Coronation Wives

by Lizzie Lane

  She smiled. ‘I didn’t say that. I said Clevedon was wonderful.’

  The town did indeed seem brighter and would have remained unsullied if the rock pools had yielded more stranded sea creatures, if the children hadn’t got bored.

  A narrow parapet, slippery with dark green slime ran all around the pool. Unseen by Janet, Peter and Susan were walking carefully around it, arms outstretched and toes digging into the slippery surface. Peter completed the whole circuit. With a whoop of triumph he jumped off at the shallow end. Susan followed, but her balance wasn’t so good. She wobbled and the fishing canes tangled in her legs.

  Susan’s scream brought Janet and Jonathan to their feet just in time to see Susan’s legs slip awkwardly from under her. A plume of water shot into the air as she broke the surface and disappeared in the deepest end of the pool.

  Janet ran swiftly, the wet slime of the parapet seeping through her stockinged feet.

  Jonathan shouted out to her to be careful, but she paid him no heed. She didn’t have time to be careful. Could Susan swim? Perhaps she could … perhaps she couldn’t … and then what?

  Breathless and scared, she knelt on the parapet trying to peer through the dull green water. Susan was nowhere in sight. People gathered around her, all talking at once, all making suggestions.

  The police! The coastguard! A doctor!

  Just as she was about to dive in, Susan’s head broke the surface, spluttering and spitting water, her arms flailing in an anxious but adequate crawl.

  Janet bent low and reached for her. ‘Here, Susan! Here!’

  A foot slipped from under her and she began to topple.

  ‘Let me!’ Jonathan’s voice. He pulled her back before she too was struggling in the water.

  ‘Get back.’ He took her place at the side of the pool. Susan’s fishing net had flown onto the rocks when she had fallen in. Jonathan used it to reach her, holding it out in front of him. Susan grabbed hold of the green mesh with both hands. Hand over hand, Jonathan reeled her in. A boy of about thirteen helped him lift her from the water and over the parapet.

  ‘Best catch of the day!’ Jonathan exclaimed as Susan coughed up the water she’d swallowed. ‘Come on. Bring it all up.’ He patted her on the back and leaned her forward across his lap. Susan obliged. Still breathless and shaking with fear at the thought of what might have been, Janet brought a towel and wrapped her in it.

  ‘Goodness. What would I have said to your mother if I’d gone home without you?’

  The sun and the breeze dried Susan’s clothes while she sat wrapped in the towel eating sandwiches and shivering. By the time she was dry everything was packed and Jonathan was giving them a lift to the station.

  ‘I would take you all the way home,’ he explained, ‘but I do have things to do.’

  Janet told him she understood. They arrived at the station too quickly and she found herself wishing they’d had long enough to take tea or sit near the bandstand and eat ice cream. Once the children and hamper were unloaded, she dawdled by the car.

  He stuck his head out through the open window. ‘One last kiss?’

  Janet obliged. He tasted like … She couldn’t think. Chocolates, wine, smoothly spread butter that made you turn your lips inwards then lick them with your tongue.

  She told herself not to get too carried away as there was a danger she might give him the wrong impression. But he had offered her a future away from a dark office and a home in which a stranger now resided.

  ‘So?’ He said nothing more, just looked at her quizzically but confidently, as though he already knew what she would say to his offer.

  It was impossible to look anywhere except into his eyes. Women would die for eyes like his, she thought. Blue – no – indigo. Were his mother’s eyes the same colour? Or his father’s? His mother’s, she decided, a mirror image of his own, just as he seemed to be a mirror image of the woman herself.

  ‘Are you going to let me down?’ he said when she didn’t answer.

  Despite the dryness in her throat, she managed to find her voice. ‘Perhaps Professor Pritchard won’t want me as his secretary. Perhaps he’s already got someone else in mind.’

  Jonathan smiled and shook his head. ‘I’ve already mentioned you. Besides, he knows your father. It’s in the bag.’

  Watching him drive away brought back a childhood memory, the time when she was about eight years old and had caught scarlet fever. Her throat had been dry and her skin had burned all over – just like now – and all at the prospect of a new job.

