Wives at War

by Jessica Stirling

  ‘With a camera?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Gonna take a picture o’ Ron then?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘After lunch.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Spit on my hand.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Like – like cross my heart.’

  ‘Spit on your hand.’ Angus opened his fist and released a careful droplet of pure white froth on to his palm. ‘Like this?’

  ‘You got it,’ Christy said and, spitting into his palm in turn, held up his hand. ‘Now we shake.’

  ‘Mix the spit?’ said Angus.

  ‘Sure.’ Christy pressed his palm against the boy’s. ‘The promise is now binding. Okay?’

  ‘Oh-kay!’

  Much taken with this new transatlantic ritual, Angus grinned at the stranger his aunt had brought to visit. If ‘the Yank’ hadn’t quite lived up to Angus’s high expectations just at first he was living up to them now.

  ‘You gotta six-shooter?’

  ‘Nope, no six-shooter.’

  ‘You gotta a horse?’

  ‘I’m a New Yorker, son, not a cowboy. You have to go west to find the big ranges and wide-open spaces; the prairies.’

  ‘You’ve been there, but?’

  ‘Once or twice,’ Christy admitted.

  ‘You seen Indians?’

  The pig, disappointed, slumped down in the mud with a squelching sound and began to gnaw at the turnip. The boy was too full of questions to settle.

  Christy recalled an assignment to a Sioux reservation at Waverley Falls. He’d exposed forty-two rolls of film on the trip but the photographs had proved too raw for the editorial board and all but three had been scrapped. That wasn’t a story the kid wanted to hear, however. It wasn’t the truth that appealed to young Angus Hallop, but the myth, the cheating image.

  ‘Sure,’ Christy said. ‘I met with Big Chief Running Wolf.’

  ‘Apache?’

  ‘Sioux,’ said Christy. ‘I pow-wowed with him while the braves danced round the fire. I even got to smoke the peace pipe.’

  ‘What’d it taste like?’

  ‘Pretty nasty.’

  ‘Was that in a wigwam?’

  ‘Tepee,’ Christy said. ‘They call them tepees out there.’

  ‘What else did you see?’ said Angus, agog.

  He found it easier to lie to the kid than to lie to the kid’s aunt.

  The lies he was obliged to tell Polly Manone were on-going half-truths, evasions, prevarications, down-played versions of the way it was, not the way it should have been. They were intended not to inform but to manipulate, which was a basic difference between history and propaganda, Christy supposed.

  Polly crossed the yard from the farmhouse where she’d been ‘arranging lunch’, whatever that meant. She picked her way between the puddles, arms out like a dancer, and looked, Christy thought, gorgeously self-contained.

  ‘Did Running Wolf fight General Custer?’ Angus asked.

  ‘Nope, he wasn’t old enough to be at Little Bighorn.’ Christy gave the boy a loose-knuckled rap on the jaw, man to man and almost as binding as spit on the hand. ‘I’ll tell you more about the Indians later. Right now I got to go talk to your Aunt Polly.’

  ‘Aunt Polly!’ said Angus, grimacing. ‘What does she know?’

  ‘For someone with chickenpox, young man,’ Polly said, ‘you’re far too lively. I suggest you go into the house and ask Miss Dawlish to put you to bed.’

  ‘I’m not – I’m not…’ Angus protested, then realising that he had put himself in a cleft stick, set off at a gallop to hide in the motorcar that Polly had parked by the stable-barn.

  ‘Some kid!’ Christy said.

  ‘He can be a handful at times.’

  ‘Is he really sick?’

  ‘No,’ Polly said. ‘He’s taking advantage of the rash to have a day off school.’

  ‘I’m surprised your friend Dougie fell for it.’

  ‘Dougie knows when to slacken the reins. He’s very fond of the children. He had two boys of his own, but they died.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Christy. ‘I don’t know how you survive that.’

  ‘Nor I,’ said Polly.

  They moved away from Ron’s sty.

  It was a grey morning, not cold. The sky over the hills was tinted with amber as if the sun might break through before long.

  Blackstone wasn’t far from Glasgow and you could see all the suburban townships on the far side of the river piled against the hills. Jamie had told him that the counterfeit operation Manone had fronted had been based on a farm; this farm presumably.

