by Maggie Ford
‘I never …’ But he was rushing on.
‘I know it’s wrong. I’m a married man, but I’ve never felt for anyone the way I feel about you. I know you said you love your husband, that you were just lonely when I … when we … I’m married. You’re married. But we can’t help these things happening.’
‘Geoffrey.’ She tried to stop the flow of pitiful clichés, but he did not hear her.
‘I know you love me – the way you look at me. Sue, darling, if you feel anything for me you can’t possibly feel the same for – well, anyone else. Do you still feel anything for … anyone else?’ She knew who he meant, loath to say the name.
‘I – don’t know,’ she stammered.
‘You do feel something for me?’
‘I – Geoffrey, I don’t know.’
‘You must know. If I didn’t matter to you, you wouldn’t go around looking so downcast. I know you love me. You do, don’t you?’
She allowed a glum nod, a half-nod really, but enough for him. He came forward and his arms were about her, the sweetness of his breath flowing across her face, she in turn clinging to him, needing this reality.
She couldn’t remember reaching her bed, but she would never not remember the delicious, the overwhelming joy of being made love to, all the more wonderful for the mad snatched affair it was, filled with need and with tension and with fear of time overtaking them. She had never felt so fulfilled as when he came inside her, she rising up to meet him.
Afterwards she didn’t feel at all ashamed as she had that first time. Lying in Geoffrey’s arms, luxuriating in the contentment that flowed over her, she found herself drawing a veil over the man she had once adored, found herself forming a mental note to put his photo away from its place on the bedside table. What could be gained by staring at the flat, lifeless image of a smiling man that a scrap of paper proclaimed was her husband? How did she know where he was and if he still existed? Nothing was ever heard of those whom the Japanese had captured. They stubbornly recognised no conventional rules of war, were said to be fanatical about dying for their emperor and to see captives of war as unworthy of respect. Fearful tales had come out of the Far East of massacres and terrible deeds done by them. How was she to know what might have happened to Matthew?
In Geoffrey’s arms, seeing her vigilance as a waste of effort, she blocked out everything else but the hope that this would be the beginning of a long summer of ecstasy, perhaps a lifetime. Only later when he left, dressed and dapper as always as his wife came in through the front door to get his evening cup of cocoa, did she give some thought to what they’d done and what they intended to go on doing. With Emma suspecting nothing. But one day she would, or would have to be told. And then …
A shudder passed over Susan at the misery that awaited Emma, and she felt suddenly sick.
The doorbell, of course, didn’t work. It had never worked. Lilian would have liked it to work so that she could have kept her thumb on it indefinitely, displaying her anger until the door was eventually opened. Instead she must use the door knocker which wasn’t the same thing for she’d be disturbed by the noise as would the neighbours, whereas a bell upset only those on the other side of the door.
It was Mrs Crawley who answered, but that didn’t matter. Lilian’s wrath was directed as much to her as to Susan. She’d promised she’d make herself responsible for the girl and she had let the side down.
Susan’s letter had completely taken her breath away, shocked her to the very core. Unabashed it was, no matter how shamefacedly worded, the grammar and spelling, bad as ever, adding to the ill grace of it.
… I’ve got to tell you sometime. I feel I’ve got to be honest, because Emma Crawley’s walked out on Mr Crawley as him and me are living together you might say. It all just hapened. We couldn’t help ourselfs, and now I’ve found out I’m pregnant. So I thought it was best to tell you the truth. I know it sounds bad, but it wasn’t intended to be like that. It just what happened. I don’t expect you’ll forgive me and I know you’ll say I should wait for Matthew but I could just be waiting in vane? But now there’s Mattie to think of. Mr Crawley don’t like her around now Emma’s not here to give eye to her. He askd me if I’d ask you if you’d like to have her for a wile, being her grandparents …
She’d crumpled the letter up and thrown it from her half-read, only to retrieve and re-read it, still with disbelief. How anyone could be so shameless, so brazen? And to choose now of all times to write such things, three years almost to the day Matthew had gone away, had kissed his wife – his loyal wife – goodbye to march off into captivity. Three years! How could anyone be so faithless? She couldn’t wait, could she?