  The day had ended well, thought Janet as the neat bungalows and sturdy stone villas of Clevedon were left behind. She rested her brain against the headrest in the third-class compartment, which, of course, had no corridor and therefore no lavatory, and prayed fervently that the children could last until Bristol.

  Susan falling into the pool was the only blot on the day and a very minor one at that. Everything else had been wonderful. A job at Saltmead! A flat! What a stroke of luck. Giving in her notice once Jonathan had confirmed the position was no problem although Dorothea might get weepy about it, but that wouldn’t stop her.

  Away from home. Will I miss it? she wondered, then thought of that Polish accent that still haunted her dreams and shivered.

  There was time to ponder on the matter as she gazed past her reflection in the dusty glass to the darkening landscape outside. Lights were coming on in scattered cottages, farmhouses and villages, the latter clustered like sheep around an ancient church where tombstones leaned amid ripe grass and fading poppies.

  She smiled at her deepening reflection. Saltmead beckoned. It had lots in its favour, including Jonathan’s companionship. Despite the fact that they’d kissed and held hands, she still viewed him as little more than a friend. She presumed he saw things that way too.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Meg never let on that Carol had spilled the beans about going to Australia, though Polly should have guessed it. Carol was a talkative child who’d been close to her great-aunty since a baby, when Polly had spent more time in the company of the American Army than Field Marshal Montgomery!

  Like anyone else, Meg needed to talk to someone about her worries. Luckily, Bridget Dando, who’d lived four houses away down in their old street, had moved to the opposite side of the road in Camborne Crescent. In the days at York Street they had entered each other’s house without knocking, going straight to the stove and putting the kettle on. Their old habits were readopted. By eleven o’clock Bridget’s head had appeared around the open door, her toothless gums chewing remorselessly, her eyes seemingly everywhere. Not that she could help the latter. She was cross-eyed and although it proved disconcerting at first to see one eye looking right to the kitchen and the other left towards the front door, Meg had got used to it. Besides, Bridget was a good listener and not a gossip even though unloading her worries onto someone with such an unfocused gaze was a bit like Catholic confession – she wasn’t sure whether anyone was actually listening.

  Meg repeated to Bridget what Carol had told her.

  Her look was as forthright as it could be. ‘You going?’

  Meg clamped her mouth shut, looked into her tea and shook her head.

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘They haven’t said a word to me. Me! I’ve done all I bloody-well could fer them over all these years! Cast off like some worn out slipper.’

  Bridget made no comment. She seemed to sense when Meg wanted to say more and accordingly waited for the right words and moment to come.

  ‘They’ve replied, them Australians.’ Meg swallowed and sniffed back her feelings.

  ‘So when they going?’

  Meg poked at her hair and looked away guiltily. ‘They don’t know they’ve replied.’

  Bridget poured tea into her saucer and while waiting for further enlightenment took a noisy slurp.

  Meg went on, ‘Big brown envelope it was, full of forms an’ fings.’ She tilted her head back and closed her eyes. ‘I threw it out.’


  ‘Don’t blame you, me girl! said Bridget in an accent that originated some way west of Sligo. ‘This is where they belong. You’d miss ’em, you would.’

  ‘Of course I’d miss ’em, you silly mare! Of course I bloody well would!’ Her voice shook with emotion.

  Polly accused everyone of not doing their job properly: the people working at Australia House, the Post Office, even the mongrel pup that Billy had got down the Dogs’ Home, which had one ear up, one down. In common with Bridget Dando he also had an eye impediment – though not quite so off-putting – one eye being blue and the other brown.

  ‘So are we still going to Australia?’ Carol asked.

  ‘Damn right we are. Them bloody Australians didn’t reply to my first letter so I’ve written to them again. The forms and stuff should arrive any day now.’ The happiness gushed out and she gave Carol a big hug followed by a wagging finger in front of her face. ‘But don’t you tell yer Aunty Meg, mind!’

  Carol immediately muttered something about trying out the new rope swing that Norman Partridge, the local bully-boy, had just slung over the nearest lamppost.

