Paint on the Smiles (15 page)

Ada held Phil’s hand firmly as he went to look at the damage. Defying the warning on the roped-off garden to ‘Keep Off ’, he went into the shell of the once-neat house where the smell of burning made Ada feel sick, and looked at what was left. He hardly paused in the living area but pushed his way dangerously through charred furniture and fallen beams, and splintered window glass and out to his workshop. She watched with tears in her eyes as he touched the twisted metal, naming the recognizable machines in a low mutter. Burnt paper was all that was left of the order books, broken glass the only evidence of the dyes and inks he had once used.

‘Thankful I am that Mam didn’t live to see this,’ was all he said, before walking away from the destroyed building.

Van was always anxious after the town had suffered a serious air raid. The drone of the enemy aircraft became a regular sound but she didn’t fear for her own life – like most young people she thought she was immune, that terrible things only happened to ‘others’. But she was always afraid her grandmother would be killed and that fear had her hurrying to Cardiff at the first opportunity to reassure herself that Kitty Owen was safe.

She always slowed at the point where she would have her first sight of the grey stone terrace in the quiet street. She avoided looking for as long as she could, afraid the house would be gone and a pile of stones the only remnants of a secret she had kept from her mother and Auntie Ada. She loved Gran, but she also loved the secret.

On one of her visits she almost bumped into Willie, who was on a similar errand, making sure his mother and sisters were unharmed. He was standing at the gateway of his mother’s house talking to someone hidden in the porch. She darted back into a shored-up empty house which was roped off and covered with warning notices about its unsafe condition. Stepping beyond the ropes she slipped around the fractures and crumbling walls to peer back in time to see Willie leaving his mother’s house, turning once or twice to wave. She waited a while, then hurried on to where Gran lived in a similar house a few streets further on.

Gran was pleased to see her and after reassurances on both sides that no one was injured, Van updated her grandmother on the trivial (yet to Gran precious) news of the family.

Kitty Owen was small and still attractive, and she dressed with a skill that disguised the unpicked and resewn garments and cut-down and remodelled outfits she wore. She looked forward to Van’s visits and the slight connection with the family she had rejected, although seeing Van revived her guilt at the way she had run out on her ‘duty’.

That Van had been scarred by the way she had been treated was clear. Kitty also knew that by leaving her family, by not being there when the truth of her birth was revealed, she had further added to the girl’s distress. Van’s resentment of her mother’s denial of her for those early years worried Kitty and she tried gently to ease it away but Van closed up, a door slamming in her mind whenever she tried to explain the reason for the lies. When she did mention the subject it was to insist that she would one day pay her mother back for her dishonesty and the shock of the eventual revelation.

Van always wanted the latest news about Paul Gregory, Kitty’s manfriend’s son. He seemed to hold a fascination for the girl, and she saw him as exciting and worldly compared to other men she met. Today there was nothing to be gleaned as Gran had heard nothing from him since Van’s previous visit.

‘He’s safe, though, isn’t he, Gran? You’d have heard if he’d been hurt or been killed?’

‘I’m sure as I can be that he’s safe. Just unable to write. You’ll see him again soon for sure,’ Kitty promised, hoping as she did so that Paul was nothing more serious than a youthful ‘crush’ on her granddaughter’s part. Paul Gregory was not the kind of man for Myfanwy Owen to marry.

As Van was leaving, Kitty asked the question she always asked.

‘Van, lovey, is there any chance yet that your mother and Auntie Ada
would be willing to meet me? I know what I did was terrible, but after all these years surely they’ve forgiven me at least a little? With this war on we shouldn’t let it go on any longer. I think I’ll write to them – a letter wouldn’t hurt and they might reply. It would be such a joy to see my girls again.’

‘Leave it to me, Gran, I promise I’m trying to persuade them but now isn’t the time. Trust me, I’ll find the right moment soon and do all I can to persuade them to talk to you. But not yet.’ She hid the smile of relief as Kitty agreed to leave it to her a while longer.

As she walked to the station for the train home, Van’s thoughts were on Paul and it was because of that that she allowed herself to bump into Willie again. He spoke before she had time to find a corner in which to hide. It was at the station and they were obviously catching the same train.