Her mind again seething with the contents of that letter, Lilian had begun to wonder if there was anyone at home. Her knocking was taking so long to be answered. As if there wasn’t enough to put up with, she continued to wait for news of Matthew that never came, clinging desperately to the belief that one day she’d hear, that one day, when the war drew to an end, he’d come home.
But this war was on their doorstep yet again in the shape of the doodlebug. Just as the news of Allied advances had everyone reading the papers as though following the football results, excited by it all, there had come the spluttering-engine roar of those V2s, like black crosses spouting blowlamp fire in their wake. From D Day and throughout June, July and August they had laboured across the sky. All warily watched their course as they cut out, soughing on ominously, the watchers unsure whether to duck or not. When they finally came plunging to earth they demolished homes in huge explosions that fanned out flying glass and debris, killing scores of people, for no one knew where they’d fall. Sometimes a hundred would come over in a day, several at once so no one knew where to look or run. The old air-raid shelters proved of no help; cowering in them would have halted all normal life, they chewed up a body’s nerves. Several had fallen near to her, too near for comfort, and people had again left London in droves.
Yet, as though none of this mattered, Susan had had the audacity to carry on an affair with her landlady’s husband, heedless of his wife who’d befriended the girl, of her own husband who was a prisoner of war. She was thinking only of herself, her needs, her pleasures.
Lilian’s first thought had been to seek out Leonard and show him the letter. On Saturday the shop stayed open until five thirty, but she had eventually decided against going there and demeaning herself by telling him such news in front of goggle-eyed customers. She had to deal with this herself. Making up her mind in a fit of anger, she had got herself ready and now, half an hour later, was waiting for someone to answer her knock.
But she had not been prepared for it to be Mrs Crawley herself. Even so, she collected herself, fluttering the letter in the woman’s face. ‘This arrived from my daughter-in-law an hour ago. She gave me to believe you’d left. I hardly expected to find you here, circumstances being what they are.’
Mrs Crawley’s face was bleak. No longer the amiable woman, she regarded Lilian with a steady pride in her eyes. ‘It’s still my ’ome, Mrs Ward. I just come back fer a few fings wot’s mine.’
‘I see.’ For a moment she was stumped. ‘Is my daughter-in-law here?’
‘Upstairs.’
‘Is he …’
‘Wiv ’er? Yes. ’E’s wiv ’er.’
Again she was caught by the simple truth spoken so directly, without inflection. ‘I need to see her,’ was all she could find to say.
Without a word Mrs Crawley stepped aside, allowing her to enter. Her face lifted briefly towards the top of the stairs, indicating for Lilian to go up. She too said nothing, but nodded her head in Mrs Crawley’s direction as she passed, noticing a battered suitcase in the hall with a hat balanced on top.
Mounting the stairs, there was no sound behind her but she had the feeling that the woman hadn’t watched her go, and reaching the door to the room where Susan resided, she heard the front door close quietly and knew that Mrs Crawley had let herself out.
‘I couldn’t tell you before. You were at work.’ Leonard was visibly upset by her going off like that without a word to him.
‘You should have allowed me to be there, Lilian. I’d have been able to lessen the impact rather than you having to deal with it alone.’
‘I managed well enough.’
She had managed, facing up to the situation that had confronted her on stepping inside Susan’s rooms, seeing the state the girl had allowed it to get into. And that poor little mite, Matilda; she could have cried for her.
Entering, she’d been met by the sight of Geoffrey Crawley. In white shirt, brown trousers, plain brown tie and sleeveless pullover, he presented quite an elegant figure until one noticed the pale stubble on his chin. The man hadn’t shaved that morning. Lilian knew immediately that her entrance had been heard downstairs. There must have been an unholy rush to dress, making it seem as though they had been up for hours.
