Tom bought a newspaper but couldn’t concentrate on it. He spent his journey looking out of the window at the scenery and wondering what was awaiting him at Wittlesham. It was late afternoon before he arrived at the seaside station and he could not help leaning out of the window as the train drew in at the platform. Last time, he remembered, he had hoped Annie would be there to meet him and had been horribly disappointed not to see her there waving at him, but then, just as he’d thought he was going to have to wait till she was able to get away from her father, there she had been at the ticket barrier. It had been a wonderful moment.
Wittlesham was much as he remembered it. A lot shabbier, of course, as was everywhere, but lively with holiday-makers. A lot of the shops and cafés had reopened and people were out to enjoy the first holiday of peace-time before what threatened to be a long, hard winter. Tom walked to the bus stop and found that luck was with him. There were only ten minutes to wait until the Brightlingsea bus came in. He had decided not to pussyfoot around trying to contact Annie without her father finding out. If there was still a chance for them, then Mr Cross would have to like it or lump it. Tom was not going to let that evil old man get in his way.
The bus trundled through Wittlesham, past rows of small guest houses and through an area of workshops and small factories. Standing out from the rest was a big brown brick building with peeling blue paintwork and a large sign by the front gate—Sutton’s Plastics. Tom looked at it with interest. So that was where the dreaded Beryl worked.
Out into the country they went, and soon Tom could see the chalets at the edge of the town across the fields. He thought he could make out the roof of Silver Sands. And then there at last was the track to Marsh Edge Farm, with the wooden platform by it for the milk chums. Tom rang the bell, stopped the bus and jumped down. It was very quiet, after sitting in the rattling bus, just the sound of the wind in the sparse hawthorn trees, and, in the distance, the plaintive cry of the curlew. Tom began to walk up the track towards the grim group of buildings where Annie lived. He stopped trying to guess how she was going to react. He just set his mind on finding her.
And there, ahead of him, as if conjured out of his own head, was a small familiar figure perched on a grey tractor. She was coming down the track towards him.
‘Annie!’ Tom called, though he knew she wouldn’t be able to hear him above the noise of the tractor engine. He waved frantically. ‘Annie, Annie! It’s me!’
The figure in the driver’s seat waved back, but half-heartedly. She hadn’t recognised him, Tom realised. She could hardly be expecting to see him there on her land. He stood still, waiting for her to come to him, watching as she became clearer—still the same Annie with her fair curls. He caught the moment when she recognised him, staring at him in astonishment. The tractor stopped with a jolt and she just sat there, holding on to the steering wheel, looking stunned. Tom started into action then, walking and then running—running to meet her.
‘Annie!’ he shouted. ‘It’s me—I’m back!’
She didn’t jump down from the tractor as he approached, just shut off the engine and sat there, staring at him. A small worm of doubt entered Tom’s guts. She didn’t look overjoyed to see him, just bewildered. He slowed down to a walk again, taking her in, trying to judge how they stood. She looked much the same—older, of course, a woman now rather than the girl he remembered, and rounder in face and figure but the clear blue eyes and the elfin nose and chin were unchanged. What was not there was the delight he had hoped to see. He had the sudden horrible conviction that this had not been a good idea. He stopped by the front wheel of the tractor and looked up at her.
‘Hello, Annie,’ he said. ‘Surprised?’
She nodded very slowly and swallowed.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why did you have to come now?’
To his horror, there was a catch in her voice. Far from being delighted to see him, she appeared to be dismayed. Unable to accept this, Tom tried to laugh it off.
‘Why? I’ve come to see you, of course. And you haven’t even said hello yet.’
‘Hello,’ she said automatically.
He shouldn’t have come, he could see that. But still he couldn’t give up, not after coming all this way.
‘Won’t you get down, Annie?’ he said.
She nodded again, pulled on the handbrake and climbed down from the tractor. She was wearing a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up under a pair of dungarees and, as she turned to face him, Tom realised why she had been reluctant to move from her seat. She wasn’t just rounder, she was expecting a baby.
Now it was his turn to stare, astounded.
‘Whose—I mean—when did—?’ he stuttered.
All this time he had been wondering about her, and she was already married to someone else. He felt sick and angry and betrayed.
‘Who’s the lucky man?’ he managed to ask.
She looked horribly embarrassed. His eye went to her left hand. She saw him looking and flushed. She was not wearing a wedding ring.
‘He’s coming back for me,’ she said defiantly. ‘When he’s finished his tour of duty in Germany.’
‘I see,’ he said.
His throat felt dry. He wanted to get out of this impossible situation, and yet even more he wanted to find out what had happened.
‘Is that why you didn’t write to me, Annie?’ he asked. ‘Were you courting him even then? I was stuck in that prison camp longing for a letter from you and not one did you send me.’
‘I couldn’t. I didn’t know where you were. Your mother wouldn’t tell me,’ Annie said. She spoke gruffly, avoiding his eyes.
‘But you did know. I wrote to you.’
‘Once!’ She looked at him now, a flare of anger in her eyes. ‘And what a letter. So stiff and cold. As if I was just anyone. I thought we had something special. It always felt like it to me. But it was different for you, it seems.’