‘Van? What are you doing in Cardiff? Not shopping, from the lack of shopping bags.’

‘Oh, I did come to shop but I couldn’t get what I wanted,’ she explained airily and without conviction.

Willie didn’t question her further but showed her the coconut matting for which he had queued for an hour to get for Annette. Then, as she obviously didn’t want to talk about her day, he talked about his mother and stepfather and his sisters and how they were coping with the air raids and shortages with good humour and even a sense of fun.

‘This blackout’s a bit of a lark,’ he told her. ‘This friend of their queued at the chip shop in the dark but as she got near she realized the chip shop was next door and she was queuing at a men’s lavatory. There’s soft she must have felt. And I wonder what the men thought she was doing there?’ He looked at her to see whether she was amused at the story. ‘Even I lost my way here once. Took a wrong turning and almost walked into the canal!’ He chattered on, all the time wondering what she had really been doing in Cardiff.

Over the next few weeks a number of serious raids hit the town. People who had been slow to erect their shelters hurriedly finished them and made sure they were stocked with food and blankets. Beside the docks, the targets were warehouses where food and ammunition were stored. The stocks were regularly replenished as it was from these and similar places that the forces were supplied with numerous food items. Owen’s shop was again offered contracts mainly because of the convenience of
its position. Cecily was delighted but again Van insisted that the larger Watkins’ store was better placed to deal with them.

‘We’ve got a cold room for a start, Mam,’ Van argued. ‘And we’ve got the space to stock these large quantities.’

‘Space isn’t a problem,’ Cecily reasoned. ‘There’s the shop next door besides the stable loft. We can use the stable too, if we leave the van and car in the street.’

‘But you don’t want the worry. A big order is quite a responsibility.’

‘I’m quite capable ….’ Anger began to flare.

‘Mam, you have to face it, Willie is likely to be called up any day and how will you manage with only Uncle Phil to help? No, it’s best, really it is, for me to take it off your hands.’

Ada pleaded with her to agree and Peter added his voice to Cecily’s protest.

‘I’ll find you someone when Willie goes,’ he promised. ‘Don’t let your business be whittled away after all you and Ada have done to build it up.’

‘The business isn’t sliding, it’s growing all the time.’ Cecily argued. But she didn’t look fully convinced as she added, ‘Van only wants to ease our burden until things get back to normal.’

‘Then there’s the problem of Phil. Ada will expect him to be the one to help when Willie goes. I don’t like to think of you being dependent on Phil. He’s obviously ill. In fact, I feel very uneasy about him, Cecily.’

‘Perhaps he would be better with more to do. I refused to help him, give him a job here and … Peter, there’s something else. Van wants me to leave the running of the shop to Ada and Phil and go up to help her at Watkins’.’

‘What? Leave the running of your business to Ada and Phil?’ He made no attempt to disguise his dismay. ‘Cecily, my dear, you can’t seriously consider that?’

‘Phil is a bit better now. They’ll manage well enough, just until we can all get back to how we were, when this war is over.’

‘It’s your business that will be over if Phil and Ada take charge, and all the best of it is going to Watkins’,’ he said solemnly. ‘And as for getting back to how we were, I doubt we ever will.’

One day Van phoned and asked Cecily to come at once. Leaving Ada and Phil to deal with a small rush of customers, Cecily ran up the hill, worried abut the urgency in her daughter’s tone. She found Van in her office with a nervous-looking Owen. Tomos Small, her manager, was sitting opposite her and books were opened across her desk.

Tomos Small had very short hair, cut well away from his ears, giving him a naked look, no place to hide. He was flushed, his ears shining and his skin moist. His eyes, behind the thick lenses which were the reason for him not being in uniform, were wide and staring with shock.

Van stood and offered her mother a seat where she could examine the ledgers spread out before her. Van pointed a finger to a number of entries in the stocktaking sheets.

‘All of these have been altered, to cover losses of several hundred pounds,’ Van explained. ‘This man has been robbing me blind and has used this method of disguising the fact.’

‘What have you to say, Tomos?’ Cecily asked quietly.

