After You've Gone

by Joan Lingard

  Tommy held out his hand to Willa, the way he’d done before. ‘May I have the pleasure?’ She rose without a word and he moved in close on her and she remembered the feel of his legs against hers from the last time and the way his knee kept nudging between her knees.

  ‘I was hoping I’d see you here,’ he said. ‘I didn’t forget you, you know.’ She felt too shy to tell him that she hadn’t forgotten him either but she sensed he knew. They left before the last waltz.

  His energy drew her. It was invigorating to be with someone who liked to enjoy life. ‘Let’s go!’ he cried, snapping his fingers. ‘Let’s be a little crazy!’ He waltzed her along Princes Street singing ‘If you were the only girl in the world’ in her ear, making her giggle and her neck wriggle with pleasure.

  He told her he’d fallen for her hook, line and sinker! She laughed and he laughed. He wooed her and she succumbed quickly and easily to his charms, surprising herself, offering little resistance as she lay on his mackintosh in a hollow of the gardens with the dark castle standing guard high above them. When that moment arrived she forgot Pauline’s warning. Saying no did not even come into her head. Nothing did. He was the first man she had lain with but she was aware that she would not have been his first girl. She resolved not to ask. What she didn’t know didn’t hurt her. That was to be her motto, and it was what she said to Pauline later.

  ‘It’s all right saying that,’ Pauline retorted.

  * * *

  An angry cry erupted from the bedroom at the front. The bairn had good lungs on him. Willa made to rise but Tommy’s mother was already pushing herself up onto her feet and telling her, ‘You stay where you are. I’ll get him. You could put a bit more coal on the fire.’

  Willa shovelled a shuttleful of coal noisily into the range. When she’d finished she could hear Tommy’s mother’s voice mumbling. She came back into the room with the baby cradled against her big bosom.

  ‘You’re just the spitting image of your daddy,’ she was telling him. ‘The spitting image. But you’ll no join the Navy and run off and leave your granny, will you, Malkie?’

  ‘Malkie’ grated on Willa’s ears though she had been trying not to let it. After protesting a couple of times she’d realised she might as well save herself the trouble. Tommy had said ‘Malcolm’ was too po-faced for a wee bairn but he’d given in because Willa had felt strongly about it. It had been her father’s name.

  She wanted to take the baby into her own arms but his grandmother was holding onto him and rocking him and cooing into his face and he was gurgling and she was saying, ‘You know your granny, don’t you, son? Yes, you do, you know your ould granny.’ The ‘son’ irked Willa too but, again, she tried not to let it. She sometimes wondered if the woman did it to annoy her. She couldn’t make up her mind if Ina Costello was a kindly person or not. At times she seemed to be; at others, not. Willa was supposed to call her ‘Mother’ but she couldn’t get the word out.

  Pauline said she should thank her lucky stars that Tommy’s mother had become attached to the child. It would have been awkward if she hadn’t. After all, she’d taken Willa in and given her a home and it wasn’t as if Willa had a mother of her own to go to. When Willa had started going out with Tommy she’d been attracted by the idea of being part of a family again. She’d realised that he was fond of his mother, and that had pleased her. Any man who was fond of his mother must be a good man. It showed a sense of duty and the ability to love. So she had reasoned.

  Malcolm’s face had turned brick-red and his eyes were bulging.

  ‘He’s filling his nappy,’ pronounced his grandmother with satisfaction. ‘I’ll away and change him in the bathroom. You might reach me a clean nappy down from the pulley.’

  When they’d gone Willa picked up Tommy’s letter again. He’d added a PS.

  Hope you have a good New Year. We have been told we shall celebrate Christmas right royally. The boys are really looking forward to it, yours truly included.

  Was he hers truly? Could she be sure? Oh shut up, Willa, she said to herself. What good did it do thinking this way?

