Molly, as always, had bailed him out from time to time. She worried about his health, gave him money to buy better food, keep warm and bent his ear about going to see a doctor. He truthfully didn’t give a flying fuck about health and usually squandered the money, though he knew Molly was the only other true friend – besides poor old Reg – that he’d ever had. He was letting her down, but then they both recognised she was forever in his debt. He reminded himself of that when he was pinching some old boy’s silver cigarette case.
But Molly was on his side of the fence. Molly had made a success of herself, but she’d still come from roughly the same place, the place in life where nothing was safe and anything could happen.
The trouble was that he’d had a glimpse of something else – a different place to be, a different life. That something was Barbara, sweet, rosy, shiny-as-an-apple Barbara.
In the fifteen years since their parting, the memory of which still had the power to flood his mouth with bile, he’d kept tabs on her. Not that she’d ever known. He’d often watched her come and go from the magazine office over the year she’d continued to work there. It was sad, in a way, that she’d abandoned that job, when she’d struck out on her own to become independent, but then she was never like Molly. There was nothing driving her and a big part of him was glad she’d gone back to being the glowing girl he wanted her to be.
The wedding – that was harder to take. She’d married an old man! That crusty old brigadier, probably not as old as he looked, but still. How could she bear it? What did she think she would get from it? But then he always reminded himself – what did she ever think she would have got from him? And what could he have given her? He had adored and coveted her. He wanted to cling to her like a barnacle to the hull of a beautiful, fleet yacht, to be carried wherever she went. He made a small, rough sound, dropped his head in his hands and dragged them harshly over his face.
When he removed them the actress was on her way back – perhaps this was the night, then. She reminded him of someone he couldn’t at that moment recall.
‘Johnny, I hate to see you so sad. Will you come and join us?’
The actress looked over her shoulder, indicating the group she had arrived with, all of them bursting with the wit, laughter and confidence of talent.
‘Please.’ She pressed her palms together. ‘Do.’
He followed with a show of reluctance. She seemed a nice woman. She wasn’t to know she had just joined a big club. He remembered now who it was that she reminded him of: Barbara’s mother. Jennifer … Juliet? Julia.
He often asked himself why he’d done that and concluded it was simply because he could. He’d been that close to what he wanted and still he couldn’t stop himself.
Oh Barbara. My beautiful girl.
‘Now,’ said the actress, placing her hand lightly on his shoulder as she addressed her friends. ‘This is Johnny, and you’re all to be very nice to him!’
Sixteen
1953
On Wednesday, the day after the Coronation, the weather improved. People said, ‘Typical, isn’t it always the way?’ and added ruefully ‘Well, it could hardly have got worse.’
Maureen was busy around the place, throwing open windows and shifting furniture to the loud drone of the hoover. When that went off, the strains of Housewives Choice on the light programme took over: Anne Shelton, Burl Ives, the Vienna Boys’ Choir … Barbara might not have turned it on herself, but the cheerful popular tunes were a comfort, as was the sight of Ron Dexter’s thermos perched on the wall in the backyard, a sure sign that normal service had been resumed.
Knowing Prayle’s agreeable successor was there emboldened her to go out into the garden. Would there be signs? Traces? A message of some sort that only she would understand? She walked round the house in the morning sunshine expecting at every stage to come across some evidence of last night’s intruder.
Of – oh God, oh God! – Johnny.
She found only one thing and she came upon it at the same moment that she encountered Ron, who was cleaning his tools. He was a man in his late fifties who’d worked a chauffeur since coming out of the RAF but who, happily for Barbara, had decided to swap his smart uniform for dungarees. He’d also retained the impeccable good form and politeness of his previous occupations. He was sitting on an upturned bucket when she appeared, but stood at once, and touched his right hand to his forehead.
‘Morning madam.’
‘Good morning, Ron.’
‘Just getting a bit of housework done.’ He indicated the tools. ‘Before I get started.’
‘What a lovely day,’ she said, ‘after that terrible rain.’
‘Went well for her though, didn’t it?’