Eyes sharpened by the sight of that stubble saw more telltale things: through the open door in the partition wall, a glimpse of an unmade bed and this at eleven thirty in the morning; clothes left on the floor; breakfast cups unwashed. The two must have been idling around the place in a state of undress. The knowledge brought bile into her throat as she swallowed fastidiously. Worst of all, Matilda, who was standing up in her cot, the covers twisted into a heap, was still in nightclothes, her dark curling hair dishevelled, her little face unwashed and still sticky from a piece of bread and jam that now adhered to the cot rail. She’d been crying, no doubt for attention that wasn’t forthcoming as these two indulged in each other – evidence of her distress was visible in the mucus drying around her nose. Lilian had never seen the child in such a mess. Usually Mattie looked quite presentable at other times when she had visited, but now she knew that had been Emma Crawley’s doing, never the mother’s. And there had stood Susan in a clean dress and hastily applied lipstick, though her long hair had not been combed quickly enough, for Lilian had seen one or two tangles that had been missed because of this couple’s vile goings-on earlier this morning.
It was then she had found her voice. With the letter held at arm’s length to the girl, she demanded what was the meaning of it. ‘Are you saying that this … animal has got you pregnant?’ she’d asked, quite illogically, for had it not been written there in black and white?
Crawley had stepped forward, full of indignation. ‘I say, hold on.’
Lilian had recalled her words all the way home and recalled them now with a mixture of pride in her own self-control – her ability to find the right words about which she was now justly satisfied – and of controlled anger which now struck her as totally correct in the circumstances. ‘Yes, animal. That can be the only word to describe the sort of person who leads a young woman with a child away from her true path, loyalty to a husband who is not here to fight for her. I call it despicable. It is nothing less. That you, who have so far kept yourself out of the forces by your job while young men are fighting and dying for you, can find it in yourself to break up my son’s marriage, is a despicable act. A different story, I can vouch, if he were here. Then a coward like you would run with your tail between your legs. You are a coward, a traitor, a parasite. And you,’ she had turned on the trembling girl, her daughter-in-law, ‘you are a harlot. I’d rather see my son dead than take you back!’
That had been a mistake. She shouldn’t have said that. On reflection it seemed she was condemning her own son. That was when she had nearly broken down. To combat her weakness, she had gone into the other room to stand over Matilda, the other two following at a distance.
Looking down on the child, averting her eyes from knickers, bras, stockings and men’s pants that draped every chairback, she’d been revolted by the musty odour that rose up to meet her from the cot itself, an offensive effluvium of urine, long-unbathed skin and unwashed bedclothes. She’d half expected disorder but not this abomination. The cot, like the bed, must have been crawled in and out of for weeks without any change of linen, and looking at Crawley with his fresh-looking skin and his attention to dress, it was unbelievable he would put up with such squalor as met her eyes. There had been another smell too in that room. A faint reek that she could not at first place. Susan and her abominable lover had been crawling all over each other night after night, filling the room with the reek of their coition. One word had escaped her as she lifted the child, who must have witnessed this copulation time after time, out of her cot: ‘Slut!’ And again, enlarging on the word: ‘You disgusting slut!’
In a smouldering fury she had commanded Matilda to be washed and dressed, a process that had involved a great deal of perseverance to control the miniature tempest at the unaccustomed washing. Susan had told her this was how Mattie always was and that it was easier not to bother and upset her, a likely excuse for laziness. Finally, Lilian had borne the child home with her, as Susan had asked.
It still escaped her how the child’s mother had stood by and watched her being taken away without one word of protest. The last she had seen of Susan, as she bore Matilda down the stairs and out of the house, was her standing there leaning slightly against Crawley, his arm protectively about her, a declaration if ever there was one of her intention never to go back to her husband when he finally came home. Lilian was still certain of that.
She now cuddled her granddaughter to her. After a proper bath, her hair now brushed to a dark sheen, the little body still convulsed with the occasional sob from screaming at such mishandling. One would think she’d never seen water in her life, which must almost be true, sad to say, and Lilian again felt hatred build up against the mother.
