by Marie Joseph
Wesley thanked her and sat down, holding his hat on his knees. Why didn’t the old codger retire, he wondered. With all the unemployment in the town what had possessed him to pick this girl with the biggest freckles he’d ever seen all over her pasty face, and close-set fishy eyes. She wasn’t much cop as a typist either, picking at the keys and darting little glances at him when she thought he wasn’t looking.
The minutes ticked by – five, ten, fifteen. Wesley sat without moving as the girl, a bundle of quivering nerves by now, rubbed so hard at a typing error she made a hole in the paper and had to start again.
The last time she had seen Wesley Battersby he had been playing the lead in the Operatics, striding about the stage waving a sword and singing of his love, his everlasting love which knew no bounds. He was the best-looking man she had ever seen in her life, with his jet-black wavy hair and his slumbering, come-to-bed eyes. Her skin suddenly crept with devastating embarrassment as he smiled straight at her.
‘Would it upset you if I smoked, Miss . . .?’
‘Fish,’ she said, going blood red. ‘Miss Fish. No, it won’t upset me at all if you smoke.’ She pushed an ashtray towards him. ‘Thank you very much,’ she finished, totally overcome.
‘What a lovely day,’ Wesley said, thoroughly enjoying the effect he knew he was having on her. ‘I hope they have a day like this for the Coronation on the twelfth.’
Miss Fish was racking her brains for something meaningful to say about the new King and Queen, but it was no good. She could only stare with her thin mouth agape, groping around in her mind for the words that refused to come. If they’d been in a film, which they weren’t, he would have sung at her and she would have jumped on the desk, lifted her skirts and done a tap dance, before he lowered her slowly down into his arms, gazed into her face and kissed her.
‘I hope they have a lovely day, too,’ she said dreamily at last, as Wesley, hearing old Thomson’s heavy tread on the stair, stood up in relief.
Ten minutes later Miss Fish couldn’t believe her eyes when Wesley came out of Mr Thomson’s inner sanctum, bashing his way past her desk, camelhair coat flying, a look on his handsome face like the wrath of God, sparing her neither a glance nor a civil good-day.
Polite as ever, Mr Thomson hovered behind him, hands clasped together in his customary pose, gold-rimmed spectacles and watch chain gleaming in a sudden shaft of sunlight filtering in from the high windows.
‘A beautiful day, Miss Fish,’ he said, beaming at her with satisfaction. Obviously chuffed to little mint balls about something or other.
‘Let’s hope it keeps up for the Coronation,’ she said, beaming back.
‘Indeed. Indeed,’ said Mr Thomson, going back into his room and closing the door with an unmistakably triumphant click.
10
‘GOD, I NEED a drink!’ Wesley flung himself at the sideboard and poured himself a large whisky. ‘Where’s Amy?’ he shouted, just as if his mother would know. ‘I’ve been at the house and she’s not in.’ He gulped the whisky down. ‘I’m going back there now. She’d better be in this time.’
‘Will you be staying for a spot of lunch, dear? Ethel will be back from town in time to make it. She won’t let me lift a finger.’
Phyllis was talking to him in a prissy voice with her mouth wobbling itself round the words. She lifted her head and narrowed her eyes to get him into better focus. He looked as if he’d run all the way from Preston, but how could that be when she could see the car on the drive outside?
‘You look very hot, dear,’ she said, standing up then sitting down immediately as the carpet came up to smack her in the face. ‘Feverish,’ she added. ‘I hope you’re not going to be ill.’
At the very thought of him becoming ill she covered her eyes with a hand, only to take it swiftly away at the sound of Wesley’s loud voice.
‘Did you know that Dad went down to see Harold Thomson not long before he went into hospital?’
Phyllis shook her head violently from side to side. Which was a mistake.
‘You mean he didn’t tell you?’
‘Tell me what, dear?’
