Authors: Maggie Ford
‘You know what travelling’s like these days, Mum,’ Matthew laughed easily and kissed her offered cheek.
‘I never travel far these days,’ she said as he put down his kit and Susan’s small, slightly battered weekend suitcase in the wood-floored hall, a hall of such width that Susan felt her whole family could have almost lived in it. She thought briefly of her own cluttered living room with its old furniture and with its everlasting noise of argument and laughter. About this place there was a silence that seemed almost tangible, as if a cold ghost lived there.
‘Dad home?’ Matthew queried easily as he and Susan followed his mother into the lounge. Susan wished she could feel as easy, but then, he would feel easy, wouldn’t he? This was his home.
The lounge was huge. The furniture looked lost in it, sparsely and tastefully laid out; a parquet floor bordered a large beautifully patterned carpet that looked sort of Turkish. Through the bay window, the high summer sun cast a minimal vertical strip of gold on to one tiny area of the wood floor, missing the carpet completely, which Susan imagined would never be allowed to be touched and consequently faded by any lengthening shaft of autumn sunshine. Mrs Ward probably had one of those posh blinds that well-off people used to keep damaging sunlight out.
‘He’ll be home for lunch,’ his mother answered. ‘As usual. But of course he must go back afterwards to open up for the afternoon, Matthew, whether you’re here or not.’
‘So you’re the Susan we’ve heard so much about in Matthew’s letters. He certainly didn’t lie about you.’
Mr Ward’s appearance prompted a surge of relief after an hour stiff and fraught with tension. She took to him the moment he came in at the back door to immediately shake her hand and utter his hearty comment before turning to his son to ask how long he would be home.
‘We go back Sunday night,’ Matthew supplied with a chuckle at the innocent, stock question asked nowadays of every serviceman home on leave.
Mr Ward too gave a low chuckle not unlike his son’s, with a touch of mockery in it that could be taken the wrong way if one missed the whimsical gleam in his eyes. They were slightly lighter than his son’s, more hazel than brown; she could see who Matthew took after, glad that it wasn’t his mother. But if he’d taken after his mother, she knew she wouldn’t be here with him now.
‘Don’t give you long, do they? Well, we’ve got you for the weekend at least. We promise to send you back all nice and clean.’
She had a feeling that as a young man Mr Ward might have possessed the same caustic humour as Matthew, but that it had mellowed or been mellowed by life. She wasn’t usually clever enough to see inside people, but he was so much like Matthew in looks and manner, she felt she could guess at the person he’d once been because Matthew had been a bit like that when she’d first met him.
It came to her that she still knew very little about Matthew as they sat down to a small but beautifully set-out cold lunch of salad and luncheon meat, all she supposed the Wards’ food ration would stretch to (dutifully she had handed over her ration book which Mrs Ward had not waved away). They were making conversation from which she began to feel excluded. At ease with his family, he was a stranger to her. Why had she consented to come here, when his way of life was so removed from hers? There came a dull feeling that once back in Birmingham, it would be the end of her and Matthew. She didn’t fit in here. She was yet to meet his sister. If she was anything like Mrs Ward …
Susan felt most uncomfortable, smiling when she thought she ought to, answering the odd question put to her mostly by the friendly Mr Ward. The afternoon when he would disappear back to his shop loomed before her like a prison sentence. To sit looking at Mrs Ward’s chilly expression all afternoon was not to be contemplated. She dreaded the moments when Matthew, quite at home among his own, would blithely wander off on some pursuit and leave her alone with this woman.
Mr Ward left, saying he would see her later that evening. Mrs Ward led them upstairs for Susan to put her case in the room allotted to her and freshen up. Freshen up sounded so posh.
‘The bathroom is there.’ She indicated a door at the end of a long landing which curved slightly at the end.
Susan nodded wordlessly. She had never seen a bathroom. The sort of people she knew in Birmingham did not have them. At least this would be a small refuge for her where she could escape this woman’s penetrating eyes.
The landing had six other doors. Six. Susan had never seen such a thing. Surely, other than the bathroom, the rest couldn’t be all bedrooms. Matthew said his was a four-bedroom house, so the one at the opposite end to the bathroom might be a cupboard.