‘It did. I thought it was splendid and so moving.’
There was a short pause.
‘Anything special today, madam?’ he asked. ‘Or shall I just get on with it.’
‘Oh, just get on please Ron. You know what needs doing much better than me.’
This was a formality. There never was ‘anything special’. The garden was far too big really and it continued exactly as it had been when Stanley was alive, with masses of fruit and vegetables – most of which she gave to the hospital, the convalescent and nursing homes and various deserving acquaintances.
Mr Dexter nodded at the bucket.
‘This was here, so thought I might as well perch while I did my polishing.’ He was a man who hated to be thought in the least soft.
‘Good idea.’
Barbara surveyed the convenient bucket and then looked up to about six feet above, where the narrow transom window of the larder broke the high, blank wall like a squinting eye. There were no finger marks on the glass that she could see, but then the torrential rain would have washed them away.
She telephoned Edith to invite her up to Heart’s Ease that afternoon, but she sounded uncharacteristically weary.
‘To be perfectly honest, my dear, I’m not at my best.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Only blooming anno domini. Why don’t you pop down and see me here?’
‘Thank you, well, why don’t I?’ The prospect of getting out, a spin down to Salting in the sunshine was pleasant. ‘If you’re sure?’
‘Sure as eggs. I could do with brightening up.’
Edith herself was usually the brightener. Today, she did indeed look a little tired, though she answered the door, after a long interval, with her usual panache.
‘Ah there you are!’ She cried, as though Barbara was the one person she’d been looking for.
The small house in Coastguard Road, overlooking the estuary, contrived to be both eccentrically cluttered and peaceful. Barbara, used to more space than she needed or could use, liked the snug embrace of the small sitting room. Its shelves were full of ornaments and mementoes (Edith’s self-proclaimed ‘awful old junk’), piles of books and magazines. The walls were covered in wonky pictures, many of them with picture postcards tucked into their frames. The back window afforded a view of the broad, shining sweep of the estuary and the slick bronze mud flats dotted with flashing birds.
‘The kettle is on, the cups are there and there’s some ginger cake under the cover.’
‘Let me.’
‘I was hoping you’d say that. A poor show inviting a friend round and obliging her to make her own tea.’
Barbara took the tray through and put it on top of the pile of magazines – Illustrated London News, Punch and The Lady – on the low table by the window. Edith remembered The Countrywoman and was tickled by Barbara’s brief foray into journalism. She sat in her usual faded red armchair and Barbara pulled up the lloyd loom with its frayed seat.
‘Shall you be all right on that my dear?’ asked Edith, as she always did, and, as always, Barbara answered that she would and promised to be careful.
Tea was poured and cake passed. They spoke of the previous day. Their conversations always started small before unwinding in all kinds of unforeseen
directions.
‘Nice party at the Keyes? I take it you got home all right in the deluge?’
‘I did, though I rather wished I’d accepted a lift.’
‘Lord, you must have been drowned.’
‘I was. My own silly fault for being stubborn.’
‘Oh, don’t say that.’ Edith downed the last of her tea. ‘I’m a great believer in pig-headedness and it’s not done me any harm.’
Barbara went to fetch the kettle and topped up the pot. Afterwards, as she placed the kettle in the hearth, her eye was caught by the framed photograph of Edith’s husband. It was a studio portrait in full dress uniform, taken on his first, unscathed, leave when they had both believed in a shared future. He was about the same age as Stanley would have been at the time, but even in a formal pose he conveyed the genial openness of a warm-blooded, young man.
‘Such a charmer, my Kit.’
‘I can tell.’
‘Can you …?’ Edith leaned forward, pushing herself upright on the arms of her chair. Once standing, she straightened up and took two steps to retrieve the photo from the mantlepiece. Before sitting down, she passed her hand over the glass a couple of times, both cleaning and caressing it, then placed it on the side table next to her cup.
‘Your Stanley was a fine figure of a man. So tall and imposing,’ she said.
‘Yes. Yes, he was.’
After a little pause, she continued, ‘Mind you, we all have our one that got away, don’t we.’
