by Marie Joseph
Slowly she walked through into the kitchen to the sight of Irene cramming a whole shortbread biscuit into her mouth. The bulging cheeks and the slyness in the flicking glance from round blue eyes snapped the last vestige of Lisa’s control.
Snapping the lid back on to the biscuit tin, she whirled round in time to see Irene pushing a second, or was it a third, biscuit into her mouth. There were crumbs down the front of the child’s dress, her eyes watered with the effort of swallowing without chewing, and suddenly Lisa did what she’d been longing to do for a long, long time.
Almost without volition her hand came out to slap one bulging cheek, and as Irene’s lips parted in a wide gasp of surprise a shower of crumbs spluttered out to dribble down her chin.
‘I told you you’d had enough to eat!’ Now that she had done the unforgivable, Lisa’s anger was immediately spent. Irene Carr wasn’t a child. Lisa doubted if she had ever been a child. They had heard only the week before that Irene had won a scholarship to Lisa’s old school, and come September she would be setting off each day wearing the familiar uniform of navy-blue and sky-blue, squashing the cap down over her white-gold curls, the box pleats of her gym slip pulled out of line by her already sprouting chest. With her gift of mimicry Lisa had impersonated some of the mistresses, walking like one, talking like another, only to be met by Irene’s blank, indifferent stare.
‘I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.’ Lisa was almost weeping as she tried to pull the stiff, resisting girl into her arms. ‘Look. I know I have an awful temper.’ She spoke quickly, trying to take advantage of Irene’s stunned reaction to the hard slap. ‘It’s upsetting your father seeing us always at loggerheads with each other. He thought we would be friends.’ She dropped her arms to her sides. ‘I’m not trying to be your mother, love. I’m not trying to take anyone’s place. But you’re stuck with me.’ Lisa smiled ruefully. ‘And I’m stuck with you, so can’t we make the best of it? Please?’
Already the marks of her fingers were beginning to show red on Irene’s left cheek. If Irene had burst into tears, even tears of rage, Lisa felt she could have coped. But the round china-blue eyes were as hard as flint, dry and cold with a hatred that was almost tangible.
‘Your father stole money from his friends.’ Irene backed away, spitting out each word. ‘He should have gone to prison. Millie told me. But he went to Australia so the police couldn’t find him. And you lived in Mill Street.’ She took another backward step. ‘You made my father feel sorry for you, Millie said, and that’s why he married you. An’ I’m going to tell him now what you’ve done. An’ if you follow me, then I’ll push you downstairs.’ She pointed a finger. ‘If you touch me I’ll scream!’
Utterly defeated, Lisa let her go. She walked over to the sink and ran cold water into a glass. There was a pain just below her ribs as if she had been punched violently by a balled-up fist. She accepted in that moment that Millie Schofield would have to go. Veiled animosity was one thing; putting Irene against her by telling the child half-truths was another. Richard was right. Her place was here in this house, being a full-time mother to Peter and a full-time something or other to his daughter. Lisa took the glass over to the table and sat down.
She could not imagine a life dedicated to domesticity. She would still make time to work on her sketches, talk to clients on the telephone, live vicariously through Richard’s anecdotes about the shop. Be the kind of wife he had always wanted her to be. Lisa sipped the water slowly, putting off the moment when she must go upstairs.
She loved her husband. And oh, dear God, how he loved her! Behind the horn-rimmed spectacles he had taken to wearing full-time, his eyes would glow with pride as he looked at her. Their love-making was as soothing and satisfactory as if it were a blessing.
Even the war seemed to be happening to other people, in some far-away place, only the shortages and the news bulletins intruding into their new-found dream of contentment. When she’d tell Richard of her decision to stay at home and conform to his blueprint of how a wife should behave, Lisa could clearly anticipate the relief and joy on his face.
Like her father before her, Lisa’s impulses and decisions were never half-toned. Her day would come, she told herself, when Peter was at school, the war was over and Irene was married.
