Wives at War

by Jessica Stirling

  ‘Deposit the cheque and await further instructions.’

  ‘From Dominic,’ said Fin, nodding at Christy, ‘or from this gentleman?’

  ‘We’ll be told what to do next,’ said Christy.

  ‘Are you going with Polly to Lisbon?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so.’

  ‘How romantic!’ Fin said, with just the ghost of a smile. ‘And how unfortunate that Polly’s husband will be waiting to greet you at the other end. I wonder if Dominic knows what’s really going on? What do you think, Mr Cameron?’ Christy didn’t answer, didn’t even shrug. Fin got to his feet. ‘Well, my Polly,’ he said brusquely, ‘I do believe our business together is concluded. I’ve done all that’s been asked of me.’

  ‘And been well paid for it,’ Polly reminded him.

  Fin gave a little bow. ‘Very true. When do you leave for Lisbon?’

  ‘Next week, or the week after.’

  ‘All that remains then,’ Fin said, ‘is to wish you bon voyage.’

  He shook Christy’s hand and then, stepping from behind the desk, took Polly into his arms and kissed her with a tenderness that she had never encountered in him before. She held the kiss a moment longer than she’d intended and then, with the cheque in her purse, followed Christy out into the hallway and along to the elevator.

  ‘He isn’t in love with you, Polly, is he?’ Christy asked while the old machinery cranked them down to the ground floor.

  ‘No,’ Polly said. ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Forty grand,’ Christy said. ‘It’s not much, is it?’

  ‘I’m sure Fin’s been feathering his nest at Dominic’s expense,’ Polly said, ‘and he thinks I’m going to let him off with it.’

  ‘No,’ Christy said, ‘he thinks you aren’t coming back.’

  ‘Not coming back? Of course I’m coming back,’ said Polly with a lot more conviction than she, at that moment, felt.

  * * *

  Blackstone was hardly another country and Knightswood wasn’t much more than fifteen miles away but Lizzie had always been a townie and Bernard had expected her to pine for her kitchen in the cottage row and badger him to take her back there as soon as possible. To his surprise Lizzie settled quickly to life in exile and seemed content to stay right where she was.

  The children had a great deal to do with it. She’d missed the children more than he’d realised. Angus, June and May were pleased to have Granny Lizzie around and soon co-opted her as an ally in their little wars with Margaret Dawlish. Lizzie was careful not to tread on Miss Dawlish’s toes or rub the housekeeper the wrong way, though, for however out of her depth she might be when it came to coping with a world gone mad, she was, Bernard realised, much more in tune with family feelings than he would ever be.

  Poor old Dougie had been ousted from his room. Lizzie slept there in the narrow single bed while Dougie and Bernard dossed down each night in sleeping bags on the gallery floor in the stable-barn.

  Fortunately there was no sting in winter’s tail and Bernard knew that there were worse places to lay your head than a stable-barn. Legions of folk were camped out in schools and church halls or crammed into spare rooms in other people’s houses, suffering not only the stress of being homeless but the even greater stress of being dubbed scroungers and layabouts by their landlords. So great was the pressure on him to find lodgings for the displaced that he had even been forced to board two families with Arthur Hunter Gowan. Naturally the surgeon’s wife had kicked up Hades but Hunter Gowan had been oddly acquiescent, even, in his way, welcoming, for Bernard and he shared a secret now and were bonded by it.

  Lizzie wasn’t alone in enjoying the novelty of staying at Blackstone. Bernard also found the experience salutary.

  After a chaotic day at the council offices, he would trudge up the farm track in the gloaming with a real sense of release, for family life, or a fair approximation thereof, appeased his guilt and pushed the affair-that-never-was further into the background. His lingering regrets about not being man enough to embark on a sexual adventure vanished when he gathered at the table with Babs’s children, his wife and new-found friends. This, he thought as he looked around the supper table, was what he had risked losing for the sake of a furtive fling with a woman who was more admirable than admiring and whose sorrows he could never hope to understand, let alone relieve.

