That Liverpool Girl (34 page)

‘Bombed houses.’ Nellie folded her arms. ‘He wants to draw the mess in town. You’re right, they shouldn’t have come here.’

‘That’s what I said till my dearly beloved shut me up. Phil, this is magic, son. There’s something about my kids. Every one of them’s talented. But this? Well, I don’t know what to say.’

Keith cleared his throat. ‘That’ll make a nice change.’ He stood up, reached out his right hand and shook Phil’s. ‘You’re a star, lad. If you’ve shut your mother up, you’re a walking miracle, and I thank God you’re here. And . . . well, wherever he is, your dad’ll be proud of you. I’m proud, and I’m only your stepdad.’

Nellie took the boys and the sketch through to the ground-floor bedroom. From the kitchen, Eileen and Keith heard the old lady as she exclaimed over the quality of Phil’s work. ‘Life’s full of surprises,’ said Eileen, her eye on the kitchen clock. ‘Where is she?’

‘Mel? With Gloria, I expect. School holidays – they’ll be trying clothes on.’

But Eileen didn’t agree. There was a glow in the cheeks of her fourteen-year-old daughter, a twinkle in her eyes. ‘I reckon she’s with Peter in Rachel Street, Miss Pickavance’s house. She has a key. They’ll be up to no good.’

‘Jeanie!’ Neil Dyson staggered into Home Farm’s kitchen, the unconscious Jay Collins a dead weight in his arms. ‘He gets heavier with every step, I swear to God. Blankets.’ He placed Jay on the sofa before taking a few deep gulps of oxygen into lungs that had been working overtime for the best part of a mile. ‘Come on, Elsie. There’s nothing new on this earth, nothing you haven’t seen before. Strip him. His clothes are wet through and frozen. We’ve no chance of warming him up till we get these things off him. Towel him dry once he’s bare – there’s some nice rough towels on the pulley. We need to keep his blood on the move.’

Elsie thrust her cup into Neil’s hands. ‘Get yourself outside that tea. You look nearly as bad as he does.’ She glanced at Jay. He was frighteningly still and, she suspected, near to coma. She grabbed towels from the line above the fireplace, put them on the fireguard to warm, then began to peel off the poor young chap’s clothing. There was hardly anything of him. She’d noticed that young ones with diabetes tended to be on the thin side. He needed building up and looking after, but would Gill Collins listen? Would she buggery. It was like trying to talk to a heap of coal in the dark. ‘Come on, lad. Buck up, eh?’ she whispered to the motionless Jay. ‘You’ve got to fettle a bit better than this, son.’

Exhausted, Neil dropped into a chair. ‘Jean, run up to Willows and ask Miss Pickavance to tell the operator we need an ambulance fast. Hypogly-wotsit and hypothermia. Or diabetic, unconscious and very cold’s easier. Go on, love. I’d go myself, but I’m puffed after lugging him up from Four Oaks. I had him in a barrow, but the wheel shaft broke and I had to carry him. Soft bugger must have keeled over and fallen in the horse trough. Ice on the water wasn’t thick enough, so the mad article could have drowned in six inches of wet. I pumped the stuff out of him, and he’s breathing, but not for much longer if we don’t get help.’

Jean screamed for her daughters. ‘Stella? Pat? Bring every sheet, blanket and eiderdown you can manage. Fill some hot water bottles.’ She grabbed hat and coat before running to the big house. Of course, it wasn’t the big house any more, was it? The big house had been pulled down years back and— Why was she thinking about this kind of stuff? Jay Collins lay near-dead, and here she was trying to remember the original sandstone building that had all but fallen down years ago.

And she had bread in the oven, and the kitchen copper was boiling water so that she could do the extra sheets for Land Army girls’ beds. Wasting wood or coal was a sin, especially now.
Oh, Gill, why couldn’t you have looked after him just a bit better? You know he’s no idea when it comes to counting points against insulin.
‘Jay,’ she muttered, ‘you’d best pull round, because we don’t want to bury you before we’ve given you a bloody good telling off, you mad bag of bones.’ Fighter pilot? The air force needed Jay like it needed squadrons of blind monkeys. He was lovable, though . . .

Why couldn’t his wife love him? He needed taking in hand, but who had the time these days? Every farmer was up to his ear holes trying to make a hundred acres do the work of a thousand. ‘You’ll pull round, too, Gill Collins, if I have to break every bone in your miserable body. No time to play the wild card, not with a war on. Nervous bloody breakdowns are a luxury we can’t afford till later. Post-natal depression – huh!’

