Sons and Daughters

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘But he must be well over fifty,’ said Polly, ‘and so must his old comrade.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Boots. ‘The moment any villains arrive, they’ll fix bayonets and charge.’

  Polly had hysterics.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she said, ‘are you real?’

  ‘Alive and well, Polly.’

  ‘Fix bayonets and charge?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Your manner of speaking is sending me dotty.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Boots.

  ‘Fascinating?’

  ‘Yes, dotty Polly,’ said Boots.

  ‘Dear man, come to bed,’ said Polly.

  ‘Now?’ said Boots. ‘It’s not ten yet.’

  ‘Can’t help that,’ said Polly, ‘I’m sexy.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘Sexy,’ said Polly. ‘Isn’t it bitter that so many people think you shouldn’t have sex when you’re over fifty?’

  ‘It’s even more bitter when so many people think you can’t,’ said Boots.

  Polly had another bout of enjoyable hysterics.

  ‘I can’t cap that,’ she said.

  ‘Did I say something?’ asked Boots.

  ‘Everything,’ said Polly, rising from her armchair. She took a few sinuous steps, bent her head and kissed him. ‘Boots old soldier, you’re dear to me,’ she said.

  ‘Since it’s mutual,’ said Boots, ‘let’s go up to bed, then.’

  ‘Yes, let’s show ’em,’ said Polly.

  ‘No, let’s keep it to ourselves,’ said Boots. ‘That kind of thing is strictly private. The day it becomes public will be the day when it’ll be on a par with shopping.’

  In the living room of a house in Kestrel Avenue, Mrs Patsy Adams, formerly Patsy Kirk of Boston, USA, was thumping husband Daniel with a cushion. Daniel, seated in an armchair, was taking the blows like a man. He was, in fact, shouting with laughter.

  ‘Take that!’ said Patsy. Thump. ‘And that!’ Wallop. Then she chucked the cushion at him. Daniel caught it and cuddled it.

  ‘Nice when it leaves off,’ he said.

  ‘Daniel Adams, I hate you,’ said Patsy, dark hair ruffled, hazel eyes full of sparks. She was twenty-two, a few months younger than Daniel, and a credit to the land of her birth in her looks and her outgoing nature. ‘You were letting Betty flirt with you. Worse, you were ogling her.’

  ‘Patsy, I honestly beg to differ,’ said Daniel. They had been entertaining friends, a young married couple like themselves, and the visitors had only just left. ‘I mean, ogling?’

  ‘Ogling for sure, when she was sitting on the arm of your chair and showing her skinny legs,’ said Patsy.

  ‘Believe me, Patsy,’ said Daniel, ‘I reserve my ogling just for you. I can say with a fair amount of sincerity that I didn’t notice whether Betty’s legs were skinny or fat, or even if she had one leg or two. What I did notice was her scent, something like minty garden peas.’

  ‘You’re not fooling me,’ said Patsy.

  ‘Come here,’ said Daniel, and he dropped the cushion, leaned forward, grabbed her and sat her on his lap. Patsy let it happen. ‘Now listen, Patsy, you’re definitely what the doctor ordered for me.’

  ‘Well, I sure am glad I was specifically prescribed and not pulled out of a hat,’ said Patsy. ‘Daniel, d’you like being married?’

  ‘I like being married to you,’ said Daniel. ‘I don’t think I’d like being married to Betty. She gushes.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ said Patsy, ‘and all over you.’

  ‘Well, if she’s got a problem, I can’t help,’ said Daniel. ‘You’re my one and only, now and until I’m ninety.’

  ‘What happens when you’re ninety?’ asked Patsy.

  ‘I think that’s when I’ll need my own kind of help, to get myself pointed at you,’ said Daniel. Patsy laughed then. So he kissed her, and her forgiving lips clung. Daniel was her fun guy, her very own fun guy, and she definitely objected to covetous outsiders. Come to that, Daniel could object very vigorously to any guy giving her the eye, which in a way was kind of thrilling. ‘Well, now,’ he said, ‘I hope Dad’s business worries will be solved by the time he gets back from his holiday.’

  ‘That fat crook you told me about sounds like a hood,’ said Patsy. ‘Can’t someone blow his head off?’

  ‘It’ll take a cannon shell to do that,’ said Daniel, ‘and there’s not a lot of them about in this country.’

  ‘Well, find one, buy it and use it,’ said Patsy.