It was less a question than an observation and Barbara let it hang there.
‘In my case that one was Kit.’ Edith went on, ‘He got away good and proper before there were any disappointments, or squabbles, or compromises. So there he sits, lucky chap, beautiful and new, and beyond reproach.’
There was a question that had to be asked and Edith was a person with whom one never needed to be shy.
‘It’s been such a long time. Have you never wanted to get married again?’
‘No “again” about it. We were never married.’
This information was delivered plainly and simply, not as a bombshell, but she must have noticed Barbara’s tremor of surprise.
‘Not even engaged. That’s not to say we wouldn’t have been, if things had turned out differently. I call myself Mrs, but people know jolly well I make it up.’
Barbara could still blush. ‘I’ve known you for a long time and I had no idea.’
‘Why would you, my dear? I don’t bruit it about. Kit and I were each other’s. It doesn’t much matter how, not to me anyway. What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Dear Stanley was devoted to you and I’m sure he was the man for you, but I wager if you think about it there’s been someone else, some time. “The man at the crossroads” is what I call him.’
Edith’s voice was matter-of-fact and she didn’t look at Barbara, but was absorbed in pinching up crumbs of ginger cake between her fingers and thumb.
What is she saying? thought Barbara. What does she know about me that I scarcely know myself? And how does she know that this is why I wanted to see her, why I’m here?
‘There is, actually.’
‘Of course.’ Edith met Barbara’s eyes directly. The slight downward droop of the outer corner of her eyelids gave her face an inscrutable, sagacious air. You always knew, when Edith was looking at you, that you had been seen. Barbara felt she should add something, but Edith put up a hand.
‘But don’t tell me anything,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you let me tell you something instead?’
‘Please. Do.’
‘A simple thing based on my own experience and it’s this. When you have a hard choice, choose for the future and what might be to come, not on account of the past and what has already happened. The first is freedom and the second is pretty much enslavement.’ She leaned forward slightly, peering out of the window as if looking for something. ‘Hark at me, I’m being sententious. It’s the prerogative of the elderly. You don’t have to agree.’
‘I do,’ said Barbara. ‘Or anyway, I understand.’
‘Good! And as I said, you don’t have to tell me anything, anything at all. Not now, not ever if you don’t want to. I only want to hear what you wish to tell me.’
‘In that case …’ Barbara took a deep breath. ‘There is one thing.’
‘Fire away.’
‘I think,’ Barbara chose her words carefully, ‘that I can see the man at the crossroads again.’
‘How extraordinary.’ Edith wasn’t fooled. ‘When we’d just been talking about it.’
‘But he’s not waiting, he’s coming towards me.’
‘Really? Putting you on the spot.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh Barbara, my dear …!’ Edith laid her head back and gazed beatifically upward. ‘How I envy you.’
Edith had both correctly intuited her feelings and placed any decision firmly in Barbara’s own hands. Barbara knew her friend well enough to realise there would be no more forthcoming in the way of advice. Not long afterwards, she took the tea things to the kitchen and washed them up. As she put on her jacket in the narrow hall, Edith said ‘Remember I don’t ask you to report back.’ She clenched her fist. ‘But I shall be thinking of you.’
On the drive home and more than a little shaken, she tried to think of Stanley as if at this late stage, she needed to, before it was too late. What had Edith said? A fine figure of a man, tall and imposing … devoted to you … the man for you. …
All true, after a fashion. They were each what the other had and it was not in their natures to question how things had fallen out, or why. All those years of companionship and domestic peace. The war had not disturbed them much. Stanley was out of the army and Salting had attracted no unwelcome attention from the Luftwaffe, though they had seen the planes go over in forty-four. Like most people in the town, they had involved themselves in the war effort. Barbara had knitted, baked, made up parcels and participated in little musical shows to raise funds. Stanley had helped set up fortifications on the promenade (you never knew) and, with Prayle, laid down even more of the garden to vegetables. They had taken an evacuee, but that had not been a success. The boy, poor lad, had been rude, difficult and when he ‘borrowed’ a bicycle that put the tin hat on it as far as Stanley was concerned. Barbara would have been more forgiving, but the whole episode had made her glad that they had never had children of their own.