Wesley stared at her balefully. ‘Well of course he didn’t tell you! I don’t suppose he discussed an unimportant thing like that with you, did he? He could have signed everything away without telling you.’ He put his drink down and stood up. ‘Think yourself lucky, Mother dear, that he didn’t.’ Wesley was looking as bad as she felt. Red and sweating, his eyes dark as pits, he began to pace about, beating a fist into the palm of a hand. ‘How often did he go down to see Amy? Once a week? Twice?’
‘I don’t know . . .’ Phyllis was going to cry if she wasn’t careful. It wasn’t nice Wesley speaking to her like this. As though she had done something wrong. He had stopped by her chair and was standing over her, looking as if he hated her. Phyllis cringed away from the sight of him, even as her mind told her how silly she was to be afraid of Wesley, her boy, her lovely, loving boy.
His voice was rough with rage. ‘Harold Thomson told me this morning that Dad had been to see him not long before he went into hospital. I’m asking you again – did you know that?’
Phyllis tried in vain to remember, but before she needed to admit that she knew nothing at all about it, Wesley exploded into a torrent of words, stabbing the air with a finger, rolling his eyes, a tic jerking away in his left cheek.
‘He went to see his friend Thomson and signed my house over to Amy! Do you realize what I’m saying, Mother? I’m talking about the house he gave me as a wedding present. To give us a good start, he said. My father, my house! Did you ever think differently from that?’
‘Your house, dear?’ Phyllis’s fuddled brain was struggling to understand, to make some sense of what he was saying, when all she wanted was to lie down and go to sleep, preferably right there and then.
‘Of course I mean my house!’ Much to her relief he backed away slightly. ‘I had plans for that house, and they had nothing to do with Amy. She’s forfeited any right to any part of that house.’ He walked to the door and turned. ‘You’ve no need to worry, Mother dear. This house is safe, plus your annuity, plus the profits from the shop in town and the Darwen one.’ He wrenched the door open, almost severing it from its hinges. ‘Oh, he hasn’t left me out, not quite. From the generosity of his heart he’s left me the Preston shop. Oh, yes, the bloody Preston shop, which is – as he well knew – running at a loss at the moment!’ He paused for breath. ‘So never, ever again try to tell me that my father loved me. He didn’t even like me. He’s proved that, right enough!’
‘Stay for a spot of lunch, dear. Ethel will be so sorry to have missed you.’
Phyllis stretched out a hand, then watched it drop back into her lap. She was so tired she could hardly summon the strength to blink, let alone think. Ethel would never forgive her for having a little drink or two. Or was it three? She honestly couldn’t remember.
Wesley had been in a real paddy. Something to do with a house and his father. She mopped her face with the lace-edged handkerchief she always kept tucked up her sleeve. The naughty boy had been almost beside himself with temper. Her mouth tightened into a bleak smile. Once, when Wesley was a little boy he had jumped on his teddy bear in his spiked football boots till it burst, scattering the flock stuffing all across the kitchen floor. What a tiresome little boy he had been at times.
Before Wesley had driven his father’s car to the end of the road she was asleep, head lolling, mouth open, in the stuffy room with the fire blazing away up the chimney, even though the May morning sunshine slanted through the tall window.
Bernard just happened to be looking down through his office window when he saw Amy going into the library across the street. She was wearing the black suit she had worn at the Battersby funeral, but with a dusty-pink beret-style hat. Even her back looked dejected.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning. That afternoon Bernard had two meetings, one with the Town Clerk in his Town Hall round the corner, and the oth
er with a distraught father of a brilliantly clever boy, who feared he was going to be forced to take his son away from school to earn a pittance that could make all the difference between the family living and merely existing. Both meetings were important in their own way – equally so, in Bernard’s mind, but his notes were halfway dictated and if he didn’t hurry he might miss Amy. After last night he needed to be reassured that she was all right.
There was a strange urgency about him, an almost feverish desperation in the way he left his room, ran down the stairs and across the street. He had acted without conscious volition and when he found her in the reading room he stopped in the doorway, fully aware that every head was turned in his direction.
‘Amy!’ He went straight to her, remembering to keep his voice to a whisper. ‘Come outside. I have to talk to you.’