‘No!’ Tom reached out and took hold of her upper arms. She flinched, but he did not let go. ‘I thought we had something special, Annie. I wrote to you three times, via Gwen and direct to the house. You never answered me at all. You might have told me you had someone else. At least I would have known why you cut me off.’
‘Well, hark who’s talking!’ She was really angry now, her blue eyes hot with unshed tears. ‘You who was engaged to be married without telling me.’
‘Engaged?’ Tom was bewildered. ‘What do you mean, engaged? I wasn’t then and I’m not now.’
Not yet, anyway, said the voice of honesty inside him.
‘Your mum said you had a fiancée. She said her and she had agreed to let me know what had happened to you because I’d been such a faithful pen-pal.’ Her voice was loaded with venom.
Tom gazed into her flushed face.
‘But—I wasn’t engaged. I didn’t—I don’t have a fiancée,’ he repeated.
There was a long moment of silence while Annie took this in.
‘That’s what your mum said,’ she insisted.
Tom remembered the fuss when his mother had found out about his last trip to Wittlesham. She never had liked Annie. But to put her off with a deliberate lie like that, that was downright wicked.
‘My mam’s got some explaining to do when I get home,’ he said.
But, even as he said it, he knew it was futile. From the moment he had seen Annie’s condition, he had known the whole thing was finished. He had just been putting off admitting it. He let go of her.
‘It’s all too late now, anyway,’ he said.
The words seemed to reverberate in his head. Too late, too late, too late. He could almost hear a door clanging shut on his past life, and Annie was the wrong side of it.
Annie glanced down at her stomach. ‘Yes.’
She blinked back the tears. Then suddenly she flung her arms round him and held him with frantic strength.
‘Oh, Tom, Tom, I wish it was different.’
Tom held her dear familiar body. She felt so sweet, so right i
n his arms. But pressing against him was a firm little lump—another man’s child growing there in her belly.
‘So do I, sweetheart, so do I,’ he said.
He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her gently.
‘Goodbye, Annie,’ he said. ‘I hope it all goes well for you.’
And he walked off down the track to the road, not daring to turn round and look back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IN THE week following Tom’s visit, Annie went round in a state of shock. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think of anything but Tom. Every time she drove down the track to the road, she saw him there once more, experienced again the see-saw of emotions. Sometimes she was angry, sometimes regretful, sometimes despairing. She raged at Tom’s mother for telling her lies, at Tom for writing such a cold letter, that she had not seen through those lies, but most of all she raged at herself. If she had written back, even a note saying she never wanted to hear from him again now that he was engaged, then the mistake would have been cleared up. And then how different everything would have been.
For seeing Tom again had made her realise that what she had felt for Bobby Joe had not been love. It had been something animal, to do with the excitement and glamour the GIs had trailed. She had been in love with the idea of America, and escaping. She had behaved like a mare in season. It made her go hot with shame.
If she had written back to Tom … if she had not given in to Bobby Joe … The road she might have travelled tantalised her with its wonderful possibilities.
But she had made the wrong choices, and now there was no changing them. Tom had said goodbye, and she was left with a baby growing inside her. Every day it was getting a little bigger, until the time came when it would push its way out of her in pain and blood. There was only one path forward.
Slowly she came out of the paralysis that Tom’s visit had induced. One evening, bending down to wash a cow’s udders, she felt a strange fluttering inside her. At first she thought it was just wind, but it was a different sensation from that. When it happened once more as she lay down at night, and then again as she dressed in the morning, she realised what it was. The child was moving inside her. It was not just a bump, a miserable problem, it was a living thing and she was its mother and responsible for it.
She thought a lot about Joycie, a girl in her class at school. Joycie had no father. A few other children were without fathers, but theirs had been killed in accidents or had died of illness. Joycie had never had a father. In the playground, Annie had heard the other children repeating what their parents had said about Joycie, the names they had called her. Love-child was the kindest expression. If anyone wanted a soft target to tease, Joycie had been there. You could catch her in the toilets, or dance round her in the playground, chanting those bad names. Annie stroked the bump. Would other children dance round him or her, calling out those horrible, hurtful things?
She had to do something about it. However much she might wish that things were different, however much she loved Tom and knew that she always had loved him, the plain fact was that she was carrying Bobby Joe’s baby, and it needed a father. She had to get him to answer her letters, to acknowledge what he had done. It was no use talking to either of her parents about it. Her father would only rage at her and her mother would cry. None of her so-called friends in Wittlesham were speaking to her. The only person in the world she could confide in was Gwen. So it was to Gwen she wrote, asking for advice.
Gwen did not let her down. Instead of writing about her new life and her job in London and her plans for the future with Reggie, her fiancé, she offered a plan of action:
I asked my Reggie about it. I hope you don’t mind, it being so personal and all, but Reggie and me talk about everything and he says you sound like a really nice person and a good friend. Anyway, what he said was, you should write to Bobby Joe’s regimental commander. Like, his colonel. He said, if you can get the colonel’s name it’s better but, if not, it will still get there. You’ve got to tell him what the problem is and ask him to speak to Bobby Joe. And, he says, mark the envelope Private and Confidential, and then it won’t get opened by some secretary.