  ‘That’s all right in the Wild West,’ said Daniel, ‘but not here. I’d get executed at dawn.’

  ‘Oh, gee whiz,’ said Patsy, ‘please don’t get executed at dawn, or at sundown, Daniel.’

  ‘Dad and Uncle Boots are leaving it all to Michal and Jacob Greenberg,’ said Daniel. ‘Hello, do I hear a real cry for help?’

  ‘It’s Arabella,’ said Patsy, ‘she’s awake.’

  Arabella was their infant daughter.

  ‘I’ll go up,’ said Daniel.

  ‘We’ll both go,’ said Patsy, ‘she likes seeing both of us.’

  ‘Right, start legging it to the apples and pears,’ said Daniel, which Patsy knew was the cockney term for stairs.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Up in the Lake District, Sammy and Susie’s eldest daughter, twenty-year-old Bess, was on a little copse-covered island in the middle of Lake Windermere. She had rowed herself there in a hired boat, while her friends and other visitors toured the expansive, shimmering lake in a large tourist motor-driven vessel. Some of her undergraduate friends had become noisy and irritating, and she felt like being by herself for a couple of hours. She had a lunch picnic of fresh rolls, cheese and ripe tomatoes with her, plus a flask of hot coffee.

  She wandered in and out of the leafy copse, emerging to find a man sitting near the lapping waters, absorbed in the shining ripples. He turned his head as he heard her.

  ‘Hi there,’ he said, ‘are you alone?’

  ‘Oh, sorry if I disturbed you,’ said Bess, fair-haired like Paula and her mum, and distinctly appealing. Once she had been noticeably plump, and Sammy had called her his little Plum Pudding. Blessedly, however, growing up had effected the demise of hitherto obstinate puppy fat. Now she had no quarrels with her figure.

  ‘No, you’re not disturbing me,’ said the man, black hair glinting in the sunshine, strong-boned face brown, dark green sweater and well-worn oatmeal corduroys close-fitting. ‘Unless you’ve brought a dozen friends with you.’

  I think he’s American, said Bess to herself. At least, he sounds like one.

  ‘Oh, I’m by myself,’ she said, ‘I was going to have a picnic here.’

  ‘Search me for a surprise,’ he said, ‘I’m just about to have mine of Lancashire meat pie and cheese. You’re welcome to join me. Where I’m sitting isn’t exactly London’s Hyde Park, but there’s still room for one more.’

  Bess hesitated. Compared to Paula and most of her cousins, she was a little reserved. But the day was fine, the lake lovely, the small copse quiet, and the man himself very natural in his friendliness.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ she said, and sat down next to him. Her picnic was in a carrier bag.

  ‘Jeremy Passmore,’ he said with a smile, and put out his hand.

  Bess took it and they shook hands.

  ‘Bess Adams,’ she said.

  ‘Happy to meet you, Bess Adams,’ he said.

  ‘I think you’re American,’ said Bess as the waters lapped by.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘From Chicago. Enlisted in 1942, when I was twenty and thought I knew all I needed to. Had my baptism of fire in North Africa alongside Monty’s Eighth Army, which sobered me down a little. No, more than a little. I was given a liaison posting later, as a lieutenant, with Monty’s Second Army Group a few weeks prior to D-Day. Slightly wounded during that hell of a battle for Caen, badly wounded early in ’45, hospitalized in England and stayed there when the war was over.’

  ‘Staye
d in hospital?’ said Bess.

  ‘No, in this little old island. I’ll be going back to Chicago one day soon, I guess. That’s my life story, which you probably noted didn’t start for real until ’42. Now tell me yours, or I’ll hog our time together.’

  ‘But what made you stay here?’ asked Bess, hair travelling around her head in the breeze.

  ‘Ancestry,’ said Jeremy. ‘My great-grandparents emigrated from a small town name of Tenterden in your county of Kent. Would you know that, Bess?’

  ‘I know of it,’ said Bess, ‘but I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Try it one day, it’s charming,’ said Jeremy. ‘I wonder sometimes, I sure do, why my ancestors ever left it for Chicago.’

  ‘Most emigrants left because of the economic doldrums, didn’t they?’ said Bess.

  ‘Economic doldrums?’ Jeremy eyed her like a man tickled. ‘I like that. Well, a few months after the war ended, I tracked my ancestors down and found I had aunts, uncles and cousins. I’ve been hitting it off with Aunt Amy and Uncle Dan for over a couple of years. They insisted.’