  Half-finished villas and bungalows peeked over the ridge about a half-mile off. Polly said that the builders had gone into liquidation soon after war began but that when the war ended some smart financier, with more of an eye to the future than the past, would make a killing by reopening the site.

  Christy had no plans, no future, nothing beyond acquiring the information Marzipan needed to set up this woman to take a fall. He felt guiltier than he had done when he’d conned Babs Hallop into renting him a room, for Babs was an innocent and Polly was not. She was slim, sleek and sophisticated but the hard, self-protective shell that real painted ladies possessed was missing and behind her clever talk was a melancholy core.

  ‘Do you miss your kids?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Will he bring them back?’

  ‘How do I know what Dominic will do?’ she snapped. ‘You’re the one with all the answers. Is that the price I’ll have to pay to get my children back? Will I have to give your government everything I have to ensure that my husband stays out of prison and my children are free to return to Scotland?’

  ‘I can’t answer those questions.’

  ‘Can’t, or won’t.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Tell me the truth; are you being paid to persuade me to hand over all my money to your government?’

  ‘Not paid, no, not in cash.’

  ‘What then? What’s in it for you, Mr Cameron?’

  ‘I get my pass to sail with a convoy, take pho—’

  ‘Baloney!’ Polly said. ‘Is that an appropriate word?’

  ‘It’ll do,’ said Christy.

  ‘Why are you trying to sell me some ridiculous cock-and-bull story about Italian guerrillas, American double agents and plots to bring down Il Duce?’

  They had strolled to the gate at the far end of the yard. Beyond was a field, half ploughed. Beyond the field were a cluster of pines and the leafless branches of tall oaks and beeches and little silver birch trees, slender and elegant as Polly herself. Down river, where the hills dipped away, you could see barrage balloons in the sky and thin columns of smoke and a squadron of aeroplanes winging in from the south. In the yard Christy could make out the boy and the motorcar. The old man, Dougie, was standing by the farmhouse door with a cat in his arms, the woman, Miss Dawlish, at an upstairs window, all motionless, like model figures on a model farm.

  Polly leaned against the field gate and folded her arms. In the long overcoat and tweed hat she looked, he thought, like an exiled Russian princess. He felt sudden anger at Manone for callously leaving her behind.

  He said, ‘I’ve seen the harm they can do.’

  ‘What who can do?’

  ‘The Nazis.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘The Paris of the North, they called it. One and a half million people lived in Warsaw before Hitler decided he wanted to own Poland too. They bombarded the city for three weeks. Food supplies were cut off and refugees, three hundred thousand of them, came pouring in from the countryside. Electricity, gas, water, telephones all knocked out. When we thought there was nothing left to bomb the Luftwaffe pilots came in low and machine-gunned the civilian population. Picked them off while they queued for bread or lined up at the water carts or tried to get the wounded to safety, while they buried their dead.’

  ‘You wit
nessed all of this?’

  Christy nodded.

  He spoke without emphasis for he had learned not to allow passion to distort conviction.

  ‘Sunday,’ he went on, ‘Sunday the twenty-fourth of September, they shelled the Church of the Saviour during High Mass and left most of the city in ruins. Next morning they sent in the planes again. From eight in the morning until midnight they bombed the rubble.’

  ‘Where were you while all this was happening?’

  ‘Started out in the Savoy Hotel in Nowy Swiat Street but when the hotel took a hit I followed a family of refugees out into Marshall Pilsudski Square. Even that late in the day the Poles believed they could save the city. Poles, Jews, rich, poor, men, women and kids all running about looking for somewhere to shelter while the Civilian Committee for the Defence tried to organise its last lines of resistance. Resistance! Jesus, who could resist that onslaught; who could resist that brutal, unrelenting blitzkrieg, that sort of power?’

  He glanced down the valley of the Clyde, at smug suburban villas and tenements, at factories and shipyards protected only by toy aircraft and comical silvery balloons, and then he went on: ‘Blitzkrieg isn’t even real power. It’s just warfare, just men and machines and organisation. Real power is yellow badges on Jews and trains leaving for Dachau and Buchenwald, trains packed with lawyers, bankers, teachers, priests, all the protectors of that once-beautiful city. What’ll happen to them? God only knows.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that sort of thing could happen here?’