  Tommy knew that they didn’t celebrate Christmas much at all, not the way they did south of the border, in England. The shops were open as usual, the trams ran and folk went to their work. New Year was the big celebration, and that, like Christmas, had been and gone. On Hogmanay they’d gone up to Tommy’s Aunt Elma’s, his mother’s sister. She lived in a three-bedroom flat in Marchmont with her master butcher husband Gerry, whom she insisted on calling Gerald, to his annoyance. Elma hated the name Gerry, for it made her think of the Huns, but he said he’d been called that when he was a lad, long before he’d ever heard of them. He’d managed to stay out of the war, which was the way Ina Costello put it. He had a dodgy stomach, was forever sucking Bismuth lozenges, which he kept in a tin in his top jacket pocket. ‘Whose stomach is perfect?’ Ina wanted to know. Her Tommy’s wasn’t, yet look at him! He’d seen active service and been torpedoed in the North Sea, after which he’d been brought back to a convalescent hospital in Edinburgh, to her relief. ‘See you don’t make too quick a recovery,’ she’d told him. ‘It’s nice and comfy in here. When they do put you out and the war’s over we’ll see if we can get ourselves a better place.’

  The war had ended and the Costellos had stayed on in the same one-bedroom flat with the box room where Tommy had slept as a boy. His mother had surrendered her bedroom to the young couple on their marriage and made do now with a double bed-settee in the sitting room where she was comfortable enough. They seldom used the room so it didn’t cause much inconvenience. Most folk who visited were taken through to the kitchen at the back where it was warmer, the only exception being the minister and, very occasionally, the doctor. The last time he’d been in the house was when Malcolm was born. Willa had been fortunate in having a relatively short labour and straightforward birth; as her mother-in-law had stressed for she herself had suffered greatly bringing Tommy into the world. But she had never held it against him, not for a single minute.

  ‘When Tommy gets promoted we’ll get a two-bedroom,’ she said. He was currently a Yeoman of Signals, hoping to be elevated soon to the rank of Chief Yeoman.

  She envied her sister Elma her three-bedroom flat in Marchmont, a more select district than Tollcross.

  For New Year Elma had spread her table with plentiful quantities of shortbread, Black Bun, Dundee Cake and Cloutie pudding. She’d laid them out on dainty, frilled doilies, which seemed out of keeping with the heaviness of the offerings. Elma took pride in being ‘particular’. Gerry kept the whisky circulating. When one bottle was finished he reached for another and tossed the old one over his shoulder into the bin. ‘For luck,’ he said, ignoring his wife’s baleful eye. He’d been in the pub earlier so that he was pretty well stotious by the time Willa and Ina arrived. As the hours went by Willa herself became a little tipsy and her mother-in-law warned her she’d better watch she didn’t get her bairn drunk. The whisky would go through on the milk. But even she was looking flushed and laughing at Gerry’s risqué jokes and she sang along with the neighbour who’d come in to first foot them with a lump of coal. If Tommy had been there he would have done it for he was darker than any man present. The darker the man, the better luck he would bring with him.

  ‘I belong to Glasgow,’ sang Tommy’s mother, who had visited the city only once and returned to report that it was clarty and not a patch on Edinburgh.

  Then Bunty, Ina’s youngest sister, embarked on ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’, hiking her already short skirt up above her knees to show off her red satin garters, which caused her sister Elma to issue a rebuke. ‘Honest, Bunty, at your age! It’s time you grew up, so it is. You’d give anybody a red face.’ When she went out to the kitchen Gerry snapped one of the garters against Bunty’s leg and Bunty screamed in mock protest. Everyone laughed. Elma was the only one of the company to remain starkly sober. She’d allowed a trickle of sherry to pass her lips at midnight but nothing more. Even that had cau
sed her to grimace, as if it were cough medicine she was swallowing.

  Ina had to take Willa’s arm on the road home. They walked back from Marchmont to Tollcross at three o’clock in the morning, Willa pushing the pram through a smattering of sleet, flanked by Tommy’s mother and aunt. She enjoyed the walk, with the streetlamps glimmering in the white mist and lights blinking at windows. The city was still awake. There were folk on the street, merry for the most part and good-natured, on their way home from parties. As they passed they called out, ‘A Happy New Year to one and all!’ and they called back, ‘And the same to you!’

  They passed the King’s Theatre, shuttered and dark, and Ina said they must go and see Goody Two Shoes before the show ended. Bunty said Florrie Ford had been great in Cinderella at the Empire. Her friend Mr Parkin had taken her.

