of my lovely unbuggered grammar-school Hughie.’
‘They don’t, you know… grammar-school types.’
‘Right… mixed sex education.’
‘How come your mixed-sex grammar-school Hughie is so virginal with all those girls available?’
‘Oh, by not knowing what it was for, and putting everything into his village cricket team.’
‘Everything? Anny!’
‘Hospital wards are making you coarse, Fiona.’
Re-buttoned, re-buckled, hair combed and re-coiled, Hugh and Angela became uniformed colleagues again for the purpose of making written reports on the obvious – that this was a wooden hut with sealed windows and insulated walls within so many yards of the tide-line.
‘Shall we come down here tomorrow, Anny?’
‘Do you think I could find a shark’s tooth?’
‘A fossil one – of course, there are thousands.’
‘All right, and we could have a swim – oh yes! A freezing swim before our Christmas Lunch… wonderful!’
‘I haven’t got my bathing trunks on camp, Anny,’ Hugh said in all seriousness.
She scoffed at him by doing her trick of tipping her hat over one eye and looking him up and down clowning suggestiveness. ‘Bathing drawers. Oh Hughie darling, I could eat you. You are so absolutely sweet.’
* * *
The Partridge sisters-in-law, Paula and Marie, greeted one another with the friendly reserve expected. ‘Oh Paula, you shouldn’t have.’
‘Get on with you, Marie, if Robbo and me are going to be here for Christmas, it’s only fair for me to help out with the baking.’
Marie acknowledged this, and would have felt put out if Paula and Robbo hadn’t expected to muck in, in the same way as when they went round to Sam and Dolly’s on Christmas and Boxing Day and Marie’s parents on New Year.
‘I pulled the damper out an hour ago, so the water’s nice and hot. You go and have a bath.’
‘And Daddy’s coming home tonight, isn’t he?’ Bonnie said.
‘And we’re going to make some mince pies, aren’t we, Bonnie?’
Marie was about to say that Mrs Farr had given everybody a batch to bring home, when she realized that to stop the pie-making ritual of Christmas Eve afternoon would be to deprive Bonnie of one of the stepping-stones that must be trodden to get them through the Partridge family’s traditions.
The bathroom was chilly and the water was boiling, so Marie lay and soaked in a roomful of white mist, drifting ahead through the next few days. As it was every year, all the Christmas baking had to be done this evening ready to take to Dolly’s tomorrow. Paula had made a start. It wouldn’t take long between the two of them.
I wonder what time Charlie will get home? The train that gets in about seven, I reckon. She hadn’t thought that she would miss him so much – and in that way too, much more than she ever expected. Thank the Lord she had her little job. The girls were a load of laughs, the time went before you knew it. She was almost ashamed of some of the dreams she had been having lately. But you couldn’t help what you dreamed: even so… she wouldn’t have liked anybody to know. Worst part was, not recognizing the faces in the dreams. It would start off being Charlie and then kept changing to different men, and she didn’t recognize any of them. Perhaps it would be even worse though if you did recognize them. Lord! Suppose it was somebody you met every day… out shopping… that would be awful!
And, as they always did every year, this evening, Charlie and Robbo would meet Sam and Harry and they would go down to the King William and carry home the crate of beer and the bottles of fancy drinks for the women.
If she had missed him in that way, what about Charlie? They say men need that kind of thing more than women do, but I don’t know… At least Charlie wouldn’t go with another woman. Never. Her Curse was due, it was a pity things couldn’t have been organized a bit better… but you couldn’t do anything about it. Just as long as I’m not early and we can have a couple of days. She never was, as a rule, but they said excitement could make you early – or late. It often happened to brides, so they said. The water was cooling but there was no room for any more hot, so she sank herself down to cover her shoulders.
As they always did, early tomorrow morning, Charlie would go up the allotment and pick the Brussels and get the parsnips and carrots and potatoes out of the clamp and take them down to Dolly’s. Sam would prepare them whilst Charlie came home to change. Dolly did the cooking for dinner, Paula and Marie acted as her kitchen maids and made the trifle for tea; then they laid out plates of tinned-salmon, ham and tongue, celery and watercress. Since she had married into the family, Marie had always made the cake.
Before she became a Partridge, Marie had no rituals or traditions, and now she was as steeped in them as the rest. She liked them: it Was, like Sam always said, building up something that would last. He said, ‘My old Dad could look back down seventy years and see every Christmas Day he ever lived through.’ Marie liked that. There was something safe in having traditions in a family. It was why she had let Bonnie help with the pastry on Christmas Eve before she hung up her stocking. Bonnie’s children would do the same thing.
