“Apparently not.” Bel snorted so loudly that Flo half expected flames to shoot out of her nostrils. “I think I’ll kick him out, get a divorce.”
“You should never have married him,” Flo said, with the benefit of hindsight.
“I know.” Bel uttered an enormous sigh. “I don’t half envy your Sally. Her little girl’s a proper bobby-dazzler, and that Jock seems a dead nice feller.”
“Sal’s already in the club again. She’s making up for lost time now that jock’ll soon be home for good.”
“Have you been seeing Hugh O’Mara, luv?” Sally asked, one stormy December Sunday when Flo went to see her in Huyton.
“How did you find out?” Flo stammered.
“Someone told Nancy and she told our Martha.” Sally’s face was misty with happiness as she nursed nine-month-old Grace on her lap.
“I’ve been meeting him outside school every Friday for more than a year—I suppose you think I’m daft.”
“Oh, no, luv. I might have done once, but not now.”
Sally glanced at her daughter. “I can’t imagine how I’d have felt if someone had taken her away before I’d even seen her, or the little one I’ve got in here.” She patted her bulging stomach. “Everyone was dead cruel, Flo, me included. I thought keeping the baby would ruin your life.”
Instead, it was the other way round, Flo thought wryly. “Is Nancy mad at me?”
“Martha couldn’t make out if she was or not. She seemed more resigned than anything. I suppose she thinks it can’t do much harm now.”
“I don’t suppose it can,” said Flo. “How is our Martha?”
She only asked because it would please Sally, who was forever trying to reunite the sisters.
Sally grimaced and said, predictably, “I wish you’d go and see her, Flo. She’s dead miserable. Kate’s starting school in January, and she’ll be stuck in the house with Elsa Cameron who’s completely off her rocker now. The last time I went she was singing hymns the whole time.
By rights, Martha should find a place of her own, but although you’ll say she only wants to interfere, Flo, she’s not prepared to leave Elsa in sole charge of Norman or the woman’s quite likely to kill the poor bugger. Anyroad, Norman would be lost without little Kate. They’ve been brought up together, and he worships the ground she walks on.”
Hugh O’Mara emerged from school wearing a woollen balaclava, a long fringed scarf, and the horrible navy-blue belted mackintosh that Flo thought made him look like a miniature gas man.
It was another terrible winter, bleaker and icier even than the notorious winter of 1940, and the fuel shortages and power cuts made it seem even worse. Food remained rationed, and in such an austere atmosphere it was hard to believe that Great Britain had won the war.
There was a little girl with Hugh, a pretty child, like a fairy, with long fair hair. She wore three-quarter-length socks and patent-leather shoes, and her winter coat was much too big. There was something familiar about her face, though Flo couldn’t remember having seen her before.
“I’ve got another friend,” Hugh beamed happily at Flo.
“She only started last week, but I knew her before school.
Me mam goes to their house sometimes. She’s nearly two years younger than me, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”
“Of course it doesn’t, luv.” He would be seven in a month’s time and was shooting upwards like a vigorous sapling. Flo had already bought his present, a toy car. If you twisted the steering wheel, the four wheels turned.
She was taking the risk that Nancy wouldn’t object.
“Can she come with us to the Mystery?” Hugh said eagerly. “Have you brought the ball?”
Flo was about to say the little girl should ask her mam first, when another boy came up, a dark, handsome lad of about ten, with an ugly purple and yellow bruise on his forehead. She’d noticed him before. He was a bully and most of the children kept well out of his way. He put a possessive hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “I’ve got to take her home,” he said, scowling. “We live in the same house together.” He turned to Hugh and spat, “You leave her alone, Hugh O’Mara.”
“Don’t you dare speak to him like that,” Flo said angrily.
The boy ignored her and pulled the child away.
“C’mon, Kate.”
“Is that Kate Colquitt?” Flo enquired, when the children had gone.
“Yes. Do you know her?”
“I’m her auntie.”
“You never are!” Hugh’s brow creased in disbelief. “I don’t understand.”
“Her mam and me are sisters,” Flo explained carefully.
Then she said, “The boy with Kate, is that Norman Cameron?”
“Yes.” Hugh wrinkled his thin shoulders. “He’s not very nice. I don’t like him. No one does, not even his mam.”