Muttering to herself, Lisa rinsed out the glass and upended it on the draining board. Immediately she was all contrition. She would make herself love Irene, even if it killed her, and she would force the strange child to love her back. She could make anyone like her; hadn’t she proved it over and over again? It was a gift that her father had possessed in abundance.
Just for a moment Lisa imagined her father, laughing in the garden at The Laurels on a sunlit day, with his red-gold hair and vivid blue eyes, a circle of friends hanging on his every word. She heard the soft Scottish burr in his deep voice, remembered the twinkle in his eyes as he winked at her. He would have made what he would have called ‘mincemeat’ of Millie Schofield, sent her packing, then exerted all his charm on Irene so that she too drowned in his charm.
Once again the bleak feeling of rejection stilled her into sadness, leaving her feeling lost and lonely. Walking quickly into the wide hall she ran lightly upstairs.
Richard, pale now that the fever had subsided, sat up in bed, his head lolling uncomfortably against the mahogany bed-end. He looked as neat and tidy in his striped pyjamas as in the dark suits he wore at the shop, with a white handkerchief, ironed by Millie, pushed into the top pocket. Without the horn-rimmed spectacles his eyes looked young and defenceless, and the sight of him made Lisa feel better and strengthened her resolution.
‘Feeling better?’ She took a pillow from the foot of the bed and put it behind his head. ‘I suppose Irene told you I smacked her?’
He nodded. ‘I told her she must have asked for it.’ He frowned. ‘Do you think it was wise, though? She’s gone off to bed in one of her sulks.’ He stretched out a hand for a glass of cloudy barley water and took a sip, wrinkling his nose. ‘I wish Millie would put lemon in this. It tastes disgusting.’
‘There’s a war on, love.’ Lisa sat down on the bed, smiling at him. ‘I wouldn’t queue for half an hour in the hope of a lemon. Would you?’
He couldn’t understand her calmness, Lisa knew that. Without the sparkling lenses of his spectacles to hide behind, his stare was wary. He had expected her to storm upstairs in the wake of his difficult daughter, tearful maybe, justifying the slap, and instead here she was, talking about lemons, the shortage of, apparently unperturbed.
‘I’ve decided to stop working full-time,’ she said straight out. ‘The shop will carry on without me, and now that clothes rationing is almost on us women will be using their coupons for more important things than dresses.’ She met his astonished gaze. ‘Besides, now we’ve finished more or less with orders for black-out curtains, people will be making do for the duration. May’s gone to make uniforms anyway, and where would you get girls to do the sewing even if there was anything to sew? It’s into the Forces, or munitions, or the Land Army. Our kind of work doesn’t fall into the reserved-occupation scheme exactly, does it?’
Richard blinked. The arguments about his wife’s insistence on working had been long and fierce. He had tried reason, bullying, even bribery, and nothing had worked. Now here she was, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, dark hair swinging forward on to her cheeks as she leaned forward, her expression as bland as one of Millie’s creamy rice puddings.
‘It’ll never do,’ he said biliously, ‘you and Millie in the house all day. That’s what you always said. Isn’t it?’
‘I did, and it won’t. So she’ll have to go.’
‘Millie go? Where?’
‘I don’t know. Anywhere!’
‘But she’s always been here.’ Richard looked embarrassed. ‘Since before my … since before Irene’s mother died.’ He reddened slightly. ‘You won’t be happy being at home all day washing socks and scrubbing out.’
In
his obvious dismay he used the northern phrase without thinking, then winced as Lisa laughed.
‘Scrubbing out? Not much chance with wall-to-wall carpets all over the house.’ She took his hand in her own. ‘Come on, Richard. Don’t tell me you’ve been pleading with me to settle down like a good wife and mother all this time just for the sake of saying it?’ She juggled the hand up and down. ‘It’s Millie, isn’t it? You don’t like the thought of me working, but you like even less the idea of her leaving your employ.’ Lisa raised dark eyebrows. ‘Because that’s what she is, Richard, in your employ.’
‘In other words, a servant?’
‘Yes, if you want to be difficult.’
‘And you were used to giving servants the sack?’
‘My mother was. If they deserved it.’
‘And Millie does?’