‘And this is your room.’
The door she had assumed to be to a cupboard was opened for her to inspect her quarters. And what quarters. Everything became a pink and white blur as, blindly, Susan stepped within as she had been bidden, a faint smell of lavender greeting her. It was neat and modest in size, though not what Susan would have called small by any means, with a single bed, a dressing table with delicate white and pink jars on it, and a mirror, a cupboard and a chair. The walls, curtains, bedspread and a fluffy rug by the bed were pink, all the furniture white, and the linoleum brown, the only contrast. Susan stifled a gasp of awe; tried to behave as though she were used to this sort of room.
‘Thank you very much, Mrs Ward,’ she managed in a whisper, while Matthew grinned and said loudly:
‘My room, of course, is that end, by the bathroom.’ In other words he and she would be separated by two doors, but only she was meant to detect the amused connotation he was conveying, his mother quite oblivious as she left them to go into their separate rooms to unpack what they’d brought with them.
He did indeed go to his door and open it, but as his mother went on out of sight down the stairs, he stepped back and came towards Susan, moving silently.
‘I’ll help you unpack,’ he whispered purposefully and instantly she knew what he meant.
A knot of excitement formed deep in her stomach as she went into her room. Matthew followed quietly, no longer the stranger he had seemed during lunch.
For the sake of propriety as he pressed her down on the bed with the sun shining bright through the window, she whispered, ‘What if your mother comes up and catches us?’
He was bending over her, his mouth ready to close upon hers. ‘She won’t. As far as she’s aware, you’ll be unpacking in your room and I in mine and good manners will prevent her intruding into either.’
‘But if she hears …’ But Matthew’s lips closing over hers smothered any further protest as, his weight upon her, her body responded with waves of longing surging through it.
‘She doesn’t like Susan, does she?’
Matthew leaned with his back against the bench in the work room behind his father’s shop. The question was a foregone conclusion, but he had to ask it. Now was the time.
The shop was quiet for the moment. Saturday afternoon shopping took many people up west now that they felt safer with the Blitz failing to return. Not that there was much to buy; coupons, ration books, points, had put paid to casual spending. People were forced to save up a certain amount of points to buy a dress or a pair of shoes, so all the joy had long gone out of buying. But it was an excuse to get out, wander around the main shops, perhaps take in a cinema or theatre afterwards to forget shortages, loved ones overseas, the war itself.
With the shop quiet, the opportunity for a heart to heart with his father presented itself nicely. Susan had popped out to get some sweets with the coupons she had been saving for this weekend. She’d be back within a short while and in that time Matthew intended to tax his father on his mother’s reaction to Susan. No good asking her how she felt. She’d merely have given him a blank stare and remarked that it was his business at whom he threw his hat, the remark full of disapproval. And he already knew by her attitude that she disapproved, so why ask? Yet he needed to ask, and now his father leaned back in his creaking swivel chair and, pressing dark, pungent tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with his thumbs, frowned in deep thought.
‘You know your mother,’ he said after a while, effectively avoiding a direct reply. ‘Never been one to show her feelings.’
‘That’s what I told Susan. She’s dead scared of her.’ He saw the knowing half-smile his father gave and anger rose up inside him. ‘Why the hell can’t she be normal, like other people?’
‘You mean she doesn’t conform to your idea of normal, all sugar and spice.’ There was reprimand in the quiet tone. ‘Does that mean she should be discredited? She is honest and upright and has always done her best for you and Louise – in her own way, the only way she knows.’
‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry.’ He felt chastened. No one could accuse his mother of under-handedness or paying lip service to anyone. If she called a spade a spade, everyone could be certain it was nothing else. But if only she had one gentle streak in her, let the rules be bent ever so slightly; if only she was capable of letting people down lightly with a little white lie now and again. Timid people like Susan needed a little gentle understanding.
His intention had been to come out this afternoon to see his father, leaving Susan and his mother together to get to know each other without his having to hold Susan’s hand, but she had begged to be allowed to come with him. Looking into the pleading in those blue eyes, he knew that to refuse her would have been like leaving a lamb in a lion’s den.