Good luck, Annie. I’ll be thinking about you and keeping my fingers crossed for you. Be sure to let me know what happens.
As she read the words, hope woke painfully inside Annie’s heart. Here was something she could do, someone in authority to appeal to. She kissed the letter and hugged it to her chest.
‘Good old Gwennie,’ she said out loud. ‘What would I do without you?’
All that day as she worked, she had something new to involve her mind. Instead of plodding the endless treadmill of regret, she was planning the exact wording of this crucial letter. It had to be short and to the point, she realised. Colonels were important men, they did not want to be bothered with girls rambling on about their problems. She went over and over it until, by evening, she was reasonably happy with what she had formulated. After supper, she wrote it out carefully in her neatest handwriting, addressed it and put on three stamps to make sure it covered the foreign postage.
‘Just going out to the post box,’ she said as she passed through the kitchen.
Her mother looked up from the sock she was darning.
‘You sending back to Gwen already? You only got one from her this morning,’ she said.
‘Yes—well—it’s something she asked me that she wanted to know quickly,’ Annie lied. She wasn’t going to admit what she was doing to her father.
‘Good for nothing little bitch,’ Walter muttered from behind the Sunday paper that he took all week to read. Whether he was referring to Annie or Gwen was unclear. Either way, Annie ignored him. If all went well, if the colonel spoke to Bobby Joe and Bobby Joe took her to America as he had promised, then soon she would be out of Marsh Edge and never have to listen to her father again.
Two weeks went by. The post brought bills, a catalogue, a small part for Edna’s sewing machine, but no official-looking envelope postmarked American forces mail, Germany. The hope that had been born with Reggie’s suggestion began to die slowly of suffocation.
And then it arrived. It was Edna who handed it to Annie.
‘What’s this, dear?’ she asked, holding it with two fingers as if it might explode. ‘It’s from Germany. It’s not from him, is it?’ She lowered her voice to a whisper and looked significantly at Annie’s bulge.
‘No,’ Annie said. ‘At least—No.’
She reached out to take the letter with shaking fingers. She felt sick. So much was riding on this; she wasn’t sure if she could bear it. Her mother was saying something but she couldn’t hear it through the buzzing in her ears. She ran upstairs to her room.
The letter was as short and to the point as the one Annie had sent. The writer regretted to inform Miss Cross that Private Robert Joseph Foster was a married man and the father of three children. If Miss Cross wished to pursue her claim, she could ask for blood tests to be performed after the birth of the child, but she should bear in mind that this would not provide definite proof of the child’s paternity. Until then, nothing more could be done and nothing gained by any further correspondence.
Annie sat staring at the piece of paper. The print blurred before her eyes. There was a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, as if she were falling into a black abyss. This was the end. There was no escape, for her or for the baby. She was doomed to stay at Marsh Edge and be bullied by her father for ever.
But, before self-pity could rise up and overwhelm her, she was saved by a surge of anger. She tore up the letter into tiny pieces, flung them on the floor and stamped on them.
‘Married!’ she raged. ‘Married! You pig, you low-down lying swine! I believed you—I trusted you—you filth! All that about going to Fourways and Chicago, all that about loving me and wanting to marry me—all lies, lies, lies!’
She flung herself about the room, thumping the walls, kicking the door, screaming her hatred and sense of betrayal un
til it all seemed to fall on top of her, and she collapsed on the bed in a storm of weeping. For no amount of railing against him or against fate was going to change a thing.
It was some time before she became aware of a hand stroking her head, a soft voice speaking soothing words, the weight of another body sitting beside her on the narrow bed.
‘What is it, my pet? You can tell me—’
The offer was irresistible. Annie turned to her mother and was folded in the comfort of her arms. She cried on her shoulder and was rocked and soothed against the softness of her slight body until the tears gave way to racking sobs.
‘Better now?’ Edna asked. ‘What was it that upset you so? What was in that letter?’
‘Oh, Mum—he—he’s—’
At first, she couldn’t get the words out. But gradually, prompted by Edna, she told the dreadful news. It was such a relief to be able to talk to someone at last, to be the one supported by her mother, instead of the other way round. Edna stroked her back, patted her shoulder.
‘It’s all right, my pet. We’ll survive. We’ll get through it, you’ll see. That man don’t deserve a lovely girl like you. Leading you on! We’ll be fine here together, you and me. It’ll be lovely having a dear little baby about the place.’
In her raw emotional state, it took Annie a while to fully understand what her mother was saying.
‘You mean—you don’t mind?’
‘Mind? Well—you didn’t ought to have done it, that’s for sure. It was a very wicked thing, and I was shocked when I found out. I mean—my daughter. I always thought—well—that you were a good girl.’
Edna paused, and Annie felt the weight of her disapproval hanging about her heart.
‘Oh, Mum,’ she croaked, ‘I never wanted to upset you. I know I shouldn’t have let him. I don’t know what got into me—it’s spoilt everything—’
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