  ‘Sure it could,’ Christy said. ‘And it isn’t only planes and tanks and guns that’ll hold the bastards off, it’s the small stuff, the petty stuff too. There are other wars going on, little wars, from two congressmen squabbling about a defence budget on Capitol Hill to – well, me and you and Dominic Manone caught up in a shady deal to underwrite the downfall of the Duce.’

  ‘We had our first real raid two nights ago,’ said Polly, almost wistfully.

  ‘I know. I was there,’ said Christy. ‘That was nothing. You got tickled, is all. Tickled.’

  ‘People died.’

  ‘How many? Forty, fifty?’

  ‘Don’t be so callous,’ Polly said. ‘If one person dies…’

  ‘Sure, one is too many,’ Christy agreed. ‘But one is better than one million and one million’s better than having the rats running Europe. You think Fascism is the answer to anything? You think you can sort out the muddles of democracy by rounding up Jews and Catholics, gypsies and Socialists, Communists and Liberals, the schoolteachers and Gospel ministers, actors, artists, writers and—’

  ‘All right,’ Polly interrupted, ‘I understand.’

  ‘I hope you do,’ said Christy. ‘I really hope you do.’

  ‘Could it happen here?’ said Polly.

  ‘It can happen anywhere,’ said Christy. ‘Maybe there are those who would prefer to capitulate and not fight against the monster, not to spill more blood, but the monster don’t see it that way and when the monster comes stalking you…’ He shrugged and shook his head. ‘Lebensraum: you British don’t know what it means yet.’ He shrugged again. ‘I guess you could say that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘What happened to your photographs?’

  ‘From Warsaw? Confiscated. Every scrap of film, every negative politely but firmly confiscated before I was politely but firmly booted out of Poland. I saved one roll, just one.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Smuggled it out inside me, wrapped in a rubber contraceptive.’

  ‘And you sold the photographs to Brockway’s, I suppose?’ said Polly.

  ‘Nope, I ain’t that mercenary, Mrs Manone. I gave the roll to a guy in the US Government.’

  ‘Because information is also power,’ said Polly.

  ‘You didn’t really bring me way out here just to eat lunch, did you?’

  He remarked her hesitation, her reluctance to admit that his argument was convincing. He hadn’t lied about Warsaw; he would never lie about Warsaw. He said, ‘I thought Madrid was bad but under the bombing and bloodshed in Spain there was a sense of adventure, of acceptable danger. Not now, though, not now. Franco’s no Hitler. He’s a megalomaniac pipsqueak, sure, but no barbarian. Mussolini? Italy wouldn’t be in this damned war at all if it wasn’t for the Duce’s overweening ambition to become the noblest Roman of them all.’

  ‘No,’ Polly said. ‘I didn’t bring you out here just to eat lunch.’

  ‘Why did you bring me out here then?’

  ‘To hear what you had to say.’

  ‘Well, I’ve said it,’ Christy told her. ‘You’ve got my side of the story. You know what makes me tick.’

  ‘Do I?’ said Polly. ‘I’m not at all sure that I do.’

  ‘Okay,’ Christy said. ‘Don’t try to make sense of it, just think about what I’ve told you and talk it over with your friend.’

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘Hughes.’

  ‘So Babs has been gossiping, has she?’

  ‘If you do decide to liquidate your holdings and turn them into cash then you’re going to need Hughes’ help, aren’t you?’

  ‘Fin won’t buy your story. His patriotism is only skin-deep. When it comes to parting with money he’ll fight his own little war on his own little terms.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to change his mind, won’t you?’ Christy said.

  ‘Only after you’ve changed mine,’ said Polly.

  * * *

  They had lost the window in Archie’s office and some tiles from the roof but otherwise the office in Cyprus Street was undamaged.

  Archie set about boarding up the empty window, showing, Babs thought, not only a deal of application but also surprising dexterity for a schoolteacher. He popped out for an hour and returned with four planks of wood balanced on his shoulder and a bag of tools that he’d scrounged from the gateman at Simons’ shipyard in Renfrew. To acquire such valuable booty, Archie must have argued his case very eloquently, Babs thought admiringly.

