At the Break of Day (14 page)

‘It’s the exam in two months. It’s so important,’ she told Jack, and he understood and read to her from a book. She took it down in shorthand, typed it up while he timed her, sitting at the kitchen table, his feet up on another chair, chatting with Grandpa. Norah wouldn’t help.

In June she took her exams and they danced that night and kissed in the yard because she dared to believe she had done well. Ollie brought round bottles of beer and Grandpa had some too, and Norah. Jack winked at Rosie.

In July, the results came through and that night they celebrated again and then danced at the Palais until midnight because there was no more shorthand, no more typing to be learned.

‘We’ve done it,’ she told Jack, kissing him on the mouth, tasting the beer on his lips, knowing that he could taste it on hers. ‘We’ve goddamn done it.’

Tomorrow she would walk up and down Fleet Street and find a cub reporter’s job and she ignored Norah’s scowl as they danced in through the yard, because now she was really on her way and Jack had said that he was proud of her, and so too had Grandpa.

The newspapers would not take a girl of seventeen. They wouldn’t take her if she was older either. She was not sufficiently well educated. She was a girl. There were too many men back from the war. They wouldn’t even take her as a messenger. It wasn’t suitable work for a girl.

She thought of the baseball she had thrown, the bike she had ridden, chasing down other kids on the block, down the street, in and out of cars, trams, hunting for Indians when she was the cowboy. The nickels she had pushed on to the tram lines for the trams to flatten. That wasn’t suitable play for a girl either. This was the end. Somehow it brought everything to an end.

She didn’t go back to Woolworths for two days because she couldn’t stop the tears. She lay on her bed, the curtain drawn across the small window, but there was no light anywhere, anyway, any more. Everything had gone, nothing was worth getting up for, going on for. It was not only that her plans had failed but her protection had been stripped away and now she faced again the pain of her separation from the two adults she had loved with all her heart and it was all too much.

Jack came. He sat on her bed, held her hand but she couldn’t feel him, she couldn’t hear him as he told her she must not give up. She must get angry again, he said. She must fight. Remember the cheese, and the meat. Remember the rec, the hop-yards where it had been warm, where things had changed for them all.

‘Don’t let yourself lose, Rosie, not now, not ever. Don’t let yourself despair. You’ll see Frank and Nancy again.’

She turned from him. She was too tired, couldn’t he see that? And she hurt too much. She wanted Nancy’s arms to make it better. To take the ache away and to wipe out the hours of work which had all been for nothing. It had all been taken from her, as she had been taken from America. She felt dead and to tell him would be to hurt him. How could she do that?

Maisie came too, and Grandpa sat with her, but how could she tell any of them about the emptiness, the pain? How could she hurt them like that?

On the third day she returned to work because there was nothing else to do. She must live every day, Frank and Nancy had said. What would they say now, when she had failed to use all that they had given her? How could she hurt them like that?

Mrs Eaves gave her Erroll Garner, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker to play because Jack had been in to explain her absence. She took her by the arm, and led her to the office.

They sat and drank Camp coffee while Mrs Eaves talked of the Americans she had known, the GI, Stan, she had loved, although she was married.

‘My husband came home in the winter of forty-five. Desert Rat he was. I was white haired by then and he thought it was the Blitz that had done it. It wasn’t though. Stan had been killed in the Ardennes. It broke my heart and turned me white nearly overnight.’ Mrs Eaves was holding Rosie’s hand tightly.

‘It’s all right,’ Rosie said. ‘Don’t talk. Don’t say any more. Don’t hurt yourself like this.’

Mrs Eaves swallowed but then continued. ‘War breaks hearts. It breaks lives too. There’s so much love that can never be spoken about; so much pain. There’s so much death. So much injury which takes away futures. Really takes them away, Rosie.’

Mrs Eaves leaned back and lit a cigarette with trembling hands, letting the match drop into the ashtray. They both watched the flame die.

‘Life’s not a bowl of bloody cherries you know, Rosie.’ Mrs Eaves’s voice was tired, quiet. ‘You’re growing up. Frank and Nancy aren’t here. Your Grandpa’s old. You’re on your own, my dear. Everyone is.’ She flicked her ash into the ashtray, picking a shred of tobacco from her lip.