‘You should have seen those rooms,’ she said to Leonard. ‘She was never like that when she lived here. I took her always for a clean girl, clean-living. You could have knocked me over with a feather. And her cries when Matthew left, I’d never have believed she could turn so far the other way.’
‘Well, she’s here now,’ he soothed, his arms opening for Matilda to come to him, which she did readily, to lie against her grandfather, thumb in mouth, dark eyes slewed round towards the grandma who had so handled her. ‘She’ll be with us until Susan wants her back.’
To which Lilian huffed, ‘We’ll see about that.’ And smiling at the child, added, ‘One day, you’ll thank Grandma. When Daddy comes home.’
As the year drew to its close, that he would come home she was more than certain. And soon. Of that too she had no doubts, the news being what it was, all good. This year of 1944 marked a turning point if ever there was one; despite buzz-bombs, despite frightening V2s that had come after – in June alone Rome was captured and the landings in Normandy took place, but much more heartening, for her at least, was the defeat of the Japanese invasion of India. For her it was a light at the end of the tunnel. A few more months and they’d be defeated entirely and Matthew would come marching home. In the face of that thought, all other victories had paled, even when Paris was liberated in August, then Brussels. And then on the twentieth of October had come the most wonderful news of all, of the Americans’ re-landing in the Philippines. Not long now before she saw her son again. Then another heartache would begin when he learned that the wife he loved so much had been and still was unfaithful. At least they had his child here. A beautiful two-and-a-half-year-old to be introduced to him, to call him Daddy, compensation for the loss he did not yet know of. Lilian’s heart almost broke for him at what faced him on his return.
Meanwhile it was a new half-forgotten world she and Leonard had entered, taking Matilda into their home. They’d scarcely remembered what it was like to bring up an energetic young child. Louise had been quiet, doing all that was asked of her, never resorting to tantrums, when hurt, running to her parents for it to be kissed better in th
e stubborn knowledge that all would be well. She could be quite self-willed when the fancy took her, but Lilian had always managed her.
Even Matthew, who had been the harder of the two to bring up, a rebel always wanting to kick over the traces, going into a corner to nurse his hurts, brazening out hurt pride with abrasive flamboyance – even with him she had managed. Until, that is, he’d gone against her advice to go for a commission, instead joining up as a mere private. She still felt he had done it just to spite her, though why, she had never been sure, she with only his well-being at heart. And look where his action had got him.
But all the good and bad in her two children had become a distant memory as they’d grown away from her. Louise was now an independent young woman, hardly ever coming home when on leave and, so her letters said, going out with a young Canadian by the name of Ken Turnbull from Winnipeg. They planned to go steady and, reading between the lines, she was hoping to go back with him to Canada after the war. With Matthew a prisoner far away, Lilian prayed daily, if God were willing, that he would come home, but she knew he would probably be a changed man.
Yes, her memories of bringing up a child had dimmed considerably. Matilda, however, altered all that. Invading her grandparents’ stagnant lives, she hounded them, small as she was. Being a demanding child, rather like her mother, but charming with it, she made her grandmother’s head spin and sometimes ache with her liveliness. With no idea how to stay neat and clean, her clothing coupons never went far enough, and to keep her prettily dressed, Lilian dragged out her old sewing machine, cutting down her own dresses, unravelling old cardigans and often sacrificing her and Leonard’s own coupons. But there were rewards, seeing a child they’d brought home looking and smelling like some workhouse waif transformed into the pretty little thing she was. And so like Matthew that it hurt.
It had pained them at first hearing Matilda’s plaintive cries of ‘Mummy, Mummy’. She said little else, for she was terribly behind with her talking, not yet chattering as a child that age should. It passed, as she was too young to sustain a memory, but Lilian took care not to take her to see her mother and awaken the child’s renewed distress. Susan seemed not to mind.