  By the time Archie returned, she had swept up all the broken glass and together – he the journeyman, she the apprentice – they had measured and sawn the planks and hammered them into place so tightly that not one breath of air could seep through, let alone one drop of rain. Archie said he’d retile the roof too if he could find a long enough ladder. Babs was sorry that Archie’s ingenuity failed on that point for the beautifully boarded window gave her not only a sense of security but of satisfaction in a job well done.

  On Thursday morning Babs arrived late, not terribly late, just late enough to incur Archie’s wrath, for now that the fuel repository had been sandbagged and made shipshape and firemen and workmen had gone from Cyprus Street, he would brook no excuse for bad timekeeping.

  Twenty minutes to nine o’clock; the office door was unlocked and the business of the day apparently underway.

  A handsome middle-aged woman was seated in Archie’s office. She was clearly visible through the open doorway, and she was mad, hopping mad.

  Archie, it appeared, was in need of moral support and before Babs had time to take off her coat, called out to her in his very best yaw-yaw voice, ‘Mrs Hallop. Erm – if I could possibly enlist your assistance for one moment, I would be…’ Then he projected himself from the chair behind the desk and with a mumbled apology, shot out of the office and closed the door behind him, leaving the client, still fizzing, alone.

  ‘Who is she?’ Babs said. ‘What’s got up her nose?’

  ‘She’s Belgian,’ said Archie. ‘Widow of an Englishman. Very well-to-do, I gather, and exceedingly well heeled. Private means, that sort of thing.’

  ‘What’s she doing here?’

  ‘Wants war work.’

  ‘Is she skilled?’

  ‘Used to be a doctor, would you believe?’ Archie ran a hand over his hair. ‘In general practice in Liège, ages before the war. Married an English consultant and came to live in Paisley. He was a bigwig in hospital medicine until he died of a heart attack
in October last year.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Send her to the Labour Exchange,’ said Babs. ‘They’re crying out for doctors.’

  ‘The Exchange sent her here,’ said Archie. ‘Well, not exactly, not directly. She tried to enlist in the Red Cross but they turned her down because of her age. Then she canvassed the local hospitals, none of which would accept her qualifications and regarded her with deep suspicion in spite of her late husband’s reputation. Paisley General offered her skivvy work, cleaning, which she declined.’

  ‘Can’t say I blame her,’ said Babs. ‘Then what?’

  Archie glanced at the office door. There was no sound from behind it but Babs thought she could sense frustration thrumming in the air.

  ‘The Exchange suggested factory work,’ Archie went on. ‘That’s fine. That’s okay. The widow’s willing. They ship her round for interview by Personnel at Mainbridge Munitions, who keep her hanging around virtually all day while the labour committee hems and haws about her Belgian origins. They’re totally boggled by her and eventually decide not to accept her. Now she’s really mad, blistering mad, for she knows dashed well it’s not her Belgian origins that bother them so much as her posh accent and expensive clothes.

  ‘She hotfoots it back to the Labour Exchange, shouting the odds. There’s no placating her. Small wonder: an able-bodied, intelligent woman who wants to contribute because she has family still in Flanders and hates the Jerries and nobody will sign her on. Ridiculous! Absolutely bloody ridiculous! So this morning, not knowing what else to do, they ship her round to us.’

  ‘What can we do for her?’

  ‘I haven’t the foggiest,’ said Archie. ‘She’s been dumped on us only because she’s too hot to handle. I’m blue-blind if I’ll let her go to waste, though, but I do need a little time to evolve a strategy.’

  ‘I’ll make tea,’ said Babs.

  ‘Big help you are,’ said Archie, and went back into his office.

  * * *

  The woman’s name was Evelyn Reeder and from the moment Babs clapped eyes on her she realised that the problem was not merely her age, sex or the fact that she hailed from Belgium. Whatever her name had been before marriage or whatever name her husband had been blessed with at birth, it was patently obvious to Babs that Mrs Evelyn Reeder was a Jew.