‘But …’

‘No buts. You can either sit down and give up or get out there, find a job as a secretary on a magazine, a paper. Get into it that way. Then maybe go back to America if you want to. You’re lucky, you have people who love you. You have a life and a future. So many haven’t any more.’ Mrs Eaves was crying now and Rosie held her and wept too and then she went back to her counter and played Bix, smelling the hamburgers cooking on the barbecue, feeling sand beneath her feet, seeing the hops on the bines. She thought of the cheeses she had clutched to her, Jack’s bruised face in the van, Frank’s struggle with the LA and she knew she’d have to go on. She wouldn’t let herself lose, not now, not ever and this is what she told Jack, when he came in, but although his smile touched her pain, it didn’t make it go away.

When she returned that evening, Grandpa was ill; he had the same cold as Lee had struggled with. She sat by his bed all night and every night for ten days and though he was better he was not the same, and she knew that she couldn’t go on with her plans. Not yet.

He needed her at lunchtime and when she finished work and during her tea breaks, and she was there because she loved him, not because Norah shouted at her, ‘You’ve got to. It’s only fair.’

She was young, only seventeen, she told herself as she brushed her hair, tucking it behind her ears. There was plenty of time. She would wait, but waiting was so hard.

The next day she made Norah queue at lunchtime while she came home and sat with Grandpa because Norah had shouted at him this morning.

When Norah complained she said, ‘You’re not fit to be near him. You’re cruel, you always were and you still are. But you’ll do the goddamn shopping. It’s only fair.’ She no longer felt guilty where Norah was concerned. The feeling had faded when Rosie had begun to look after Grandpa day and night, out of love but out of duty too. She and Norah were equal now and there was no room in her life for guilt any more – or almost no room. Besides, there was too much pain in the darkness of the night and she wondered how many tears a person could cry.

It was on Friday that they went to the jazz club again, and Jack told her he had won twenty pounds when Pearl Diver won the Derby and that the bookmaker had been Mr Jones. She laughed but stopped when he said she must have the money to go towards a ticket to America, to see Frank and Nancy. To go back for ever, if that is what would take the shadows from her eyes. Maisie had said she would look after Albert, and Jack would too.

The smoke was all around them in the club. A man in the corner was rolling a reefer, his girlfriend was smoking hers. The smell was sweet.

‘Go on, you use it,’ Jack said, pushing it across to her. ‘It’s your birthday present. A bit late, I know.’ He was drinking his beer, not looking at her, and Rosie thought of the sweater she had knitted him for his birthday, out of two of Grandpa’s old ones, and here he was, offering a way of life back to her.

He looked tired too, and she felt like a spoilt child who had kicked and screamed because she had been hurt, ignoring him. Thinking he couldn’t see what she was feeling.

She pushed the money back. It was held together by a rubber band. ‘I couldn’t leave you,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t leave any of you. And anyway,’ she said, leaning back and drawing circles in the beer which had spilled on the table, ‘now my plaits have gone, where would I put the rubber band?’

He laughed, very loud, and the boy rolling his reefer looked across at them, nodding his head at his girlfriend, licking the cigarette paper, lighting it, breathing it deep into his lungs.

Rosie drank some of Jack’s beer and knew now that she loved him, more than anyone else, and the pain receded and she slept each night and woke to sunlit days.

Since Rosie would not use the money, Jack took them to Butlins in August instead, after a summer of austerity with rations reduced yet again. Mr Attlee said, ‘I cannot say when we shall emerge into easier times,’ and Rosie nodded as she read these words. She was already emerging.

Grandpa was pleased because Marshall Aid appeared to be a possibility.

‘I knew humanity would prevail,’ he said.

But Frank had written to tell her that in the spring President Truman had embarked on an American crusade against Communism. He wanted the West strong enough to buffer the US and Rosie wondered if this was the only reason they were receiving aid. She didn’t tell Grandpa that. She didn’t tell him either that Frank had been visited again by the Local Administrator because Nancy seemed to think it was just a nuisance not a problem. And maybe she was right.

