He’d always wanted a garden. It was the only thing he’d missed throughout his entire adult life spent living in Bootle with only a tiny patch of yard. Now Eileen had an acre or more and Jack was in his element. No member of his family had wanted for basic vegetables over the past year, nor rhubarb and cooking apples – there’d even been strawberries in June. He thrust the spade fiercely into the ground. The soil was black and damp and soft. Immediately he began to feel at one with the earth and Jessica Fleming was forgotten, or so he told himself.
Eileen came out after a while and regarded him worriedly. ‘Do you intend turning the entire garden
over
in a single afternoon, Dad? You’ll have a heart attack at the rate you’re going.’
She persuaded him to come inside for a drink and a smoke. ‘I managed to get ten ciggies in the post office. Anyroad, I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘Alice is expecting a baby in August,’ Eileen said when they were seated in the living room and he was gratifyingly puffing on the first cigarette he’d had in weeks. Nicky, eight months old tomorrow, a handsome little chap who, unlike his dad, rarely smiled, stared at him solemnly from the playpen in which he was sat clutching a teddy bear.
‘Our Sean, a dad!’ Jack suddenly felt very old. It had always been a quiet dream that his three kids would end up settled with families of their own, but now he felt, unfairly, that he was being abandoned. He blamed it all on Jessica for upsetting the pattern he’d so carefully planned. He thought of Penny, still a baby. It would be many years before she’d grow up and get married.
‘It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?’ laughed Eileen. ‘He was such a flirt, never out with the same girl twice until he met Alice.’
‘How come you know, Eileen? Our Sheila didn’t mention it when I saw her this morning.’
Eileen looked uncomfortable. ‘Alice came all the way out here yesterday to tell me. She’s convinced our Sheila doesn’t like her.’
‘Neither me nor Sheila liked Alice much at first,’ Jack conceded, ‘and even now I’d have preferred Sean to marry someone carrying a bit less baggage. Five kids, a wife, and now a babby on the way! It’s a big responsibility for a lad of nineteen.’
‘It’s no good crying over spilt milk, Dad,’ Eileen said flatly. ‘They’re married, Alice is expecting, and that’s all there is to it. The thing is, how on earth are they all going to fit into that cramped little flat in Miller’s Bridge?’
The problem drove Jack back into the garden, taking the ciggies with him, where he turned the black earth over and broke it into pieces even more energetically than he’d done before. Alice’s place in Miller’s Bridge was poky in the extreme, with just two tiny bedrooms, a living room and a basic back kitchen that could only be described as Victorian. The lavatories outside were shared with other families in the block. The Scully boys slept in one room, Alice and her two sisters in the other. He hated to think where Sean laid his head when he was home on leave, but presumed it could only be on the floor. Jack attacked a clod of earth with hatred in his heart for the property owners who fattened their wallets by cramming the poor into substandard accommodation that wasn’t fit for animals – and for the politicians who allowed it to happen. If they’d let him, he would have built a house for his lad with his own bare hands.
He lit another ciggie and cut the grass on the small lawn with the ancient mower which the previous owners of the cottage had left behind. It was a waste of good growing space and he’d have liked to turn it over to vegetables, but Sheila’s kids needed somewhere to play when they came, and Nicky would soon be walking.
When Nan Wright died at Christmas, he’d put in an application for number 1 on behalf of Sean and Alice, willing to pay the increase in rent out of his own pocket, but so many folks had lost their homes in the Blitz that his application had been just one of many, and some other family had been successful. According to Sheila, they’d paid the rent collector a few bob on the side as a bribe.
The lawn finished, he trimmed the hedges, pruned every bush in sight, and could only be persuaded to stop when Eileen announced Kate Thomas had turned up for tea. By then, all the ciggies were gone.
He liked Kate. They usually talked about politics, and
despite
their totally different backgrounds, they agreed on most things. He eagerly went indoors.
‘Hallo, luv,’ he beamed. Her little scrubbed face and untidy hair posed no threat, unlike Jess Fleming who oozed danger from every pore. Little did Jack know, but Kate Thomas loved him far more deeply than Jessica ever had or ever would.