“Perhaps he can’t help not being very nice.” She recalled sadly what a beautiful baby Norman had been, so happy—there was a photo somewhere in the flat, taken on his first birthday, that Martha had given her at the time. She hadn’t realised the three children would be at the same school—Hugh and Kate were cousins, not that they’d ever know.
Flo took a rubber ball out of her bag and began to bounce it. “C’mon, I’ll race you to the Mystery. Whoever’s last has to climb to the top of the tallest tree and shout ‘Hallelujah’ ten times.” She always won, but Hugh’s legs were getting longer. As soon as he was likely to get there first, she’d have to think of a less demanding penalty.
1949
Mr Fritz was stepping out with Mrs Winters, a widow who had tightly permed black hair and wore smart, tailored suits with very short skirts, though her legs were much too thick for ankle-strap shoes—or so Bel claimed when she saw them together. “I don’t like the look of her, Flo. Once she’s installed upstairs you’ll be out on your arse.”
“Oh, don’t!” said Flo. She felt hurt and a touch dismayed, as if Mr Fritz was letting her down. Somehow, unreasonably, she’d considered herself the only woman he wanted in his life, though their relationship had always been strictly platonic.
“It’s a pity he and Stella can’t get divorced,” Bel remarked. It had taken her several years to get rid of Ivor. “Still, I suppose the poor chap’s got to dip his wick somewhere. I’m glad I’m a woman and not panting for it all the time.”
Mrs Winters lasted only two months. “I couldn’t stand the way she stuck her little finger out like a flagpole when she drank her tea,” Mr Fritz confessed to Flo. “I felt I wanted to hang something on it.” He stared at her gloomily. “What happened to your chap from the income-tax office?”
“I gave him up. We didn’t have much in common.” All Ray Meadows had wanted to talk about was figures. Bel had tried to insist that Flo encourage him. “He’s dead keen, I can tell, and a good prospect. You’re not getting any younger—you’ll be thirty next year.” But Flo had decided, once and for all, that she would sooner remain single than marry a man she didn’t love wholeheartedly.
Books and the cinema provided all the romance and excitement she needed, especially as things usually ended happily. She enjoyed the quiet of her flat, buried half under the ground, drinking sherry, and feeling pleasantly cut off from the real world. Her only regret was that she no longer had a family. She missed the love that Mam and Dad had bestowed on her, and since Sally’s son, Ian, had developed muscular dystrophy at the age of two, poor little lad, Flo saw her sister rarely now. Whenever she went to Huyton, Sal and Jock seemed so wrapped up in anxiety for their son that Flo felt in the way. Of course, there was always Martha, but if it hadn’t been for her, Flo would have had a son of her own for the past nine years.
“I’ve been invited to the Isle of Man for the weekend in July,” Mr Fritz said, with the air of a man who’d been asked to attend his own funeral. “Some of the chaps from the camp are having a reunion. Trouble is, they’re taking their wives. I’ve no one to take.”
By now, half of the little Fritzes were in their twenties.
The previous year Mr Fritz had been invited to Ben’s wedding but had refused to go. “I’d feel most peculiar,” he said, “like a stranger at the feast.” A few weeks ago, he’d received a card to say Ben’s wife had given birth to a son.
He was a grandfather, which made him feel even more peculiar, and also very old, though he was only fifty.
“I’m sure not every chap will be bringing a wife,” Flo said briskly. “You’ll probably have quite a nice time.”
Over the next few weeks, he continued to raise the subject of the reunion, saying miserably, “I hate the idea of going by myself.” Or, “It wouldn’t have to be a wife. It would be enough to take a friend.”
“If that’s the case, why not ask Mrs Winters?” Flo suggested. “It’s only a few days, and you could put up with her little finger for that long, surely.”
“No, no,” he said, distractedly. “There’s someone else I’d far sooner go with.”
Two days before he was due to leave, he came down to the basement, where he sat, sighing continuously and staring moodily into the gas fire, which wasn’t even lit.
After half an hour of this, Flo said, “Bel will be round in a minute. We’re going to see The Keys of the Kingdom at the Odeon. She’s mad about Gregory Peck.”
“Gregory Peck’s got everything,” he said despondently.
“I bet he wouldn’t be stuck for someone to take with him to the Isle of Man.”
Flo burst out laughing. “If you carry on like this much longer, I’ll offer to go with you meself.”