‘Yes, if you must know. Yes!’
A painful silence settled between them. Lisa saw that he was disturbed and angry. She turned her head away from him. All right then – she would be angry, too. For heaven’s sake, she was the one who was making the sacrifice, giving up something she held dear. As usual when disturbed, her thoughts came out in her head in clichés. Richard wasn’t playing this scene at all the way she had expected him to. Instead of being totally overwhelmed by her offer, all he could think about was his housekeeper!
‘She’s been discussing me again with Irene. Telling lies about my father. Setting her against me. I tell you honestly, with Millie here there’s not the slightest chance of Irene and me being friends. If you won’t tell her to leave, then I will.’
‘You won’t, you know.’
When Lisa turned round she saw with surprise that two spots of hectic colour burned high on Richard’s cheeks. His voice was low but it had the ring of authority. He was, as Miss Howarth would undoubtedly have said, in one of his moods. On his high horse, impervious to reason.
‘Anyone would think Millie has some sort of hold over you,’ she said slowly.
‘Nonsense!’ Lisa’s eyes widened as she watched with fascination the tide of colour flood his fair skin. Richard was blushing like a young girl, caught in the grip of an emotion without the power to control it. She looked at him with growing disbelief.
‘You’ve slept with her, haven’t you?’ The words said themselves, even before she grasped their implication. ‘You have, haven’t you?’
Instead of replying, Richard suddenly swung his legs over the side of the bed, pushing back the blankets, but when he tried to stand up his knees buckled beneath him and he fell back, his eyes closed.
‘It was a long time ago. Long before you.’
Lisa felt as if she’d been winded. It wasn’t as if she was a prig or a prude; it was just that the thought of the tall, horse-faced Millie, with her high-piled hair and her sliding eyes, slipping between the sheets for a night of passion, couldn’t be grasped. Millie Schofield was a spinster, natural-born. The idea of her small, buttoned-up mouth opening to a man’s kiss was obscene. Good Lord, there was more warmth in a Wall’s ice-cream than in the whole of that elongated torso.
‘It was just after my wife died.’ Richard kept his eyes tightly closed as he made his confession. ‘She – Millie – had been a tower of strength.’
Blackpool Tower, Lisa thought hysterically.
‘She came to my room one night after Irene had been playing up, to tell me she’d got her to sleep at last.’ He laid a hand over his closed eyes. ‘Anyway, it just happened.’
Lisa found her voice. ‘But she’s older than you!’
‘Five years, that’s all.’ Richard spoke with a breezy insensitivity. ‘It was just the once because the next morning I told her it had been a mistake.’
‘A mistake?’
‘Yes. And she understood and agreed, what’s more. It wouldn’t have done, not with her living in as she was then.’ Richard removed his hand from his face and opened his eyes. ‘That was when I got her the room over the shop down in the village. She’s all alone in the world, you know. I upped her wages so she could afford the rent.’
‘Paid her off?’
He winced at her crudity. ‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’
‘Well, I would.’ Lisa got up from the bed and walked over to the window, lifting the net curtain and staring down into the deserted avenue.
‘I told you. It was a mistake.’ Richard gave a deep sigh. ‘I suppose you find it all hard to credit?’
Lisa answered in a muffled voice. ‘I find it almost impossible to believe.’ She turned round. ‘And I suppose you’ve convinced yourself it didn’t matter? I suppose she was a virgin? A near-middle-aged virgin who could take it all in her stride, then dismiss it as just one of those things?’
‘Don’t use that word. I don’t like it.’
‘What word? Virgin?’
‘It’s not ladylike.’
‘And what you did – no, what you didn’t do afterwards was the behaviour of a gentleman? My God, Richard. I’m not a man-hater, but the more I learn about them the more I think I should be. It’s a man’s world, isn’t it? First my father, then Patrick Grey, taking what they need at the time they need it, and to hell with the women who are daft enough to comply.’ She shook her head from side to side. ‘Poor Millie. No wonder she can hardly bear to look at me. You must have known she couldn’t shrug a thing like that aside. Because of what you did she’s been in love with you all these years, living on hope that one day you’d turn to her again. Have you really been kidding yourself that she’d forgotten?’