The lights in the ornate dining room of the Dorchester Hotel were dimmed except for the one over the grand piano. There were about seventy people there, more than half American officers, the remainder guests, both men and quite a few smartly dressed women. Against one of the walls stood several white-clothed tables laden with food and drink. The pianist, an elderly man in evening dress, had already agreed the programme with Jessica, who’d brought her own music with her. The colonel who appeared to be in charge of the proceedings banged on the piano with a glass tankard, the pianist winced, and everyone fell silent as Jessica was introduced as a British nightingale who was about to entertain them.
She sang ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘I’ll be Seeing You’, ‘Yours’, several Cole Porter songs, a few Irving Berlins, including her favourite, ‘There’s a Small Hotel’. Her voice, as dazzling and pure as clear crystal, soared upwards and outwards, intoxicating an already partly intoxicated audience with its beauty. After something patriotic for the British, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, she finished up with the American National Anthem. ‘Oh, say can’t you see, by the dawn’s early light …’ The uniformed men stood stiffly to attention, put their hands on their hearts, and joined in.
Between songs, she was cheered to the echo. When she finished, they threatened to lift the roof off with their shouts for an encore.
‘I don’t think I can manage any more,’ she said to the
colonel
when he came hurrying over to thank her. ‘My throat’s hurting.’
‘That’s okay, honey. They’ll soon quieten down. Come and have a drink.’ He snapped his fingers imperiously at the pianist to continue and the man began to play ‘There’ll Always be an England’ with a slightly mutinous air.
Jessica had quite a long conversation with the colonel, who was a benign, middle-aged man with a shock of prematurely white hair. He led her towards some empty chairs in the corner where they discussed the war, and he told her that folks in the States had no idea the Brits were in such a bad way.
‘This rationing, for instance, it’s appalling how little you have to eat.’
‘We have enough to keep us going,’ said Jessica, ‘and the Government is very sensible. They make sure what we eat is good for us.’
‘And the Blitz!’ He shuddered. ‘How on earth did you live through it?’
Jessica thought of Jacob Singerman and little Tony Costello. ‘Some of us didn’t,’ she said drily, and suggested that if he cared to travel as far as Exeter, York or Norwich or several other places, he could find out what the Blitz was like for himself. ‘They’ve all had air-raids recently.’
‘You’re a brave little country, that’s for sure.’
‘We’re little in size, but big in heart.’ He was beginning to sound a bit patronising, she thought.
‘You lost your big aircraft carrier,
Hermes
, off the coast of Ceylon last week, didn’t you?’ He shook his head ruefully, as if the ship wouldn’t have been lost if he’d been there to protect it.
‘I didn’t lose it personally, but yes, I understand it was sunk by the Japanese.’
‘Not only that, your troops are retreating on all fronts in the Far East. Never mind.’ He slapped her thigh. ‘The
good
ol’ US of A will turn the tide. By this time next year, it will all be over.’ He made no attempt to remove his hand. When Jessica tried to stand up, she found herself imprisoned on the chair.
‘If you wouldn’t mind!’ She raised her eyebrows and glared at the hand on her thigh. The back was covered with white hairs.
‘How’s about we two take a room upstairs?’ he whispered in her ear. He no longer seened benign.
‘How’s about we don’t!’ She tried to prise the hand away, but it felt as heavy as lead and seemed to be permanently adhered to her leg. She didn’t want to make a scene, but if he didn’t let her go soon she’d be left with no alternative but to throw her drink in his face or scream for help.
She was contemplating which of the two would cause her the least embarrassment and had decided on throwing the drink when an unexpected saviour appeared on the scene.
Major Henningsen, whom she hadn’t so far seen all night. He bent his broad, tough body over the colonel and said urgently, ‘You’re wanted in the lobby, Doug. Something important’s come up.’
The colonel blinked and looked grave. ‘I’ll be there on the double, Gus.’ He released Jessica’s thigh and marched off in the opposite direction from the lobby.
‘Is there really something important?’ Jessica tried to smooth the creases the colonel’s clammy hand had made in her frock.
‘No, but he’d had far too much liquor and he’ll have forgotten all about it if and when he finds the lobby.’ He sat down in the chair the colonel had vacated.
‘Thanks for rescuing me.’ She felt genuinely grateful, but, true to form, Major Henningsen immediately put her back up with his next words.
‘That’s okay, but what do you expect men to do when you turn up looking like that?’ he said curtly.
‘Looking like what?’ she gasped, enraged. ‘I came as a singer, not a courtesan. Are you suggesting I should have dressed as a nun?’