All the heads in trilbies or flat caps turned away, back to their newspapers. The room was too cold, in spite of the sunshine outside, their general apathy too well established for the majority of the men even to begin to wonder what was going on. The Silence is Requested notice on the wall was quite unnecessary. Only an elderly man in a bowler hat and a black coat with a velvet collar paused before going back to thumbing through a small notebook on the sloping table in front of him. Something about the way the man had taken the young woman by the arm and led her out, something in the way he had looked at her, had reminded him with an unexpected jolt of himself as a youngish man in love with a girl like that with butter-brown hair. So terribly, so much in love. Sighing, the old man bowed his head over his writings and in a spidery hand began a new line.
‘Amy . . .’ Bernard walked her round the corner into the shadow of the library with its church-like windows. ‘How are you? You look tired. Where have you been?’ He let go her arm. ‘I went for a long walk last night and I nearly knocked at your door on my way back, but it was too late.’ He lifted a hand to his hair. ‘I should have knocked. I know now. Yes, I should have knocked.’
The wind ruffled his brown hair. Amy knew it irritated his sense of tidiness. He was strangely impatient, not with her but with the whole notion that he could be behaving in this way, marching her out of the library, dragging her out, he supposed, if one was a stickler for the truth.
‘I’m all right,’ she reassured him. ‘If I look a bit fed up it’s because I am. I stood in a queue at the Labour Exchange for two hours only to be told I was too old, too lacking in qualifications – the wrong shape, I suppose.’ She smiled. ‘Married women of my age don’t look for jobs, they let their husbands keep them. Married women only go out to work to provide for their children and only then if their husband is out of work or ill or dead.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t fit into any of those categories, and I won’t apply for charity, so there we are. It’s a case of where do I go from here?’
He thought he saw the sparkle of tears in her eyes and was immediately cast down. Did all this mean that Battersby wasn’t providing for her? Sustaining her? Supporting her? The chivalrous side of him made him see red. He had thought Dora was joking when she hinted that if Amy didn’t find a job soon she would starve. Starve? Oh, my God! A thing like that couldn’t quietly happen in this day and age. Could it?
‘I must go,’ he said quickly, as abruptly as if she had been trying to detain him. ‘But I’ll . . . will you come to my house for tea on Sunday? We can go through those pamphlets together.’ He walked backwards, away from her, still smoothing his hair. ‘You will come, won’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘I’ll come.’
She made her way back into the library, seeing, out of the corner of her eye, Wesley’s father’s friend, the solicitor Mr Thomson, coming out of the front door of his office right across the street. She had only met him once or twice at The Cedars and was surprised that he even recognized her. Yet there he was, waving his newspaper at her, beaming all over his whiskery face, before striding off in the direction of the tram stop.
Everyone was behaving in a peculiar way. Perhaps it was the unexpected warmth of the sun addling their brains.
Inside the reading room it was as though no one had moved. The men in their outdoor clothes still read their newspapers, turning the pages slowly, as if living on the dole had defeated them, drained all hope from their souls. It might be spring outside, but not a single ray of sunshine touched this cold grey room.
Amy shuddered, turned on her heel and walked out again into the street, unaware that an elderly man with a velvet collar on his threadbare overcoat watched her go with the suspicion of tears in his eyes.
Dora was standing on her doorstep when Amy went past. She had never been a stander on doorsteps like some women along the street, arms folded over flowered pinnies, calling out to a neighbour cleaning her windows or mopping her front flagstones. But she wanted to know how Amy had got on.
‘I can see you’ve not been offered a managerial job,’ she said, ‘but I’ve had an idea. If you’d like to come in for a minute I’ll tell you.’ After she’d handed Amy a steaming cup of tea, she went on: ‘Mrs Green and her daughter. The married daughter. They’re both looking for help. Mrs Green knows you from your last job. All right,’ she said, before Amy had had a chance to speak, ‘I know it’s beneath your dignity to go out cleaning, but it would put you on till you’ve qualified as something more in keeping.’
‘In keeping with what, for heaven’s sake?’ Amy thought how well Dora was looking since she’d stopped running, stopped hurling herself from one job to the next. She wouldn’t swear to it, but she was almost sure that Dora had been putting powder on her nose.
