The Promise

by Lesley Pearse

  But he was gone for good now. By now he might even be fighting the Germans. She just hoped he would stay safe.

  ‘Penny for them!’

  Belle spun round in her seat at Mog’s remark. She’d been so deep in her guilty thoughts that she hadn’t heard her come into the room.

  Marriage had done wonders for Mog. All through Belle’s childhood in Seven Dials, she had been a kindly and loving mouse. She’d scuttled about her work, cooking, cleaning and mending, always in dark, shapeless clothes, her hair scraped back tightly from her face. She had seemed much older than Annie, Belle’s true mother, even though they were the same age.

  Now her clothes were fashionable, fitted well and showed off her small but shapely body. She might have a few strands of grey among the brown now, but she wore her hair in a chignon, with a few loose curls around a face that glowed from fresh air and happiness. She might be thirty-eight, but today, in a pink- and black-striped dress with pin tucks on the bodice, she looked ten years younger.

  Mog had made her dress herself, but she was such a skilful seamstress that it could have come from the very expensive gown shop further up Tranquil Vale. She told anyone who asked that she’d been a housekeeper before she married Garth, and they assumed by her demeanour that she’d worked for gentry.

  No one would ever guess she had spent her entire adult life until now as a maid in a brothel, and carried inside her head more knowledge about that profession than the whole female population of Blackheath.

  ‘You were miles away,’ she said to Belle, smiling fondly. ‘Care to tell me about it?’

  Mog had been like a mother to Belle for her entire life, and she was the one Belle could normally confide in about anything. But she couldn’t admit anything about Etienne, Mog would be horrified that any man other than Jimmy ever crossed her mind.

  ‘My thoughts aren’t worth anything,’ Belle sighed. ‘It’s just the war, the madness down in the bar. It’s unsettling.’

  Mog looked down at the hat Belle was drawing, frowning because she saw it was almost funereal, not Belle’s usual frothy style. ‘You’ve been looking a bit peaky for a couple of weeks now,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t be up the duff, could you?’

  Belle’s mouth dropped open in shock, partly at Mog using the kind of slang she used back in Seven Dials, but even more because it had never occurred to her to consider she might be having a baby.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘Well, I don’t think so. I can’t be! Can I?’

  Mog chuckled. ‘Well, if I didn’t know you better I’d have thought you didn’t know how babies are made,’ she said.

  Belle blushed and giggled. Since Mog married Garth she never said anything about Belle’s time as a whore, and even when she spoke about the days when she was the maid and Belle’s nursemaid in her mother’s brothel, she somehow avoided all reference to what went on elsewhere in the house. So the oblique reference to it now was surprising.

  ‘I hadn’t considered that possibility,’ Belle replied.

  ‘Well, consider it now,’ Mog said tartly. ‘I noticed you turned green last night when I was preparing that ox tongue. You couldn’t get out the kitchen fast enough.’

  ‘It was just that it smelled funny.’

  ‘Maybe so, but it’s never bothered you before. When was your last monthly?’

  Belle tried to think. She could remember one back in May when there was a brief heatwave, but that was all. She told Mog this. ‘That isn’t to say I haven’t had another one, I just can’t remember,’ she added.

  ‘If that was the last one you’d be three months gone now,’ Mog said, looking at Belle speculatively. ‘Have you had any other symptoms?’

  ‘Well, I’ve felt a bit odd,’ Belle admitted. ‘But not sick or anything.’

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ Mog said lightly. ‘If you are having a baby it’s a gift from heaven, and it’s something to rejoice about. I keep hoping I might be lucky, but maybe I’m too old.’

  That brought Belle up sharply. It had never occurred to her Mog might want a baby. Yet by the wistful look in her eyes, that was exactly what she had hoped for when she married Garth.

  ‘You aren’t too old,’ Belle said quickly. ‘Women have babies right up till they are in their mid-forties. But I’m not sure that this is the right time for either of us, not with the war on.’