  ‘You mean you live with them?’

  ‘Bess, it’s home from home, but I can’t stay under their feet for ever, and as I said, I’ll be sailing for the States soon.’

  ‘Don’t you have a job?’ asked Bess.

  ‘You’re asking?’ said Jeremy. ‘So I’m telling. I’ve a work permit and have been earning my English dough as manager of a farm.’

  ‘I think that’s wonderful,’ said Bess.

  ‘Wonderful?’ Jeremy looked tickled again. ‘I think you’re being English.’

  ‘In what way?’ asked Bess.

  ‘The polite way.’

  ‘No, really,’ said Bess. The breeze plucked at the skirt of her dress and lifted it. Hastily, she adjusted it. Jeremy noted her slight blush.

  ‘Your turn, Bess,’ he said. ‘Or shall we start taking in some calories first?’

  ‘Well, I do feel a bit peckish,’ said Bess, and they brought their food into being and began to eat.

  ‘Now start talking,’ said Jeremy.

  So Bess, put at ease by his camaraderie, told him about her family, particularly about how her dad became a self-made businessman.

  ‘Yes, and would you believe, he started with capital banked in his old socks.’

  ‘Banked where?’ said Jeremy.

  ‘Well,’ said Bess, ‘from the time when he was about seven he saved every coin he could and kept them in his old socks in a box under his bed. When he finally came to disgorge it, he had twenty full socks and what my Aunt Lizzy said was a small fortune.’

  ‘A saving guy with an eye to his future?’ said Jeremy.

  ‘Oh, I think he had his eye to his future when he put his first farthings into a sock,’ said Bess, and went on to detail some of Sammy’s achievements. ‘He and his brothers were all adventurous, they’re all in the business, and might have taken off for dizzy heights if my grandma, Chinese Lady, hadn’t kept them in order.’ Bess laughed softly. ‘And she still does, and everyone else in the family as well.’

  ‘Chinese Lady?’ said Jeremy. ‘Come again?’

  So Bess had to explain how her paternal grandmother came to be called Chinese Lady. Jeremy laughed until he shook.

  ‘Mind, that’s only what I’ve been told by my dad and uncles,’ said Bess.

  ‘It’s still a hoot,’ said Jeremy, which made Bess think of brother Daniel’s wife, Patsy. Patsy used that expression.

  Encouraged, she talked some more for quite a while, and Jeremy listened, liking the sound of her English voice with its little musical lilts. Eventually, she thought of Patsy again.

  ‘Oh, would you like to know I’ve an American sister-in-law?’ she said.

  ‘That’s a fact?’ said Jeremy, who had finished his Lancashire meat pie, and was making healthy inroads into a large wedge of cheese and some crusty bread.

  ‘Yes, it’s a fact,’ said Bess. ‘She comes from Boston and is married to my elder brother. She’s really very nice.’

  ‘Well, I sure wouldn’t go for her giving the rest of us a bad name,’ said Jeremy. ‘So if she’s pretty nice, send her my regards. Now carry on.’

  ‘I’ll probably get boring,’ said Bess.

  ‘I’ll take a bet you won’t,’ said Jeremy.

  So Bess told him about Bristol University, where she was reading French, maths and English Literature because she wanted to be a school-teacher.

  ‘Wow,’ said Jeremy.

  ‘Wow what?’ asked Bess.

  ‘Schoolteachers get headaches and take pills,’ said Jeremy.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Bess.

  ‘My college fraternity took pills for breakfast and lunch.’

  ‘Probably because the students were devilish,’ said Bess.

  ‘As a teacher, what would you do with your devilish students?’ asked Jeremy.

  ‘Point them to their natural home,’ said Bess.

  ‘Natural home?’

  ‘Hell,’ said Bess, all diffidence having slipped away.

  Jeremy shouted with laughter.

  ‘Bess, I sure am pleased to have met you,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Bess. Noting he had no flask, she asked if he’d like some coffee.

  ‘I was thinking of calling at the hotel and ordering a beer at the bar,’ he said.

  ‘How are you going to get there?’ she asked.

  ‘Hail someone in a boat,’ said Jeremy, ‘it’s how I landed here.’

  ‘Well, you can share my coffee first, if you like, and then I’ll row you back in my hired boat.’

  ‘You’ll do that?’

  ‘I’m game,’ said Bess, ‘and I have to join up with my friends in an hour, anyway.’