Only Norah, Rosie, Ollie and Jack went to Butlins. Not Grandpa, he was still weak but feeling much better, and not Maisie, who stayed behind with Lee to look after the old man. She wanted to, she had insisted when Rosie went round. Lee’s too young. You all go and enjoy yourselves. And I don’t mind about the sheets either.

They travelled by charabanc past verges sown with barley which were now being harvested. They saw a man scything an entry for a reaper-binder into a field of wheat. They stopped and watched him rake up the wheat he had cut. It was too precious to waste.

As the charabanc engine started again they began to sing on the back seat, Jack and Ollie drinking beer, and soon the whole coach was joining in, even Norah. The camp had rows of flat-roofed chalets, a swimming-pool, a gym, a dining-room, and over on the edge where the hedge leaned over from too many years in the path of the wind, there was a fun-fair.

She and Norah shared a chalet and Norah walked around touching the wardrobe, the dressing-table, the basin.

‘This is what a prefab must be like,’ she said. ‘Nice and clean, fresh and new. That’s what I want. My own new prefab. You can win competitions for the best gardens, you know.’

Rosie sat on the bed and nodded. Norah had never gardened in her life. She looked around. She preferred Grandpa’s house with his books, the fireplace, bricks which had been there for years. Bricks which had housed him, and her.

Jack and Ollie had a chalet in the next row.

In the morning the tannoy woke them, shouting ‘WAKEY WAKEY’, but she didn’t mind because she had no sheets to wash and wring. They straggled with the other campers past rose beds clear of greenfly into the dining-room, to eat beans and bacon, and Ollie wondered whether the roses had been there when the services took over the camps in the war. Rosie felt in her pocket for her matchbox. It was there. Why had she brought it? Would Maisie remember to catch the ladybirds for Grandpa?

She drank her tea and smiled at Jack. They were here together for a week and it was as though the years had fallen from her and she needed nothing else. Just him. They ran to the pool when breakfast was finished. She stood in her swimsuit on the edge of the pool, the tiles cold beneath her feet. She felt Jack’s eyes on her. She flushed and dived into the cold water. Jack’s body was strong and as pale as hers was now. Her lakeside tan was gone.

She hauled herself up on the edge, then stood and dived again, hearing the water gushing past, kicking out, reaching the other side. It was as good as the lake and it was fun. She hauled herself out, dived a third time, heard the water again. Yes, it was just as good. She surfaced, wiped back her hair and smiled at Jack.

Now the Redcoats were blowing whistles, and they were formed into teams for racing. Jack’s team won. Again and again they plunged into the water, throwing balls, racing when the whistles blew, then filing into the dining-room again for lunch.

At three Rosie went with Norah to keep fit in the gym, throwing her arms up and down, feeling the sweat on her face. Again and again until she was too tired to think of Frank and the LA, Grandpa, even the journalism, but not too tired to think of Jack.

That evening they danced in the ballroom. She and Jack did not jitterbug but held one another close while the lights caught the chandelier and the MC called out numbers, giving prizes to those who won.

Jack smelt of chlorine, and his hands were cold and dry against her skin. She wore nylons he had bought for her, for Norah too. He pulled her closer and she felt him down the length of her body and they danced as though they could never be apart.

‘I love you, Rosie,’ he murmured, his breath warm in her hair.

‘I love you too,’ she said and she did. She always had, she always would.

The band struck up now, loud and fast into the Hokey Cokey, and they both laughed as they formed a circle, Rosie holding Ollie’s hand, Jack holding Norah’s, and it was like the ship’s dance as they sailed away from Liverpool. But tonight she was home, her pain had been faced and this was better than the Lake Club had ever been, better than the barbecue with Joe.

That night she dreamed of Gallagher in Lower Falls. The next day she wrote to Frank and Nancy, asking them if there was any danger that Frank would have to give up the paper because of this LA. It was his life.

She wanted to know what they were facing because she could think of them without pain now. She licked the envelope as the tannoy called ‘WAKEY WAKEY’. Breakfast was an egg, a soft-boiled egg, and she dipped her soldier into it, remembering the egg cosies her mother had knitted, asking Norah if she did too. She nodded and smiled.

They swam again, watched by other campers in deckchairs, some with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, and Jack put Ollie’s name down for the Knobbly Knees Competition in the afternoon.