In the spring of forty-six, Stanley had become ill and suffered the most terrible pain that even he was no longer able to conceal. He point-blank refused to go into the hospital. At the end of June that year, he died quietly in his own bed, in the early morning, with a summer haze over the bay and the pigeons calling softly from the Fort.
Barbara had cried, mourned and recovered. Everyone was very, very kind.
But that was a long time ago she reflected as she turned into the lane by Keeper’s Cottage. And this is now. And Johnny is at the crossroads.
When she got home there was a note from Maureen on the hall table.
‘Dear Mrs Delahay,
Mr Dexter wants me to tell you that someone came round to offer some pruning and other things, he knows about trees. Mr Dexter thinks he might be useful and asked him to come back tomorrow when you are here, his name is I think Mr Ellridge.’
She lowered the note and saw her own face, white as milk, in the hall mirror. It was as if Johnny had put his finger in her mouth.
Seventeen
She broached the subject with Dexter the moment he arrived next day.
‘I don’t understand. It’s so peculiar. Did this man simply appear? He just showed up and offered his services?’
‘In a way he did madam. He came to the front door, as a matter of fact, and then Maureen brought him round. He said he knew this house and the Brigadier, when the Brigadier lived here. Used to be down at Keeper’s Cottage for a while, apparently. He seemed a pleasant sort of chap, madam, and he did point out that some of t
he trees on the Fort could do with tidying up before the autumn, I’ve been thinking the same thing myself.’
‘Still, it was rather impertinent of him.’ She regretted her choice of words and added, ‘Don’t you think?’
‘I don’t want to give the wrong impression, madam. He was very polite, not pushing himself forward. We were chatting.’
She could almost hear the conversation; Ron Dexter would have been putty in Johnny’s hands and, of course, Johnny had uttered nothing but the truth. Plausible, charming, self-deprecating, slightly down-at-heel but a gentleman for all that … Her skin prickled.
‘So is he coming back?’
‘Sometime today, that was how we left it.’
‘All right, but please tell him we don’t need his help. If you don’t mind, Ron.’
‘Very well madam, I will.’
She could tell that he wasn’t comfortable with having to give the brush-off to a former acquaintance of the Brigadier’s. Perhaps she hadn’t been forceful enough. Wherever he was, Johnny was pulling the strings.
She couldn’t settle to anything: the bills that needed paying; the calls to be made; the letters to be written; the silver to be polished; house flowers to be changed; spare bedroom curtains that needed turning … In fact, the thought of all these activities filled her with wild, resentful boredom. That they constituted a large part of her life made her want to weep. She was, however, on the church flower rota this month. Although she would not normally have done hers until Friday, she used this as an excuse to get on her bike and pedal down the lane to St Catherine’s, in whose tiny rural parish Heart’s Ease stood. She told herself could see what was worth saving from last time, at least, and what she would need to bring fresh.
The church was empty and she was glad of it. She sat down in a pew for a while, steadying her breathing in the peace and quiet, and gazing at the east window over the altar. The window depicted a winsome, doe-eyed Jesus, with a sheaf of lilies cradled like an infant in his left arm. There had not been much church-going in Barbara’s upbringing – except at school where it was obligatory – but Stanley was a regular attender (‘church parade’) and they had walked down the lane most Sundays to matins or evensong. A simple, brass plaque commemorated Brigadier Stanley Delahay of Heart’s Ease, Church Lane, ‘a faithful worshipper and benefactor’. Every few weeks he would march down, on his own, to eight o’clock communion. Nothing passed his lips beforehand, so breakfast on those days would be his favourite – kippers, followed by hot oatcakes with bitter marmalade. In the years since his death, she’d grown to be quite glad of her small involvement in the church, though she’d have been the first to admit that it had more to do with habit and social connections than with faith. Even now, she thought she detected something reproachful in the gaze of the winsome Jesus.
The Rose in Winter Page 17