He gave a fleeting grin. Without his cap, she noticed that his crewcut hair wasn’t silver as she’d originally thought, but milk blond. ‘I’m not sure if that would have caused more excitement or less.’
‘Huh!’
‘I see you didn’t bring your little girl.’
‘Penny? I left her with a neighbour.’
‘Penny’s a cute name.’
‘I can’t say the same for Gus. You definitely don’t suit Augustus.’ Attila, perhaps, or Genghis Khan.
‘It’s Gustav, actually. My folks were Danish.’ He leaned back in his chair and regarded her disdainfully. ‘Where’s your husband?’
‘In the army,’ Jessica snapped.
‘What regiment?’
‘The Royal Artillery.’
‘Stationed where?’
‘I’ve no idea where he’s stationed. We’re separated.’
‘I thought as much.’ He nodded knowingly. ‘A respectable married woman would never wear a dress like that.’
Jessica made a superhuman effort to retain her temper and think of a way of riling him as much as he riled her. ‘I reckon the problem with my dress lies more with you than me.’ She patted his arm understandingly. ‘This is a perfectly normal evening dress that any woman with a decent shape and decent shoulders would wear. You may well say I’m not your type, but I reckon I’m very much so. You’re attracted to me and it scares you stiff, doesn’t it?’
He glared at her so balefully that she was worried he might strike her. Then his hard narrow lips twitched and suddenly he was laughing so much that he had to remove his glasses to wipe his eyes.
Jessica thought resentfully that as far as Major Henningsen was concerned, it was always
her
who ended up feeling discomfited. There was nothing more deflating than being laughed at, particularly by someone who looked as if they only laughed once a year. Perhaps, like the colonel, he was drunk.
‘It’s not fair,’ she thought. ‘I came to entertain them, not to be insulted.’ She got up abruptly to seek some food, and was captured by another major who turned out to be delightful company. He showed her pictures of his wife and children and told her she had the most glorious voice he’d ever heard. ‘Please come and sing for us again,’ he pleaded.
‘I second that,’ said a captain, overhearing. ‘I heard Helen Morgan sing once, and you were much better.’
The remark was enough to make the entire evening seem worthwhile. Helen Morgan was a famous, highly-thought-of nightclub singer in the States. Her ego had been fully restored and her stomach was pleasantly full, when she noticed it was nearly midnight and time she went home. There was no sign of the private who’d collected her, which wasn’t surprising as he wouldn’t be allowed into an officers’ party. She wondered if he was waiting in the lobby and was about to go and look, when a voice said grimly in her ear, ‘I’ve been delegated to take you home.’ She turned to find Major Gus Henningsen at her side.
‘Reluctantly delegated, I’m sure,’ she said coldly. ‘Is there no-one here who’ll take me willingly?’
‘If you would kindly collect your coat, ma’am, we’ll get going,’ he replied, ignoring her sarcasm.
They were halfway towards Bootle before he spoke. Jessica had taken a holy vow not to say a word before he did.
‘I’m sorry about my behaviour earlier,’ he said. His voice, for a change, was relatively pleasant. ‘It was rude of me to laugh the way I did.’
‘I consider you to be an utterly hateful person.’ It wasn’t just the laughing, but every single thing he’d done and said since they’d first met.
‘
Utterly
hateful?’ There was a catch in his voice, as if he might laugh again. She decided he was definitely drunk.
‘Utterly!’ Jessica said firmly. When you said the word more than once, it actually did begin to sound rather amusing.
‘Utterly!’ He whistled. ‘Phew!’
They didn’t speak again until the car drew up outside the King’s Arms and he handed her an envelope.
‘What’s this, a billet-doux?’
‘No, ma’am, it’s your fee – for singing.’
‘Thank you.’ A fee was entirely unexpected. She bade him a frosty ‘Goodnight,’ and slammed the car door before he could reply.
Once home, she opened the envelope and found a cheque for fifteen pounds, which she stuck behind the clock on the mantelpiece. Instead of feeling pleased, a sensation of inexplicable sadness came over her and for some reason she thought about the flat over the museum and the desolate beauty of the view from the window. Perhaps it was because the view had always depressed her, though Arthur had loved it. If only things hadn’t turned out the way they had and she’d felt able to settle in the Lake District! Arthur was a good man, yet she’d walked away from him, changed the entire course of her life, and here she was, a middle-aged woman with hennaed hair, all dolled up in a red dress singing for American soldiers. Major Henningsen had made her feel like a tart.