  As Carol slunk out, Meg came into the room and settled on the leather chaise longue causing a spring to twang in protest. She took up her knitting; one plain, one pearl, the sound of her needles clicking in time with her teeth.

  She regarded the empty end of the chaise with a weathered frown. ‘Time this old thing was chucked on the bonfire.’ She looked up at Polly. ‘Why don’t you go round to that furniture shop down by the Rex and buy a new one?’ The Rex was the name of the picture house in Bedminster, a cut higher than the Broadway.

  ‘What with? Buttons?’ Polly sniffed as though the idea stank like rotten fish. Buying a new three piece – utility or not – was the last thing she wanted. She was leaving the country, wasn’t she? But she couldn’t tell Meg that.

  Meg said, ‘I’ve got enough for a deposit. You can ’ave the rest on tick.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Polly replied vaguely, cursing herself for not having the guts to tell Meg the truth. But she couldn’t tell her yet, could she? Not until she knew they’d definitely been accepted.

  Australia House responded to Polly’s second letter with equal efficiency to the first. The following day another large brown envelope slapped onto the hallway lino, the sound of its arrival cutting into Meg’s heart. Meg fell on it quickly and clutched it to her breast, hating to be deceitful, but determined not to lose the small family that had become her life. For a moment a sense of guilt softened her intentions, but it was touch and go. Her niece wanted a better life in a sunnier clime where opportunities were supposed to be there for the taking. Should she really stand in the way of a better future for her and Carol? After all, neither mother nor daughter had had a good start in life.

  But her determination to hold on to what she held very dear was too strong. If Polly left there’d be nothing worth living for.

  ‘God forgive me,’ she muttered as she shoved the envelope into the bosom of her apron. Out in the kitchen the galvanized boiler gurgled and sent clouds of steam to cling like fog to the ceiling. She lifted the lid on the dustbin that sat under the kitchen window. It gaped up at her like a dark hole – straight to hell. Taking the package in both hands she paused for one last guilty reflection. ‘It’s for our own good,’ she said, raised her eyes to heaven, then ripped the envelope in half and dropped it in.

  The house in Royal York Crescent was surprisingly silent: no clip-clop of Mrs Grey’s sensible heels across the parquet floors; no trace of her mother’s high, well-rounded vowels as she talked to someone on the telephone about a charity meeting or a social event to raise money for the destitute in some country she’d never heard of.

  Silence in the house was not that unusual. Mrs Grey’s day off obviously, and her mother was probably in the study reading a stack of official papers in dull fawn files.

  Janet began to make her way there when the sound of a door being slammed came tumbling down the stairs. ‘Mother?’

  Silence.

  She climbed the stairs and went straight to her mother’s room, a haven of pale cream, violet and seedling green. The sheets on the bed glowed white. Janet paused, stared at the unsullied crispness and remembered a night long ago when she’d seen her mother lying on that bed with …

  The sound of raised voices followed by a loud thud broke into her thoughts. She shot off along the landing and stopped by the small door that opened on the narrow staircase leading up to Ivan’s room. Carefully, so that it wouldn’t creak, she opened it a few inches. Breathless sounds of exertion came from the room above. Someone was doing something very physical. Her thoughts returned to the crisp sheets downstairs and the night when her mother’s image had become tarnished for ever. For goodness’ sake, her mother was older now. Surely she wouldn’t? And Ivan was so much younger than her!

  Slamming the door behind her, Janet ran up the spiral stairs until her head was level with the attic floor and she could see the bed, her mother and Ivan.

  Her mother was bending over the bed. Ivan was lying on it, arms flung above his head, one leg trailing on the dull green lino floor.

  ‘What are you doing with him?’

  ‘Trying to get him into bed.’

  A pair of boots were swiftly untied and placed on the floor.

  Janet held back. This was not the scenario she had envisaged.

  Ivan muttered something about lost countries, lost causes and absent friends.