  ‘Well, I know I’m not having one,’ Mog sighed. ‘But maybe you are, and war or no war, we’re all going to love an addition to the family. Just think how excited Jimmy will be!’

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ Belle warned her. ‘I don’t believe I’m that way.’

  Mog just looked at Belle with the same smug expression she always had when she thought she knew better. ‘I wouldn’t dream of telling Jimmy anything we discussed in private, but I’d better go back down there now and wash some more glasses.’

  After Mog had gone, Belle put her hand on her stomach. It was as flat as it always had been, but it was rather nice to imagine there might be a tiny baby growing inside her. Back in New Orleans, and Paris too, it had been something to fear, and she’d used all the preventive measures she’d known to make sure it never happened.

  She also was familiar with most of the first symptoms of pregnancy, as the other girls in New Orleans were always talking about them. Sudden aversions to certain smells were common, as were tender breasts and being sick in the mornings. But her breasts weren’t tender and neither had she felt sick.

  Having a baby once you were happily married was the natural order of things. But for some reason Belle hadn’t expected it to happen to her.

  She picked up her pencil and began drawing again, but her heart wasn’t really in it, and when she heard Garth ring the bell down in the bar for last orders, she was glad that the evening was almost over.

  It took a long time for Garth and Jimmy to usher everyone out of the bar. Belle looked out of the living-room window and watched as groups of men lurched across the road in twos and threes, with rubbery legs, arms around one another’s shoulders. She saw one fall flat on his face. She had no idea whether they would be off tomorrow to the training camp in France, or if it took longer to arrange, but it was frightening to think that within a few weeks they could have guns in their hands. They were shop assistants, clerks, bricklayers and gardeners; the nearest most had come to a gun was on a rifle range at a fair. Her stomach tightened in fear for them, and she had a premonition that some wouldn’t make it to their next birthday.

  She shook herself out of such maudlin thoughts and went downstairs to help, as there would be a great deal of clearing up after such a busy night.

  Half an hour later, the bar and tables were wiped down, stools and chairs stacked on them, and most of the glasses were washed and dried. Mog looked exhausted. Garth was out in the back yard hosing it down, muttering to himself about the pools of vomit and the filthy state of the lavatory.

  ‘We’ve taken more than a whole week’s takings tonight,’ Jimmy said as he took a tray of clean glasses and replaced them on the shelves under the bar. ‘But I hope to hell we don’t get another night like this one.’

  ‘You won’t join up too, will you?’ Belle asked him anxiously.

  He laughed, stopping what he was doing to pat her cheek. ‘What, and leave you, the prettiest lady in London? Of course I won’t, at least not unless they make it compulsory. And that’s unlikely, because who would run everything in England if everyone under forty was sent to France?’

  ‘The old codgers like me,’ Garth called out from the yard. ‘And if I have to clean up a mess like this again I’ll lie about my age and volunteer.’

  Jimmy fell asleep that night almost as soon as he got into bed, but as always he had one arm around Belle, curled into her back. She lay there in the darkness listening to his gentle breathing, and moved his hand down on to her belly. She had got over the shock of Mog’s suggestion now, and here, tucked so cosily into bed, the thought of her and Jimmy having a baby was a good one. She co
uld imagine Mog and Garth cooing over him or her, always ready to lend a hand, as loving as grandparents. Jimmy would make a superb father too; he was loving, patient and so big-hearted.

  But would she make a good mother? She knew nothing about babies, having no younger brothers or sisters, and brought up as she was, she’d never even held one in her arms. The closest she’d ever got to a baby was seeing women in Seven Dials with one tucked into a shawl in their arms. Here in Blackheath many of the mothers had nursemaids who walked their charges in a perambulator on the heath.

  Would she be able to keep her shop going? While she certainly didn’t like the thought of giving it up, she wasn’t going to do what her own mother had done and hand over the baby to Mog.

  Thinking of Annie, Belle wondered how she’d react to becoming a grandmother. Would she be indifferent? Or see it as a chance to make amends?