To her astonishment, he jumped to his feet and caught both her hands in his. “Oh, would you, Flo? I’ve been wanting to ask for weeks.” His brown eyes were shining in a face that had suddenly come alive. “We’ll have separate rooms, of course we will. My intentions are strictly honourable. And we’ll have a lovely time. Joe Loss and his orchestra are playing at the Villa Marina. I haven’t been dancing in years.”
“But . . . ” Flo began.
“But what, my dear girl?” he cried.
Everyone she knew, apart from Bel, would disapprove, despite the separate bedrooms and Bel would ask loads of embarrassing questions. Even so, perhaps it was the same lack of caution that had led her to accept Tommy O’Mara’s invitation a decade ago, because all Flo said was, “Oh, all right. But I don’t want Bel and the women in the laundry to know. They’ll only get the wrong idea.”
He put a finger to his lips. “You can count on me not to breathe a word to a soul.”
Flo sat on the edge of the double bed and stared out of the hotel window at the choppy, green-brown waves of the Irish Sea. A large black and white ship with a red funnel was approaching Douglas, spewing white foam in its wake. It was the ship on which they would return to Liverpool.
The sky was overcast, the clouds leaden, as if about to unleash another downpour, and the pavements were still wet from the rain that had fallen all night long and the whole of the previous day. Holidaymakers wandered past forlornly in their plastic raincoats, some of the children carrying buckets and spades.
In the en suite bathroom, Mr Fritz could be heard humming as he shaved. At the initial gathering of the ex-internees, a man had shouted, “Fritz Hofmannsthal, you old rascal! How are you?” and she’d been amazed when Mr Fritz went over and shook his hand.
“I didn’t realise that was your name,” she whispered.
“I told you it was a mouthful,” he whispered back.
After proudly introducing her all round as “My dear friend, Miss Florence Clancy,” Mr Fritz seemed to forget he was supposed to be at a reunion. That night, when they should have been at a special dinner, but were tangoing to “Jealousy” in the Villa Marina, he said, “Who wants to celebrate a miserable experience like that? It’s the sort of thing I’d sooner forget.”
The first night she’d spent alone in the single bedroom he’d booked for her on the floor above. Yesterday, Sunday, they breakfasted together at a table by the window in the dining room with its cream and maroon striped Regency wallpaper. It was raining cats and dogs, and the sky was so dark that the red-shaded wall lamps had been switched on, making the large room cosy and intimate.
“This is nice,” said Mr Fritz. He touched her hand.
“This is lovely.”
They caught a taxi to Mass and back again, then read the newspapers and drank coffee in the hotel lounge until it was time for lunch. Afterwards, they battled their way through the wind and rain to an amusement arcade, then, in the afternoon, they went to the pictures to see Notorious with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. “I must confess,” Mr Fritz said at dinner, “that I’ve always nursed a soft spot for Ingrid Bergman.”
They took their time over the meal and it was ten o’clock by the time the wine was finished. They transferred to the bar for a cocktail, and continued to talk about things of mutual interest: the laundry, the little Fritzes, Flo’s family, the house in William Square.
It was an unremarkable few days, yet Flo had rarely enjoyed herself more. It was nice to be with someone she knew so much about. There were no awkward silences, no mad scrambling through her mind for what to say next. She’d known Mr Fritz for more than half her life and they were entirely comfortable with each other.
The clock was striking midnight when he offered to escort her upstairs to her room on the third floor. When they reached the second floor, he paused and looked grave. “Flo, would you, could you . . . ” He gestured along the corridor and stuttered, “Would you consider doing me the honour of—of—”
After their lovely time together, Flo had anticipated that this might happen and was quite prepared. What harm would it do? None, she had decided. Furthermore, she had no intention of making herself out to be a shy virgin and pretending to be coy. If Stella had known she’d had a baby, then so must he. As he looked incapable of saying the words he wanted, she said them for him. “Of sleeping with you tonight?”
He was an ardent, yet gentle lover. Flo experienced none of the passion there had been with Tommy O’Mara, but as she hadn’t expected to she wasn’t disappointed.
When it was over, she felt cherished and satisfied. Afterwards they sat up in bed like an old married couple. “We must do this again, Flo,” he said warmly.
“Perhaps next month, August.”
“I’d like that.” She laid her head affectionately on his shoulder.
“In that case, I’ll book a double room in a different hotel, and we’ll be Mr and Mrs Hofmannsthal”