  ‘I think I’d prefer Goody Two Shoes,’ said Ina. ‘It’s a bit different.’

  ‘How is it?’ demanded Bunty.

  ‘Well, everyone’s seen Cinderella, haven’t they? I mean to say, it’s quite common.’

  Bunty let it drop. She wheeled off shortly to go to her own place.

  ‘Mr Parkin seems to think he’s the bee’s knees,’ commented Ina.

  A drunk was loitering in the doorway of their stair.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Ina and gave him a little push to the side. He made no move to resist. His eyes were glazed and his mouth slack.

  Willa bumped the pram up the step and Ina closed the door behind them and put the latch down.

  ‘He’d be in here relieving himself, given half a chance,’ said Ina.

  Willa parked the pram at the end of the lobby, by the door that opened into the communal back green, put on the cat net, and carried the baby up the stairs against her shoulder. Ina had to rest on both the first and second landings. The three flights were getting to be too much for her, especially with her bulk.

  ‘Well, that’s 1923 over and done with,’ she declared, as they came into the flat. ‘Now it’s back to auld claes and parritch.’

  ‘We had a good time, though,’ said Willa.

  ‘Aye, and the house has been redd up.’

  They had toiled the whole of Hogmanay, blacking the range, washing windows and curtains, scrubbing floors and polishing furniture and brasses until the place shone. Ina Costello would not allow a speck of dirt to stain the beginning of a new year.

  ‘Pity, though, Tommy wasne with us,’ she added with a sigh. ‘I missed him.’

  Willa nodded. Even to think of him brought a lump into her throat.

  ~ 2 ~

  Cape Town,

  South Africa

  27th December, 1923

  Dear Willa,

  She paused to study the address, needing to let her mind adjust to the shift of time and place. When Tommy had written the letter he had still been in the old year and here they were well on in January. She felt out of step with him in a way she had not been before and was going to be for the best part of a year. With just herself and the baby, and Tommy’s mother. The latter was waiting expectantly.

  This is a wonderful city to visit. Beautifully laid out, with Table Bay for a sea front and Table Mountain behind, it is truly a striking and picturesque spectacle. The suburbs are pretty, the lawns beautifully kept, with large, vividly coloured flowers growing in profusion. This would be a wonderful country to live in. Who knows? One of these days…

  We have had a few dips in the sea at Camps Bay and also been enjoying the surf bathing. It is a fine pastime, and very refreshing, especially at this time of year. I took to it straightaway. I am sure you would too. But I think our Scottish seas might be a bit cold for it. Brrr.

  Willa allowed herself a small sigh. Unlike Sierra Leone, with its steaming heat and mosquito swamps, she could form a picture of this place in her head. She could hear the pounding of the surf and see the golden sand and brilliant flowers. The seaside in South Africa would be nothing like what it was at North Berwick, washed by the steel-grey North Sea. She’d managed to go in as far as her ankles when she and Tommy went there for their three-day honeymoon. His mother had been nippy about them going, had said she was surprised they were bothering with a honeymoon, under the circumstances, and they might be better putting the money towards the baby’s layette. When she’d first heard that Willa was pregnant she had been surprisingly accepting. ‘Och well,’ she’d said, ‘these things happen. Better if they didn’t, mind,’ she’d added with a touch of tartness in her voice.

  Willa and Tommy had stayed in a bed and breakfast on the front in North Berwick so they’d been able to hear the sea at night. She’d liked that. It had been nothing of course to Tommy, who was used to the sounds of several seas, bigger and more boisterous than that edging the East Lothian shore.

  They’d walked along the sands, arms entwined, and he’d sung to her. ‘Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside’…That had made her laugh but ‘After You’ve Gone’ had sobered her.

  After you’ve gone, and left me crying, after you’ve gone, there’s no denying, you’ll feel blue…

  It was he who was going to go away, not her. She couldn’t ever imagine leaving him. She’d said, ‘Och, don’t sing that, Tommy. I don’t want to think about you going away.’ He’d laughed and said, ‘It’s only a song.’ He loved singing. It meant that there were never any silences between them. He’d moved on to ‘I wonder who’s kissing her now’, breaking off to stroke her cheek and say softly, ‘I’d kill anyone I caught kissing you.’ At the time it had given her a little thrill to think he cared so much.