  Belle had hoped when Annie helped her to get the shop they might become closer, but that hadn’t come about. If Belle didn’t go and see her once a month, there would be no contact at all.

  Annie was still running the boarding house in King’s Cross that she’d acquired when the old place in Jake’s Court had been burned down, and doing very well for herself. No one would ever guess by her elegant clothes and genteel manner that she’d once owned a brothel. Belle suspected that she kept having a daughter a secret too, so she wasn’t likely to be enthusiastic about a grandchild.

  Belle ran her hand over her stomach and silently vowed she was going to give her child all the love and affection she’d never received from her mother.

  Chapter Three

  Belle fanned herself with a newspaper. It was so hot in the shop that she felt she might just melt. Not for the first time in the past few days of stifling heat, she wondered who it was that decided women had to wear so many clothes.

  She was wearing a camisole, chemise, drawers and stockings, over those a petticoat with yards of material, and then a fitted dress with long sleeves and a high neck. They were all damp with perspiration and her feet hurt because they were swollen with the heat, but she supposed she was luckier than most women who felt obliged to suffer a boned corset too.

  It was four in the afternoon and she hadn’t had a single customer since ten that morning. Earlier there had been plenty of people walking by on their way up to the heath. Most of the ladies had been carrying parasols, and if only she’d thought to stock a few she might have made some sales today.

  But it was very quiet now for a Friday, a lull perhaps because the fair was opening on the heath tonight. Last year she’d been really excited by it; Jimmy had taken her there on the Saturday night and they’d had a wonderful time on the swingboats, the carousel and the helter-skelter, and gone home with a coconut and a goldfish he’d won. But she had no enthusiasm this year. It might be the last weekend of August, and to everyone perhaps the finale of summer, but the grass on the heath was brown and dusty through lack of rain. It would be even more crowded this year because everyone was out to enjoy themselves while they could, putting the war to the back of their minds.

  Since the busy night when so many young men had enlisted, there was less talk about it, but plenty of grousing about rich people who were stockpiling foodstuffs. In some cases they’d cleaned shops out, and the word was that it was bound to make food prices soar. But Belle had sold more hats, as many sweethearts were rushing to get married.

  She wished she and Jimmy could go to the seaside tomorrow; it would be heaven to feel a sea breeze and escape the stink of drains, which kept making her feel sick. But with the fair on, she knew he couldn’t leave Garth and Mog to run the pub alone.

  She moved over to the open door of the shop, desperate for some cooler air, and stood leaning against the doorpost, idly wondering if she should tell Jimmy about the baby tonight. Just two days ago she’d finally gone to see Dr Towle in Lee Park, and he had confirmed she was indeed about three and a half months pregnant. Almost as soon as Mog had suggested she might be, the symptoms arrived. First, she was becoming ever more sensitive to smells and she’d gone off drinking tea. But now her breasts were tender and fuller, and the waistband on her petticoat was tighter.

  Only Mog knew so far, and she seemed to think it wasn’t quite proper to tell Jimmy and Garth yet. Belle thought that was the silliest thing she’d ever heard, as what could be more natural than to inform her husband he was going to have a son or daughter? But she had noticed that women around here didn’t talk about pregnancy, and because she was afraid of making a social gaffe, she was keeping it to herself for now.

  A young couple were coming up the street. The girl, who was probably younger than Belle, was small and slender, wearing a pale pink ruffled dress and a straw boater. She was holding the arm of a man a few years older than her; he had the look of a bank clerk with his formal dark suit and stiff collar. The girl was gazing up at him as he spoke, hanging on his every word. As she appeared far too young to be married, it was unusual that there was no one else with them to act as a chaperone. Belle privately thought it preposterous that a young couple couldn’t take a walk together without tongues wagging, but that was how it was around here.

  When she and Mog had first come to live in Blackheath, they had to bow to all these peculiar and restricting niceties, just so they would fit into the community and attract no gossip. Belle played along with it, but inwardly felt a little superior because she knew so much more about men and life in general than any of the simpering women she made hats for.