‘They want cast-iron references.’ Dora ignored Amy’s last remark. ‘Preferably signed by God. There’s enough good stuff in those two houses to set up a shop. Even the chamber pots are bone china, and there’s a lace doily with a Busy Lizzie plant on it on top of the lavatory cistern. It’s a low-flush suite, of course. Talk posh,’ she advised, as Amy rushed away to the phone box at the end of the street. ‘Tell her you’re well connected.’
‘If I tell her I’m acquainted with you she’ll know that,’ Amy said over a disappearing shoulder.
Less than a quarter of an hour later she just had to call and tell Dora the news that both jobs were hers, which delayed her for another half hour. So that when she walked into her own house it was almost two o’clock and Wesley’s patience was at snapping point.
He rose from the chair that had once been his and went straight into battle.
Shock at seeing him left Amy speechless. She stood there by the door, smart as paint in the little black costume and the dusty-pink velvet beret, the colour coming and going in her cheeks.
‘I have been to see my solicitor this morning.’ Wesley fired each word, each syllable at her, snapping them off at the ends. As if he were auditioning for a part in a Shakespearian play, Amy thought, too flushed with her recent success at finding a job to recognize the venom in his words.
‘Mr Thomson?’ she asked. ‘He waved to me this morning. I saw him coming out of his office.’
Wesley ignored her. ‘Shall I tell you what he said to me? In his exact words?’
Still mystified, Amy nodded.
Wesley took up a legal stance. ‘The exact words, Amy?’
Again she nodded. ‘If that’s what you want, Wesley.’
‘Right! He told me that I must appreciate that probate of my father’s last Will and Testament has yet to be granted, but as a family friend he saw no reason why he could not inform me that this house, my house, Amy, has been bequeathed to you! Plus a certain amount of the ready.’ He flared his nostrils. ‘Now try and tell me you knew nothing about it. Try and tell me that your friendship with my father blossomed at just the right time because you were genuinely fond of him. Go on! Say something, even if it’s only to tell barefaced lies.’
Amy felt the blood drain from her face and her legs turn to water. She was going to faint – she was going to keel over right there and then, so she must take deep, deep breath
s, look straight ahead, not up nor down, and convince Wesley in no uncertain terms that this was as much of a shock to her as to him.
‘No wonder I couldn’t find the deeds,’ he was saying. ‘The old man must have taken them down to Thomson not long before he died.’ He took a step forward, then shook his head sadly as Amy instinctively backed away. ‘I’m not going to touch you, Amy. The way I feel goes far beyond anger.’ He sat down at the table and buried his face in his hands. ‘My father came to see you on the day he went into hospital, didn’t he? Was that the time you wheedled the promise out of him? When he was ill, in pain, and hardly knew what he was doing? My God, Amy, I don’t know you these days. I’m discovering that I never really knew you.’
Amy stared at him in horror. There were tears in his eyes, genuine tears this time. His face was crumpled with hurt, and his beautiful voice broke on a sob. She felt a sense of disgust, knowing that he was now going to play the scene differently – quite, quite differently. She held her breath.
‘Do you remember the day we got married? That cold grey day, with me in khaki, knowing that within a week I would be back at the front. Lying in a filthy waterlogged shell hole, knowing every minute could be my last.’
Amy widened her eyes. Wesley had never been at the front, never got further than Boulogne, Charlie had told her that. Wesley had been a clerk in an army office working long hours as a pen-pusher, eating and sleeping at his makeshift desk, his fingers so cold, so swollen with chilblains that for years you could still see the scars on them. There had been no need to lie. Wesley had had an uncomfortable if not a dramatic war.
‘I remember our wedding day very well,’ Amy said, relaxed enough now to pull out a stand-chair and sit down opposite to him. ‘Go on, Wesley, have your say, then hear mine.’
‘We had nothing,’ he reminded her, spreading his hands. ‘When my father told me that this house was his gift, I was so overcome, so overwhelmed . . . you just don’t know.’