His father lit his pipe, its acrid smell mixing with that of solder and flux and dust. It brought a sense of nostalgia, of belonging, that Matthew had once taken for granted, had thought would last forever, but now made his thoughts keen-edged with the knowledge that at any time he could be sent away to God-knows-where, perhaps never to come back. He felt his heart grow pinched and small with the fear of all this being taken from him.
‘Your mother,’ Leonard was saying, puffing a cloud of blue smoke into the air. ‘She has always had high principles, from the day I first saw her. She frightened the life out of me, you know. Me, who always saw girls as soft, pretty creatures with no brains, whom men could command, to see a young woman come striding into my father’s draper’s shop as though she owned it, really got up my nose at the time. But I couldn’t get my mind off her. She fascinated me. She was a beautiful woman, your mother, beautiful and straight-backed, and she held her head high. I used to look for her coming in. But I couldn’t get up the courage to tell her how I felt about her. When I did, she turned me down flat.’
Leonard gave a small quirky grin at the recollection, his pipe gripped firmly between his teeth. ‘You could never know what that’s like, to open up your heart to a woman when it’s not in your nature to do so and be turned down the way she turned me down. But finally we did start walking out together. She’s a woman in a million, Matthew, believe me.’
‘I didn’t mean to discredit her,’ Matthew said, shamefaced. ‘But she’s got to understand that I intend to marry Susan. I don’t want her resenting Susan. I know she does already and I don’t know why she should. She’s only just met her, and Susan’s the most likeable person I know. She’s sweet-natured and loving. She’s not pushy and loud. So why?’
The old chair creaked as Leonard leaned back into it again. ‘Maybe she considers you both a little young and hasty. You and Susan have known each other only a few months. You’ve hardly had much chance to see each other regularly. Perhaps if you both waited a while longer.’
‘What’s there to wait for?’ This was his life. They had theirs to look back on, had been fortunate, but what had he got to look back on so far, and how much future would be allowed to him? ‘This isn’t peacetime with long, well-arranged white weddings and strings of bridesmaids and a fine honeymoon afterwards. We might not have tomorrow and forever. I could be sent overseas at any time. I might not see her for years. I might even be …’ He checked the words quickly, then reverted to the hackneyed idiom of defiance: ‘We have to have something to cling to in this war.’
‘Yes.’ The pipe stem clicked audibly against Leonard’s teeth. ‘This bloody war.’
The shop bell tinkled. To its peremptory summons, he hoisted himself out of the chair, knocking the pipe out on the bench.
Matthew listened to the murmur of voices beyond the opaque glass of the dividing door, the conclusive note of a customer departing. The bell tinkled again, fell silent. Leonard came back into the back room bearing a domed, fretwork-fronted wireless set which he set down on the bench. He chuckled, making a joke against himself.
‘Look what I’ve come down to. My father loved his little drapery shop and said I would inherit, but he died in debt and lost nearly all of it. It was your mother who was my widowed mother’s mainstay. She made her sink what little was left into another shop after the last war, saying that electrical goods would be the coming thing. She was right. We did well. That’s how we came to live in a nice area like Victoria Park Road. I’m no snob and I know where I came from, but your mother wanted better things for you and your sister. That and her love of the old order of things makes her seem to act above herself, but her heart’s in the right place where you and Louise are concerned. I’ve got a lot to thank your mother for.’
The last words had a ring of finality about them. There was no more to be said on that score. Besides, any minute Susan would come running in, waving her few ounces of sweets in triumph. Matthew changed the subject, nodding towards the wireless come in for repair.
‘Bloody ancient thing, that one. Looks a bit beyond it to me.’
Leonard grinned compassionately. ‘She’s a widow. Can’t afford much. Asked if I could do anything with it before Tuesday. Doesn’t want to miss ITMA. Tommy Handley’s her only bit of pleasure these days. God knows, she needs someone to cheer her up, if only on the wireless. There’s little to cheer anyone up lately. Every time you tune in there’s another setback – what with Rommel and Tobruk. And Crete, us having to pull out, five thousand killed …’
‘I heard,’ Matthew said tersely.