Back at Home Farm, Elsie and Neil were trying to rub some life into the patient’s chilled limbs. Stella and Patty warmed blankets and quilts at the fire, and Elsie piled items on top of Jay until he was almost buried beneath layers of various fabrics. Metal shelves from the oven were wrapped in towels and placed underneath the bundle Jay had become. ‘Faint pulses in both feet,’ announced Elsie. ‘Thank goodness for that.’

‘Why?’ Neil stared at her quizzically before returning to his task.

‘They lose limbs. Diabetics, I mean. He’s lucky, because even at this temperature the blood’s getting through. But he’s still blinking cold, Neil. And I daren’t give him any sugar in case it chokes him. Oh, I wish they’d hurry up with that ambulance. I know we’re a few miles out, but this fellow needs help now. I mean, what more can we do for him?’

‘Is it possible to warm him up too quickly?’ Neil asked. ‘Can we do any damage this way?’

‘I don’t know.’

That was a change, thought Neil. Usually, Elsie knew everything. He went to change his own damp clothes.

Miss Pickavance arrived with Jean. ‘I’ve made a bottle of hot sugar water,’ the older woman said. ‘Just to wet his lips. If any of it does get into his mouth, it will do no harm as long as we don’t overdo it and choke him.’ She knelt on the floor and, with the tip of a finger, began to moisten his lips. He stank of pear drops, and that meant too much insulin, not enough food. ‘Come on, Jay,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let us down. In a few weeks, you’ll be ratting with Mrs Hourigan’s Jack Russells. Remember? Everyone calls them ’ourigan’s ’orribles? We can’t have the rat-kill without you. The barns will need clearing, and we’ve fencing to mend. We can’t have anything without you to keep us all smiling. You have to get through this, my friend.’

‘She’s upset,’ mouthed Elsie to Jean. ‘Thinks the world of him.’

Neil returned, still pulling a dry jersey over his head. Miss Pickavance was especially fond of Jay, because he never failed to amuse her. And she always calmed him down and made him talk about sensible things like lead for flashings, painting everything green in line with War Office orders, the best wood for replacement fencing. He was almost the son she’d never had.

‘Does Gill know?’ the lady of the manor asked.

‘No,’ Neil replied.

‘She’s not with us,’ opined Elsie. ‘She’s gone AWOL in her head. Well, it needs saying, Neil. No point pussyfooting about. She can’t look after herself at the moment, Miss P. And she loses patience with all his clowning. I came here to ask if I could borrow that Land Army girl, the one who hasn’t took to the job in the fields. I thought she might be put to better use helping with the baby and seeing that Jay eats properly.’

‘That sounds like a good idea,’ said Hilda Pickavance. ‘From what I’ve heard, the girl’s no use where she is. However, back to the point. Jay’s wife needs to be told.’

Nobody moved. Then Neil spoke up. ‘She won’t go with him in the ambulance because she refuses to leave the baby with anyone. And she’ll not take her to the hospital; she thinks Maisie’ll catch something. We’ll tell her. After he’s gone to the hospital. To be honest, I don’t think she’ll notice he’s gone; she’s been shutting him out of her mind for months.’

‘He drives her mad,’ Elsie commented. ‘That’s the top and bottom of it. She got sensible and he stayed daft.’

‘That’s as may be,’ Neil replied. ‘Me and my Jeanie have got on one another’s nerves for many a year, but we don’t turn our backs on each other. Gill’s not well herself. She’s been like a cat on hot bricks ever since that baby was born. I just feel that news like this could tip her further over the edge. She doesn’t say much, so we’ve no idea what’s going on in her head.’

Elsie voiced her agreement that Gill wouldn’t notice Jay’s absence. ‘He’s got to have warmed up a bit by now. Give him another drop of that sugar water, Miss Pickavance. Get us your balaclava, Neil. Even his head’s cold.’

The ambulance people arrived and started all over again with Jay. By the time they had finished with him, he resembled a clean version of something that had been pulled from a pyramid and lifted out of a fancy coffin. ‘Will he be all right?’ Hilda Pickavance asked repeatedly. The men and their nurse assured her that Jay would receive the best treatment available, and invited her to accompany her son to the infirmary.

‘He’s not my son,’ she replied, regret colouring her tone. ‘And I have an evacuee at home, so I must go. I have to fetch him from the vet’s, where he’s been helping out.’

‘Right-o.’ They lifted the patient and his stretcher towards the door.