  If he had been sharing a bed with Lizzie on those mild mid-March nights he might have whispered to her that he had been a fool to contemplate straying from the fold, might have told her that he loved her and that anything else had been but a silly aberration. Then to show that he not only loved but wanted her, he would have pushed up her nightgown and stroked her stomach, soothing and easing the way for lovemaking, for the satisfaction of that ineluctable and inexplicable desire that made a good marriage what it was.

  Alas, he wasn’t sleeping with Lizzie. He was dossed out in the stable-barn with Dougie Giffard wheezing and grunting in the straw at his side and the faint musty odour of the lumpy ex-army sleeping bag teasing his nostrils the way memory teases the mind.

  ‘What’s wrong wi’ you, Bernard?’ Dougie rasped. ‘Can you not lie still?’

  ‘I was thinking of things,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Things? What things?’

  ‘Just … things.’

  ‘Aw aye,’ said Dougie. ‘I know all about those “things” too.’

  ‘I don’t mean women,’ said Bernard, hastily.

  ‘Women?’ said Dougie. ‘I never thought you meant women. What’ve women got to do with anythin’ at our age?’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Giffard.’ Bernard tried to make light of it. ‘I’m a long way short of a trip to the boneyard.’

  ‘Aye, but you’re married.’

  ‘Happily married,’ Bernard added.

  ‘It’s the kids I worry about,’ said Dougie. ‘Angus without a proper father; the girls too, poor wee things.’

  ‘Babs will take care of them,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Aye, I’m sure she will, but who’ll take care o’ her?’

  ‘Oh, someone will come along,’ said Bernard. ‘Never mind the children, Dougie; what will become of us?’

  ‘Nothin’,’ Dougie told him. ‘Once this war is over we’ll have had our day an’ the rest will be up to the kids.’

  ‘God, that’s a cheerful thought,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Isn’t it the truth, but?’

  Bernard lay motionless on the bed of straw, arms by his sides, the sleeping bag drawn up to his chin. The ending of the war had become like a gigantic punctuation mark preceding a blank page and until that moment he had never considered what would become of him when the war ended.

  He would continue to live in Knightswood, he supposed, in the house in the cottage row. He would hang on to a council job and support Lizzie until one or other of them died. He would watch Babs’s children grow up and take as much pride in them as if they were his own. He would suffer when they made mistakes and would try not to impose on them all the old verities, all the outmoded values that he had learned before he went to fight in Kitchener’s war, the sterling, imperishable truths that Fritz had tarnished beyond redemption in the trenches of the Somme.

  Dougie was right: once the war was over the Giffards of this world, and the Peabodys too, would sink down into a haze of nostalgia, a soft, slow, coiling fog of remembrance and regret, and all that would be left to them would be the pride they’d once had and the shadow of the hopes they’d lost along the way.

  ‘Yes,’ Bernard admitted. ‘It’s the truth,’ then turned on his side to sleep.

  * * *

  ‘What can you tell me about Mr Giffard?’ Margaret Dawlish said. ‘Does he really own land round about here or is he just spinning me a tale?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lizzie said. ‘I mean, I’ve only just met the man.’

  ‘But surely,’ Margaret said, ‘you’ve heard your girls talk. They must have let something slip.’

  ‘Slip?’ said Lizzie, frownin
g. ‘Is it a secret what Mr Giffard does?’

  ‘Not what he does – I know what he does – but what he owns.’

  The women were alone in the farmhouse kitchen, sipping cocoa and nibbling ginger biscuits. The fire had burned low but Margaret was reluctant to put on more coal in case the bombers came again.

  ‘He used to be a printer, didn’t he?’ Lizzie said.

  ‘A long time ago. He drank himself out of job after job, so I’ve heard.’

  ‘His wife and children died,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Well, that’s his excuse.’

  ‘It’s a good excuse in my book,’ Lizzie said. ‘Why are you askin’ me all these questions?’

  ‘He fancies me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He fancies me, so there’s very little likelihood he’d tell me the truth.’

  ‘Don’t you fancy him?’

  ‘Phooh!’ Margaret blew out her cheeks in scorn. ‘Look at him!’

  Well, Lizzie thought, you’re not exactly an oil painting yourself.

  She sipped cocoa, said nothing.