  Yet now she was going to be a mother she felt a little saddened and worried by her worldliness. How would she be able to bring a daughter up to be chaste, to teach her that she must obey her husband and all the many rules of etiquette so she would fit in with polite society, when Belle herself had flaunted them all?

  She watched the young couple until they turned the corner up by the heath, then looked down to her left, toying with the idea of closing up as the street was now deserted. There was a heat haze on the road further down, which looked like a pool of water. She wondered if that was what a mirage was, for she’d heard that people in deserts often saw water ahead when it wasn’t really there.

  All at once a strident yell and the sound of rumbling carriage wheels broke Belle out of her reverie.

  Looking back to her right, she saw a small carriage drawn by two brown horses was being reined in by the driver, and at the horses’ feet a woman was lying crumpled on the ground. The driver must have been going at quite a speed, and it looked as if she had walked out right into his path.

  As Belle darted to help, the driver climbed down from the carriage.

  ‘She stepped out without looking. I could have driven right over her,’ he gasped, his face ashen with fright.

  ‘You did well to stop,’ Belle said as she knelt down by the woman.

  Her hat had fallen off and her fair hair was hiding her face. Belle smoothed her hair back cautiously, half expecting that she would have a grievous injury if one of the horses’ hooves had struck her a glancing blow. But there was no blood, just a graze on her forehead which appeared to be from hitting the ground. Whether she had tripped and then been knocked unconscious by the fall, or had fainted, Belle didn’t know as she hadn’t seen it happen. The woman was young, perhaps in her early twenties, and very well dressed in a pale blue gown.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ Belle asked, running her eyes over the woman’s body, looking for anything that might suggest further injuries.

  The woman’s eyelids fluttered and then opened. ‘What happened?’ she asked, her voice faint and indistinct.

  ‘I think you must have fainted, but you were lucky you weren’t mown down by the carriage,’ Belle said. ‘Can you move your arms and legs?’

  The woman looked at Belle vacantly, clearly in shock.

  Belle turned her head to look at the driver, a small, plump man wearing green livery. He was wringing his hands and appeared equally shocked. ‘Did you actually hit her?’ she asked.

  ‘I don�
��t know,’ he replied. ‘She just walked off the pavement and as I yelled at her she dropped like a stone. I pulled so hard on the reins it was a wonder the horses didn’t rear up. She might have been struck by a hoof, but I was that close to her I couldn’t see past the horses. But it weren’t my fault.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Belle said, and pulled the woman’s dress down to cover her legs. ‘There isn’t any blood, and she seems stunned rather than injured. I think she fainted.’

  A few people had gathered now, and though Belle knew you weren’t supposed to move someone with an injury, she couldn’t leave the woman in the road. She saw a big, dark-haired man among the bystanders, and beckoned to him. ‘Could you help me get her into my hat shop?’ she asked. ‘I could call a doctor from there.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ the woman said in a quavering voice. ‘If you’d just help me up.’

  The big man came forward, leaned over and lifted the woman as if she weighed nothing. Belle picked up the blue hat lying in the road and indicated where her shop was.

  ‘You look shaken up too,’ she said to the carriage driver. ‘Would you like to come in as well and I’ll make you a cup of tea?’

  ‘That’s kind of you, miss,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got to pick up the mistress.’

  Belle had learned in her time in Blackheath that servants were often very nervous of displeasing their employers. ‘Well, if you are sure you are all right,’ she said. ‘I expect the young lady will be fine, I’ll take care of her.’

  The big man was just putting the woman down on a chair as Belle got to the shop. She thanked him before he left, and then turned to the injured woman. ‘I’m Belle Reilly,’ she said. ‘Can you tell me your name?’

  ‘Miranda Forbes-Alton,’ she said, lolling back in the chair. She was very pale and the graze on her forehead had a lot of grit in it.