  ‘We’ll take an oar each,’ said Jeremy.

  Which they did some time later, seated side by side, Bess a surprised young lady at how comfortable she felt in company with this easy-going American. She thought that was probably how women felt in company with Uncle Boots, the most easy-going man she knew. Grandma Finch had once said her only oldest son would have been a danger to even the most respectable women if he hadn’t been a properly brought-up family man who, being married, didn’t go in for anything unlegal. Bess felt that many of the male undergraduates she knew were too noisy and callow to be a danger to any discriminating woman. Some of them had begun to get on her nerves soon after her arrival in the Lake District with a group of both sexes. Her closest friend in Bristol certainly wasn’t a male undergraduate. It was Alice, Uncle Tommy and Aunt Vi’s daughter, who worked for the bursar.

  Out on the sparkling surface of the lake that had been born amid surrounding green hills, the boat zigzagged a bit. Jeremy suggested they weren’t pulling together.

  ‘Well, just look here,’ said Bess, ‘I’m pulling my share.’

  ‘I’ll call the tempo, shall I?’ said Jeremy. ‘Right, one – two, one – two—’

  Bess caught a crab and fell backwards. Up went her legs, and her dress played about again. She shrieked. With laughter. And as Jeremy brought her upright again, she was still laughing, with not the faintest hint of a blush. She grabbed at the loose oar.

  ‘Don’t let me do that again,’ she said.

  ‘Fair and sweet young lady,’ said Jeremy, ‘the last thing I want is to have you fall overboard.’

  Bess did blush then, just a little. Fair and sweet? Oh, help.

  They rowed to the jetty, delivered the little craft to the boatman, and walked to the hotel, where Jeremy asked if she’d like to join him at the bar.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ she said, ‘but I really don’t drink very much, and I’d better wait for my friends. They’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Let’s sit,’ said Jeremy, ‘and I’ll wait with you.’ They sat together on a bench looking out over the long, shining lake. Other holidaymakers ambled contentedly around. ‘What will you be doing after you’ve left the Lakes?’ asked Jeremy.

  ‘Oh, I’ll be going home mid-August to spen
d the rest of my vacation with my family before I return to Bristol,’ said Bess. In the distance she saw the motorized tourist vessel approaching. Oh, blow, she thought, that’s a bit too soon.

  ‘Well, tell me if I’m being pushy,’ said Jeremy, ‘but may I call on you at your home?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘No go?’ said Jeremy. ‘You’ve got a feller?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Bess.

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘I’ll give you my address,’ said Bess.

  ‘I’m touched,’ said Jeremy, ‘since that’s going to mean you’ll be giving me a yes as well.’

  Bess ripped a page from the back of her pocket diary, pulled out its pencil and wrote down her address. And, after a brief second, her phone number.

  ‘There,’ she said, handing the little page to Jeremy. Lord, she thought, what’s the family going to think, Daniel with an American wife and me suddenly with an American friend, a feller from Chicago? Not wanting her noisy group to gallop up and spoil the moment for her, she said, ‘D’you mind if I go and meet my friends at the jetty? If I don’t, they’ll come up and smother us.’

  ‘Whatever you want, Bess,’ said Jeremy. ‘Just let me say I’ve known a few English girls—’

  ‘I’m sure you have, since you’ve been in England since the end of the war,’ said Bess.

  ‘Right,’ said Jeremy, ‘and I’m now telling you I’ve played around with one or two.’

  ‘I know about GIs and English girls,’ said Bess, and thought again of Uncle Boots, and his brief time with a French farmer’s daughter just before the first Battle of the Somme, which had resulted in the birth of Eloise. When she’d talked about it with her mum, her mum had said no-one with any understanding was going to say hard things about what the men of the trenches did with French girls, and that people ought to thank the French girls for giving the Tommies a bit of pleasure before they died. But Uncle Boots didn’t die, said Bess. For which let’s all say a happy Amen, said her mum.

  ‘In ’44, some months before our GIs and Brits sailed on that seasick trip to the Normandy beaches, I took a real shine to a redhead,’ said Jeremy.

  ‘I do understand,’ said Bess, eyes on the docking tourist boat.

  ‘Serious shine,’ said Jeremy, ‘but by the time I came out of hospital late in ’45, she’d skipped off to California as a GI bride of some other guy, taking a diamond engagement ring with her. The ring I’d slipped on her finger. I thought hard about that piece of chicanery and decided I was luckier than the other guy.’