‘I thought you disliked her?’
‘I did. I still do. But as far as this goes we’re sisters under the skin, Richard. In this case I’m with her against you. Can’t you see?’
‘You’re not suggesting I should have married her?’
When Lisa went to bed at midnight Richard was snoring through an aspirin-induced sleep. He had insisted that she slept in the spare room until he was better, and for an hour or more Lisa tossed and turned in the narrow bed, going over and over their unsatisfactory confrontation.
Poor, poor Millie, with her dour manner and grim face, eating her heart out for a man who had once made love to her. By mistake! And poor Richard, too insensitive to realize that a woman like Millie, by sleeping with him, would consider herself committed to him for ever. Lisa turned her pillow over, seeking a cooler place. Now, more than ever, it was essential that the housekeeper left. They would have to see that she didn’t suffer financially, though at her age it wouldn’t be easy for her to find another situation.
When the sirens went Lisa sat up in bed, staring wide-eyed into the darkness. She wasn’t afraid. The town was well away from the heavy bombing concentrated mainly on Liverpool and Manchester. There was an Anderson shelter at the bottom of the back garden, but they had never used it, as up to now the only casualty had been a cow in a field over on the other side of the town. But even as the wailing sound fell away, she heard the plane, a heavy, trundling beat in the sky, a rhythmic pounding filling her ears and striking dread into her heart.
She was half out of bed when the bomb fell. It came first as a whistling swish, then as a crunch, rattling the windows, and as if in protest the baby began to cry in a loud piercing howl.
Out on the wide landing Lisa bumped into Richard, shivering in his pyjamas, clutching the cord of the striped trousers round his middle.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘For my guess, it’s just a lone bomber dropping its load on the way back. You see to the baby and I’ll go in to Irene.’
Unbelievably, Irene had slept through the noise. When Richard came into the nursery where Lisa stood, wondering what to do next with the crying baby held against her shoulder, the All Clear went. In the dim light from the shaded lamp they stared at each other, embarrassed by their momentary panic.
‘Go back to bed.’ Lisa patted her baby son’s back. ‘He’s going off already. It was just the unexpected noise. Go back to bed before you catch more cold. I’ll go down and make a cup of te
a. We’ll know where it landed in the morning.’
‘Come into my bed,’ Richard said, when she carried the steaming mugs of tea into the big front bedroom. ‘I’m not sneezing now. I can’t get warm without you.’
He was just like a child, Lisa thought, as they settled into their familiar position of spoons in a box. He thinks he’s so strong, so much a man of his own destiny, but really he needs me just as much as the baby does. Tenderly she pulled up the blankets and tucked them round his neck. Soon she herself drifted into sleep, aware that in some subtle way their relationship had changed irrevocably.
No longer would she look upon her husband as a substitute for the father who had rejected her. From now on, even at twenty-one, she was the wiser, the more mature. This man, who had once been her boss and now was her husband, would no longer have the power to make her feel subservient, even as she fought to be independent. She had his measure, as Miss Howarth would undoubtedly have said.
She awoke long before the first streak of dawn lightened the blacked-out window, her thoughts crystal clear.
Because of Richard’s insistence that everything be shared equally between them, all profits from the shop and from her own earnings going into a joint bank account, she had no money she could call her own, despite the fact that she had desperately tried to hold back a bit in order to repay Patrick Grey. She had thought she needed protection. Losing first her father then her mother had made her vulnerable. Marrying Richard had subjugated for a while her desperate need for total independence. Now, although she was too tired to formulate a reason, she accepted that she was free.
The ringing of the telephone down in the hall propelled Lisa out of bed with the force of a stone hurled from a catapult.
‘Is that Mrs Carr?’ said the voice on the telephone. ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but the bomb in the night fell on the shops across the market square. Yours wasn’t damaged too badly, but the front windows have gone. I think it might be as well if your husband gets down there. This is Sergeant Wilkes,’ he added, ‘speaking from the police station.’