  Margaret Dawlish went on, ‘On the other hand, if he has a bit of money tucked away I wouldn’t be averse to settling down here on the strict understanding that it would be a marriage in name only. I’ll cook for him, wash his socks and clean his house but I won’t – well, you know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t call that a marriage,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Anyway, I expect Dougie’s well past it.’

  ‘Past what?’

  ‘All that lovey-dovey nonsense,’ said Margaret.

  Lizzie had her doubts that Douglas Giffard was anything like past it. He seemed to be as vigorous as any man of his age, which, she’d learned, was almost exactly her age. She was more embarrassed by Margaret Dawlish’s callous attitude than by her oblique references to sex. Even now, after years of marriage, she loved having Bernard’s arms about her, to feel the warmth of his body, his manliness, against her and to take him, welcomingly, inside her.

  ‘Would you…?’ Lizzie hesitated. ‘Would you marry Mr Giffard just for his money?’

  ‘I like it here at Blackstone.’

  ‘Aye, it’s a nice enough spot,’ Lizzie agreed.

  Reluctantly, almost sheepishly, Margaret Dawlish admitted, ‘Besides, I’ve nowhere else to go.’

  ‘I’m sure Polly will take you back.’

  ‘Polly!’ Margaret said, with a hefty sigh. ‘Yes, I expect she might – if she’s still in Glasgow.’

  ‘Of course she’ll be in Glasgow,’ said Lizzie. ‘Where else would she be?’

  ‘She might go chasing after him.’

  ‘After who?’

  ‘Her husband,’ Margaret Dawlish said. ‘Or she might go tramping off with that American instead.’

  Confusion clouded Lizzie’s thinking. She was rattled by the fact that this woman, this stranger, seemed to know more about her daughters than she did. Margaret Dawlish had been associated with Jackie and Babs for many years, of course. She’d managed the business side of Jackie’s motoring salon and, according to Babs, had done a very good job of keeping Jackie in check. But Lizzie had never even seen the motoring salon and had rarely visited Babs and Jackie in their lovely bungalow in Raines Drive.

  The river, the broad brown band of the Clyde, had separated her from her daughters and their affairs. She was vaguely aware that their lives had a density and texture that her life lacked but when she thought back to the time of her youth she realised that her life had been no less rich and her history no less colourful then than theirs was now.

  Quite deliberately she had chosen a quiet life with Bernard in Knightswood and all the striving and stramash that had marked her days in the Gorbals seemed far behind her. She watched now from a distance and suffered only obliquely when events caught up with her children, when Rosie miscarried and Babs lost her husband, for instance, and Polly found herself abandoned by that smooth, crooked devil, Dominic Manone.

  It wasn’t that she loved her daughters less or was indifferent to what happened to them but rather an awareness that she was so far removed from how they lived their lives that she could no longer solve their problems for them or protect them from the inevitable consequences of folly and misjudgement.

  She had heard of the American, Christy Cameron, of course, had learned from Rosie that he was Babs’s fancy man, but he remained vague and faceless, like a person in one of those thick books without illustrations that Rosie had devoured; how he had suddenly become attached to Polly was more than she could fathom.

  ‘Polly’s got nothing to hold her here,’ Margaret Dawlish said, ‘not now her husband’s left her. She’s a poor soul, your eldest, in spite of her money, her cars and her clothes. If she went off with the American I wouldn’t blame her. He’s a lot nicer than the lawyer.’

  Lizzie lost the thread, found herself unable to make the ellipses that linked Babs’s American to Polly’s lawyer, though she remembered the unpleasant Sunday afternoon before Christmas when all three of her girls had staged a quarrel in her living room and she had retreated with April to see Mrs Grainger’s cats. Perhaps she should have stayed. Perhaps she would have learned something that might help her understand what was going on now.

  ‘Aye,’ Lizzie said, defensively. ‘Aye, he’s all that.’

  ‘As for Jackie Hallop—’

  ‘Jackie’s dead,’ Lizzie put in. ‘I’ll not hear a word against Jackie.’

  ‘All I’m saying,’ said Margaret Dawlish, ‘is that Babs could have done better for herself.’

  ‘He gave her four lovely children.’

  ‘Any man who’s any sort of man could do that.’