  ‘Let’s just make you comfortable, shall we?’ Charlotte began undoing the buttons on Ivan’s flies. She pushed aside locks of hair that had fallen over her face. ‘Ivan’s been drinking.’ She indicated an empty decanter on the bedside table. ‘It’s annoying, but well … what can one expect with all that he’s been through?’

  If only you knew what I’d been through, thought Janet, and suddenly felt jealous rather than fearful of the man lying on the bed. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Not now, dear. Do you think you can give me a hand to get his clothes off?’

  Had she misheard? Janet looked from Ivan to her mother. ‘No! I couldn’t.’

  Charlotte looked disappointed. ‘Janet, whatever is the matter with you? He’s hardly in any state to pose a threat.’

  Janet pursed her lips, but didn’t move – petulance, stubbornness rather than anger.

  ‘Never mind. I’ll do it myself.’

  Charlotte pulled off Ivan’s top clothes, folded the dark green pullover, the striped shirt and put them on a chair, draped his fawn trousers over the back of it. Once he was stripped to his underwear and army grey socks, she covered him with the pink satin eiderdown and reached for the empty decanter.

  Janet remembered her mother covering her up like that when she was younger. But Ivan was not a child. Why did her mother have to care so much about people who should be able to take care of themselves? Her own needs were just as pressing. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she repeated. ‘It has to be now.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Janet,’ said her mother, looking down into the stairwell at her as her head poked up like a rabbit from its burrow. ‘I’ve got rather a lot of work to do, and this event with Ivan—’

  ‘Damn you, Mother! Will you please listen for a change?’

  ‘How dare you speak to me like that!’

  ‘It’s the only way I can make you listen!’

  Charlotte’s shoulders drooped and she sighed heavily. ‘Oh dear! I do get carried away with other things at times. I apologize.’

  Other things? She certainly did, thought Janet. The world gets priority, her own family … oh, what was the point? She went on with what she had to say. ‘I’ve been offered a new job.’

  ‘Then I can only wish you good luck, my dear.’

  ‘It’s at Saltmead Sanatorium.’

  There was a sudden change in her mother’s expression, perhaps because Ivan was muttering again between bouts of singing some Polish song in a loud, drunken voice.

  Janet conti
nued. ‘They specialize in treating polio.’

  ‘I know.’ Her mother’s tone was very soft. Janet wondered whether she’d known someone who’d worked there – or died there, but thought it best not to enquire.

  ‘Don’t tell me that polio is contagious. I know it is, but I’m willing to take that risk.’

  ‘Obviously I’m concerned, my dear, but if it’s what you feel you must do, then I certainly will not stop you. I was just wondering how you were going to get there. Dropping your father off at his consulting rooms is one thing, but driving all the way out there is another matter entirely and I do have my own work—’

  ‘There’s a flat with the job,’ Janet blurted, and prepared herself for an adverse reaction.

  ‘Ah! Then may I ask you to consider whether it is the job you’re going for, or is it something to do with this doctor Edna told me about? I do think you should have told me about him.’

  Janet mumbled an apology, then added, ‘It’s not serious.’

  ‘Does he have a flat at Saltmead?’

  Janet felt her face getting hotter. There was no doubting her mother’s inference. ‘I don’t think so, and even if he did, there is no cause to read anything into it. Jonathan isn’t like that. Our relationship isn’t like that. We are both interested in medicine, in fact he tells me far more about his job than Daddy ever has.’

  ‘I’m glad for you. But do think this through, darling. Bear in mind you will be away from home and although I’m sure your doctor friend plays the gentleman at present while you enjoy the protection of your parents’ roof, it doesn’t mean to say he’ll be the same when you’re living alone.’ She looked like a Madonna and sounded almost condescending.

  ‘He recommended me for the position.’ Janet was indignant. ‘His name’s Jonathan Driver.’

  Ivan fell suddenly into deep snoring. Both women looked over at him, silence falling as they considered what to say next. It was Charlotte who spoke first.

  ‘Jonathan Driver? I met him and his parents at a charity ball. His mother was in a wheelchair if I remember rightly. A forceful woman. She reminded me of Boadicea – without the knives on the wheels of course.’ Charlotte’s face clouded and she headed back down the stairs.