‘I’ll go with him,’ sighed Neil resignedly. ‘I don’t know how or when I’ll get back, but I’ll try to phone you, Miss Pickavance. Jean, you or Elsie can go over to the gatehouse and tell Gill. She has to be informed. God knows what she might do if he just went missing.’

The door closed behind the patient, his companions and Hilda, who was on her way to pick up Bertie from the vet’s surgery.

Elsie and Jean looked at each other. ‘We get some great jobs,’ Elsie said. ‘We’ll both go. That way, we can share the blame and the grief. And I might stay the night with her. I put a note on my door earlier, but Miss P has Nellie’s key if anyone needs anything. Nellie’s not back, is she? God knows how she’ll carry on over there. People say Liverpool’s took a few batterings.’

‘I don’t know. It’s as if the whole world’s falling to bits, Elsie.’

Once again, they donned their outer clothing before stepping into the unforgiving frost of late December. In three days, it would be Christmas Eve. And poor Jay Collins might not wake to enjoy it.

Tom Bingley knocked gingerly on the back door of Miss Morrison’s house. Having been dismissed by the owner and given a black eye by her latest visitor, he was not expecting the warmest of welcomes, though Nellie Kennedy seemed to understand him better now. Nor was he in a good mood. The proposed encounter promised not to be too happy, because his boy was missing, and he knew who had led him astray. At four o’clock on the afternoon of 21 December 1940 it was already dark. The sirens had sounded, so the Germans were probably planning an early visit, and, although Liverpool was seven miles south, planes could be heard and fires were visible in the distance. Eileen opened the door. ‘Tom? Where is she?’

‘My question exactly,’ was his reply. ‘And where’s my son? Legend led us to believe that he was playing chess with a boy from school, but the boy from school is visiting grandparents with his mother. We checked.’ Peter was a decent boy, and this piece of gross dishonesty would be the fault of Eileen Watson’s daughter. She had her mother’s looks and her mother’s wiles; she could probably ruin his son’s life before it had even started. ‘This is not at all like Peter. We have had no behavioural problems with him until very recently.’

‘Oh.’ She widened the door. ‘Come in. My husband’s just making a pot of tea.’ She must not appear worried. She must not allow herself to think the worst of her daughter. ‘Peter isn’t here,’ she said. ‘We’ve not seen him today.’

‘And your daughter?’

Eileen swallowed. The situation could not be concealed, especially now. It was dark, and the Luftwaffe was getting frisky. ‘We thought she was with Gloria. She said something about wrapping gifts and swapping clothes.’ The enemy didn’t usually arrive two nights in a row. ‘Germany isn’t playing fair,’ she said in a weak attempt to lighten the atmosphere. ‘No warning, not even a postcard.’

He frowned. The woman was prettier than ever. Pregnancy clearly suited her. ‘She is not with Gloria. Marie is almost out of her mind. It was bad enough when the bombs fell here and the wardens wouldn’t let us come round the corner to see if our twins had survived. But this is worse, because neither you nor I know where our children are. One thing is certain: they are together.’

‘Sit down, Tom,’ said Keith. ‘Eileen, tell him what you know.’

Eileen perched on the edge of a ladder-back chair. ‘They’re fourteen going on forty,’ she said. ‘Mel has a key to Miss Pickavance’s house in Rachel Street. She goes down from time to time in daylight, and she writes and tells Miss Pickavance what she sees. Oh, and she keeps the house as clean as she can. It was a promise.’ Her voice died. ‘Dear God,’ she whispered as a thud reached her ears. Often, the wind blew the sound of falling bombs all the way up the coast. ‘I thought I heard a couple earlier on, but that one was a definite.’

‘My son may die because of your daughter.’

‘I could say the same in reverse,’ she said.

‘Oh, stop this.’ Keith slammed the teapot onto its stand. ‘We all know what happened. You fell for Eileen and went a bit crazy; now history seems to be repeating itself in the young ones. You know the strength of such feelings, and you must realize, as a doctor, that young people fall in love at the drop of a hairpin, never mind a hat.’

Tom glared at the man who had once been a rival. His glance roved across to Eileen, and he nodded knowingly. ‘You and your daughter cast spells without knowing what you are doing.’ Eileen was lovely, but she was not a gentlewoman; Marie was infinitely superior to this divine, delectable creature. ‘Your daughter is the one with the key to that house. If they are in Rachel Street, there can be no doubt that she has told Peter about the key. Any sexual activity will have been at her instigation.’