I hope he thinks I’ve been doing right with his old allotment sin
ce he went away… at least there had been some good frosts for the Brussel sprouts.
Then she wondered whether she had done right in buying the camiknickers. She had done it in a mood of loneliness and missing him and wanting to please him. Charlie could be funny about things like that sometimes, quite old-fashioned… could be quite funny about what was proper for a married woman. She tried to remember what he looked like in his Air Force blue. She heard the front door go and voices from the living-room. That must be Robbo; I shall have to get a move on. The water was now too cold to stay there any longer.
With a towel wrapped round her, Marie made up her face carefully, rolled her fair hair under and tied it back in a velvet bow.
Marie Partridge, anybody’d think you was going to a social instead of making sausage rolls. She smiled at her reflection as she blotted the bright-red bow of her mouth. Anybody’d think you wanted to get some man going.
She hooked her bra and tightened the shoulder-straps so that her breasts rose to Hollywood heights. This time of the month, she always filled her bra out. She could almost feel Charlie’s eyes on her and felt shy to meet her own in reflection as she stepped into the powder-blue cami. It was almost like it used to be on weekends when they were first married, before Bonnie.
There’s no getting away from what Mrs Partridge was up to: she had never worn art silk and lace in winter in her life, and she never had French legs like these, even on her honeymoon.
They reckon sailors’ wives go funny when their men been at sea for months.
She stuck out her hip and half-closed her eyes at her reflection, but knew that she could never bring herself to do that to Charlie in real life. Thought about it though. She only hoped that Charlie had remembered to go to the barber’s, it would just spoil the whole Christmas if he hadn’t. You couldn’t borrow them, could you?
She smiled at the thought. ‘Sorry to bother you, Mrs Miles, but we ran short of packets and the barber’s is closed. Do you think you could lend us a few till after the holidays?’
‘Of course, Mrs Partridge, don’t know if they’m Charlie’s size.’
She made her eyes crinkle with smiling and smudged her mascara.
I’ll tell you one thing, Charlie Partridge, I’m not having any more babies. No. We’ve got Bonnie, and she’s enough.
She clipped on her ear-rings.
And I want to keep my little job at the Dinner Kitchens. I couldn’t bear it going back to being at home all day. I’m saving money. When Bonnie’s older I shall get a proper job back in the salon. Then, one day, I shall get a salon of my own – The Salon Marie.
It would be all right, Charlie wouldn’t forget to buy them.
Even as she said it, as she bent down to roll on her stockings, she realized that the story about anxious brides was true. Her Curse had come early.
Oh damn, damn, damn.
Tears gathered and she bit them back because Paula and Robbo would wonder what was the matter.
The blue camiknickers which were like something from a Hollywood film got thrust to the back of her underwear drawer.
I might as well have saved my money!
* * *
That first Christmas of the war was a strange one in Markham, spent in a blacked-out limbo, holding breath. Old men expecting a replay of trenches and ill-designed leviathans and mustard gas; old women not bearing to think about all the new widows and spinsters that there were waiting; young men wondering when the air would be filled with planes; mothers wondering why it was that they could make great ships like the Queen’s, yet couldn’t make a baby’s gas-mask that would fit on a pram, and what did you do if you had twins or a toddler who wouldn’t wear a gas-mask?
Markham children could not see that anything was much different from last year.
Evacuees could see that everything was different.
On the Council Estate, many people had their yearly taste of chicken. Many didn’t, for there was still a lot of poverty. The Partridges did. For two days, the eight of them gathered in the living-room of 23 Jubilee Lane and, in the traditional style and order peculiar to their family alone, enjoyed, as usual, presents and food and drink all paid for from their thrift in Sam’s Diddle’m Club. Except for Charlie having exchanged one uniform for another, and Harry in khaki, and the stiff tarred paper jammed into window-frames at black-out time, this Christmas would be little different from last.
Sam noticed that there was tension between Marie and Charlie and remembered how it often was when he had got home leave in the ’14–’18 war. You got out of the swing of home life when you were in camp, and the women got uppity and used to doing things their way and didn’t like to be told. Dolly had never stood up to him before he went in the army. Charlie was probably having the same sort of trouble. Well he’d have to put up with Marie being uppity and out of the home for the duration.