Tomos began to bluster, hoping to bluff his way out of the situation, briefly confident that he was able to out-talk two women, one of them a seventeen-year-old girl. His words were cut short by Van’s voice telling him not to waste their time by lying.

Cecily was impressed by her daughter, at her sharpness in spotting the neat alterations to the listed items and the totals at the end of each column. She remembered the way Van had played as a child, not with dolls but with pretend shops, and how she seemed to understand the language of arithmetic with such ease, seeing figures in her head and solving problems with exceptional ease. It had served her well.

When blustering failed to get him out of trouble, Tomos pleaded innocent error. Then, when his whining was met with only a stony glare, he returned to trying to use his greater experience to unnerve the young girl.

‘You can’t tell me how to run a piddling little store like this! I’ve managed big-huge London company stores, I have!’ he said contemptuously. ‘You? A kid like you? Damn me, it’s always important to cover yourself against losses, didn’t you even know that?’

‘So,’ Van asked calmly, ‘which is it to be? A mistake? A genuine business practice? Or downright robbery?’

‘It’s you, interfering and trying to tell me how to do my job!’

Van stopped him with an edge of steel in her voice. ‘I’m not telling you anything, Mr Small.’ She turned to her mother. ‘I should tell the police but I won’t.’ She turned back to the man now standing deflated and utterly humiliated. ‘I’ve spoken to Mrs Watkins and she agrees that you go. But if we hear any insults or foolish talk from you, the police will be informed and I have the books, in your handwriting, and two witnesses to this interview, evidence that will imprison you. One more thing. I won’t be giving you a reference.’

The man went without another word and after a moment Van dismissed Owen, who had sat silently and nervously throughout the interview. He wondered if he dare slip out for a bun while Van talked with Auntie Cecily but decided not.

Cecily was surprised to see that Van was trembling. It had been an ordeal for a young woman. She held her daughter’s hand. ‘Van, lovey, I’m so proud of you. You handled that better than most men I know. How d’you do it?’

‘Determination to let them know that being a girl doesn’t exclude me from having a brain!’ She slumped back in her chair in which she had sat upright and authoritative when Tomos was faced with his crime. ‘I’ll be short handed now, Mam. Will you come to help me? All the staff are being taken away and it takes so long to train someone new. This food rationing is added work too, having to total up the fiddling counterfoils and fill in dozens of forms.’

‘You don’t mean every day, do you?’

‘Please, Mam.’

‘I’ll talk it over with Ada and Phil tonight, and see if Peter can think of a better solution.’

Phil had improved since the loss of his workshop. It was as if it had released him from the guilt of his failure to restart his printing business. Seeing the mangled remains made it clear to everyone that he could no longer contemplate working there. He had begun to take an interest in the shop and had even borrowed a horse and cart to buy what fruit and vegetables he could find, out of town, for the sisters to sell.

Supplies of fruit were dwindling owing to the shortage of pickers and the problems of transport. None came from abroad as shipping was needed for men and the means to make weapons. The items Phil bought from small growers and farmers were a boon to the local people and an additional profit for Owen’s shop. Rabbits were a good off-ration meat source and Phil sometimes returned with half a cart load, which he gutted and displayed hanging in rows above the shop windows and were quickly sold.

‘Could you two manage without me for two or three days a week?’ Cecily asked as they sat down to eat. She was hesitant to commit to going to Watkins’ full time. It was too much to expect Ada to manage the business completely. She had told them, with some pride, about how her daughter had sacked her manager. ‘Owen is worse than useless, he’s a liability! Bertie helps when he can and Melanie calls every week, but Van needs someone there all the time, really.’

‘Go full time then, if that’s what you want to do,’ Ada said cheerfully. ‘I’ve been in the shop as long as you. I can manage. Phil will be here some of the time. Pity about Willie having to go but we’ll manage, won’t we, Phil, love?’

‘It’s definite then? Willie has to go?’ Cecily sighed deeply. ‘I was hoping he’d manage at least a deferment.’

‘He’s going, but Annette says she’ll come when she can.’

‘Annette won’t be able to do much – she has baby Claire and Victor to deal with, bless them all, and she’ll be without Willie too, remember.’