  Suddenly weary of feeling weak and inadequate in the face of this mannish woman’s tittle-tattle, Lizzie blurted out, ‘Have you ever been married, Miss Dawlish?’

  ‘Not me, oh no.’

  ‘Have you ever had a man?’

  ‘I’m not interested in men.’

  ‘You seem interested enough in Mr Giffard.’

  ‘He’s different.’

  ‘Is he?’ Somewhere deep within her Lizzie discovered a spark of her old self. ‘So you’d take Dougie for a husband but you wouldn’t let him be a husband. What makes you think a man should be treated any different from a woman when it comes to respect? My daughters might have made mistakes but they’ve never wanted for love, not when they were young and not now. What they do is their business but I’d advise you not to turn up your nose at Mr Giffard if and when he does make an offer of marriage. You’ll be lucky to have him, I think, for he strikes me as a good catch – and if you think I don’t know what a good catch is then you’ve only to look at my Bernard.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Contrition did not sit well with Margaret Dawlish. ‘I really am sorry. I didn’t intend to insult you or your daughters.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ said Lizzie haughtily, ‘considerin’ they’ve provided you with a livin’ for the past ten years.’

  Then putting down the cocoa cup, she took herself off to bed.

  * * *

  Kenny had been at the docks since before dawn. The SPU had been drawn into an investigation involving a shipment of black market meat that Customs inspectors felt might prove to be the tip of an iceberg of unregistered importation. There was nothing much to go on yet but the case had all the hallmarks of becoming a long, dreary haul, and Kenny had already opened a logbook and would soon set about gathering information from Port authorities and other less official sources.

  He arrived home just before noon.

  He knew that Rosie would be at home for she had said she would go out early to join the food queues with the baby, well wrapped up, strapped into the old pushchair that Polly had provided.

  As far as Kenny was concerned the only good thing to come out of this latest turn of events was that Rosie had quit her job at Merryweather’s. He had telephoned the personnel officer and informed him that Rosie had suffered a minor nervous breakdown and would not be returning to th
e line. The officer seemed neither surprised nor dismayed and, to Kenny’s relief, hadn’t asked for a medical certificate.

  The reason for Rosie’s resignation – the minor nervous breakdown – was seated on the kitchen table, legs akimbo, gnawing on a Farley’s rusk and smearing goo on Rosie’s hair while she, with an arm about his waist, read aloud from a big green volume entitled Every Woman’s Home Doctor.

  ‘Uh-uh,’ she said, ‘listen to this, Davy. This is a guh-good bit. “Mother may pick him up at five o’clock for a little play-time, which will help to develop the baby’s senses and strengthen the link between parent and child.” Five o’clock, see. I thuh-think you’re supposed to sleep until five o’clock or maybe that’s when Mummy gets in from her round of golf.’

  ‘Mmmmmaw!’ Davy exclaimed.

  ‘Quite right!’ Rosie glanced up from the book. ‘By the way, I think you’re supposed to eat that rusk and not shuh-shampoo Mummy’s hair with it.’

  Davy laughed as if he’d understood the joke. He looked different when he laughed, all petulance dispersed by a deep, gurgling chuckle and a glimpse of teeth showing through pink gums.

  He attacked the rusk again, fisting it into his cheek.

  Rosie read on: ‘“On no account should baby be over-stuh-stimulated by too many caresses, however; such over-stuh-stimulation is bad for the child’s suh-suh-psychological development.” There you are, my lad, hugs and kuh-kisses are on the ration from now on. What do you have to say to that?’

  ‘Mmmaw, mmmaw,’ Davy answered, then, like an alert little watchdog, heard Kenny enter the kitchen and swung round to face the door. ‘Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma,’ he chanted and wriggled so energetically that Rosie had to grab him before he tumbled off the table.

  ‘He’s got teeth,’ she said. ‘Eight teeth.’

  ‘Has he?’ Kenny took off his overcoat and hat.

  ‘Feel them.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it, sweetheart.’

  ‘According to the buh-book, the appearance of back molars means he’s at least fifteen months old.’

  ‘By the way he’s tackling that biscuit,’ said Kenny, ‘I’d put him down as fast approaching school age.’