Dolly noticed that Robbo was quiet, and Paula was so cheerful that it made you wonder what was up between them. She wondered whether Robbo had decided to join up or Paula had missed a period – not things you could ask about. Just sit and watch and wait to be told.
Of course, as people always said, Christmas was the children’s time. Bonnie, as usual, was spoilt by them all, but repaid it by enjoying every minute from the time she awoke in her Grandma’s house, to the time she fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. Bonnie noticed that Uncle Harry drank rum which he always said he couldn’t abear.
Charlie thought that Harry was knocking it back a bit. But then who wouldn’t, training in the Paras? The very thought of jumping into space and not knowing whether the parachute would open made Charlie go cold.
Harry had only a forty-eight-hour pass. It was enough. Longer and Deanna might try to see him. He thought she had got the message that she had picked the wrong one if she thought she’d try pinning it on him. ‘I don’t take chances like that. If you’re pregnant, it’s not mine.’ He hadn’t heard from her since, so he guessed that he was in the clear, but he wanted to get back to camp away from it.
* * *
All down Longmile Hill, blacked out by heavy velour drapes, ten-foot-high Christmas trees filled the inner-halls and glittered with lights.
Connie and Fred Hardy had open house on Boxing Day for Army officers who had been billeted in a large, empty house two miles away. Connie saw that her daughter was not happy. But Connie, being Connie, could not find the right words to say anything to Eve. And Eve, being Eve, smiled at the officers and responded to her father’s arranged good cheer.
Freddy Hardy used his Yuletide sociability like the entrepreneur he was, and got himself in very nicely with a high-ranking victualling officer.
* * *
There was no chink of light to be seen escaping from Mont Iremonger’s house in Portsmouth Road: he had gone to Barton Stacey to spend a couple of days with his sister.
* * *
On Boxing Day, behind shutters that had been made to keep weather out rather than light within, in the comfortable sitting-room in Abbey Water, Ursula Farr sat reading a new Margery Allingham crime novel. An open fire burned on the low hearth. A white-maned, outdoors-looking man with sixty years’ wear on his sunburned skin carried in a tray of coffee. Ursula looked up and they smiled affectionately at one another. Showing him the face of the book, she said, ‘You should try writing a mystery, Niall. Make yourself a small fortune.’
‘What would I do with a small fortune? What do I need? And there is nothing outside this room that I wish for.’
Ursula put down the book. ‘Must you go back tomorrow?’
He nodded. ‘The war hasn’t stopped.’
‘A thousand photographs and miles of film will still be made without you.’
‘Ah, but most of them will miss the best bits.’
True, she thought. Whilst other photographers of his genius were accepting commissions to photograph winning racehorses, athletes and rural landscapes, Niall O’Neill had been in Spain, documenting in painful detail the massacre and distress.
> ‘You’ll never change, Niall… thank God. I only wish that you were here more often.’
* * *
Here and there in Station Avenue, small chinks of light shone out from front rooms that were only used on high-days and holidays and so were poorly blacked out. A dim light showed through from the back of Greenaway’s shop where Vern was having a quiet five minutes on his own. Mulling over what Aunt Eadie had said. ‘I suppose Freddy Hardy will be putting you up for the Freemasons then, our Vern, now our Davcy’s spooning with the Alderman’s daughter.’
Vern had told her not to be so daft – they’ve never so much as been in one another’s company.
‘Oh? Well, you know best, our Vern.’
And now Vern, having a quiet smoke and five minutes on his own behind the shop, guessed that he did not know best. No smoke without fire. Subjects of gossip were always the last to hear.
* * *
From her bedroom window, Little-Lena watched the light fade. It was bitterly cold up there, but she didn’t mind putting up with things sometimes, so that she could enjoy it more when things got better again. She didn’t like having school spoiled by evacuees: they had scabies and nits and in her classroom girls had to sit three to a desk, the evacuated teachers were fierce and sarcastic – but things would go back to being nice as soon as the war was over.
She saw Mrs Kennedy’s friend putting his bike behind her hedge.
‘Hello, Nicholas,’ Leonora whispered.
‘Hello, Leonora, my darling,’ Nicholas answered, kissing her on the mouth. ‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘I saw you from the window of my room, you were picking holly.’
‘Ah Leonora, would that it had been mistletoe and you just happened to…’
Mrs Kennedy came out wearing her fur hat and ankle boots and a new red coat. Little-Lena rubbed a hole in the steamed-up window so that she could watch them going out together.