  ‘It’s nice he’s getting some sea bathing,’ said his mother. ‘It’ll be a good tonic for him. And he’s a braw swimmer. He’s got all sorts of certificates.’

  He’d learnt to swim at Warrender Baths in Marchmont, as had Willa herself, though at different times. When he’d told her how he used to go to the baths she remembered watching a young man with sleek black hair – a boy, really, only fourteen – standing on the edge of the top diving board, his toes curled over. She’d have been about nine at the time. She’d watched him, wondering if he would dive. After a couple of minutes he’d raised his arms very slowly above his head and still taking his time moved up onto his toes and plunged into the green water like a perfect arrow, his muscles taut. Emerging, he’d shaken his head and at that moment she’d caught his eye and he’d winked at her. Later, when she’d started going out with him, she had realised that it must have been him. After that time in the baths she hadn’t seen him for years as he’d been about to go off and join the Navy. That had been his last dive before freedom, he’d joked.

  His mother was looking at her. She resumed reading.

  The Cape is wonderfully healthy with a very clear atmosphere. Fruit is plentiful and most houses in the suburbs have fruit trees in their gardens. The people look fit and are jolly fine sportsmen. They have the breezy colonial manner, which makes them easy to get on with. There are plenty of black people to do the heavier work.

  The population is very enthusiastic about the squadron’s visit and the hospitality is far beyond anything we expected. The list of entertainments we have been invited to partake in includes tennis, shooting, picnics, parties, motor driving and dances. It is not possible to accept every single invitation we receive. We have been snowed under with them. Everybody wants us!

  ‘I’m sure Tommy would be popular wherever he went,’ said his mother. ‘He’s got a good way with him.’

  He had, Willa knew. His ready smile and friendly manner made people warm to him straightaway. He was a tactile person, too. He’d put his hand on a person’s arm when speaking to them. She remembered his touch on her arm, on the nape of her neck…

  ‘What are you waiting for?’

  Willa’s head came up.

  ‘You were miles away,’ said her mother-in-law.

  We spent Christmas with various newly made friends in their lovely homes and they showered us with gifts. It made us realise how much our colonies value us. My mate Bill and mysel
f were taken to a superb house out in the veldt where the family made us extremely welcome. They had a turquoise-blue swimming pool (bit smarter than Warrender Baths!) in their garden. We swam in the evening under the stars and afterwards were served iced cocktails on the verandah followed by a sumptuous meal comprising various kinds of white fish, lobster, prawns, chicken, different meats, salads, etc. We ate till we were stuffed. My rash has gone, you will be pleased to hear.

  Give Mother my love. I hope her chilblains are not bothering her too much.

  I remain, as ever, your fond husband,

  Tommy xxx

  ‘What a rare life he’s leading,’ sighed his mother. ‘Showered with presents! That was nice of him asking after my chilblains. He was always a thoughtful boy. When you write back tell him they’re no too bad yet. There’s still a fair bit of winter to come, mind.’

  ‘Will I tell him about your corns?’ asked Willa, feeling a little wicked.

  ‘I don’t think you need to do that,’ said Ina uncomfortably. When Tommy was at home she went into the bathroom to pare them.

  Willa folded up the letter. No mention of the baby! Malcolm had been only three weeks old when his father had left Edinburgh so perhaps it was not surprising. Tommy probably didn’t think of him very often, not like her, with him night and day. He was never out of her head. She’d have to rib Tommy about it in her next letter, say something like, ‘Hope you haven’t forgotten you’ve got a son!’ She wondered how often he thought even of her, with all those entertainments on offer. Parties. Picnics. Dances. Cocktails on the verandah. There would be girls at the dances, well, of course there would, young girls, pretty girls, carefree girls, with smooth tanned skin; and Tommy was not one to sit on the sidelines watching. He’d be up on the floor as soon as the band struck the first chord, holding out his hand.