The sharp smack across Beth’s legs took them all by surprise and it would have been followed by more if Terry hadn’t stepped forward and grasped the man’s upraised hand as Beth’s cries of outrage rent the air.
‘Keep out of this,’ Paul said to Terry. ‘It really is none of your business how I chastise my own daughter.’
‘It’s mine, though,’ Carmel said angrily, pulling Beth into her arms. ‘And I have never found the need to smack Beth.’
‘And this is the result,’ Paul countered. ‘A badly behaved and insolent child and one too used to getting her own way. I see I will have to instil some discipline here.’ He cocked an eye at Terry and said, ‘You still here?’
‘I am just on my way,’ said Terry miserably. He added to Carmel, ‘If you want me, I will probably lodge at my boss’s for a bit again. I’ll give you the address.’
Carmel nodded, knowing that it would be untenable for him to stay with Ruby now, but Paul said, ‘You will do no such thing. It is highly unlikely that my
wife
will need to call on you for anything. In fact, once you leave, I do not expect to see you ever again.’
‘He must,’ Carmel protested. ‘There’s Sam, for a start.’
‘He will take his bastard with him.’
‘Oh no he will not,’ Carmel cried, bouncing in front of Paul angrily. ‘And don’t you dare call my son a bastard. Terry and I married in all good faith and he never laid a hand on me, in that way, until we were married.’
‘Very laudable, but I still don’t want the evidence of your infidelity, whether intentional or otherwise, before my face every day.’
‘Paul, Terry can’t look after a baby and I am the child’s mother,’ Carmel said. ‘You can’t do this.’
‘Oh yes I can.’
‘Please, Paul,’ Carmel pleaded, putting a hand on his arm. ‘This really isn’t like you.’
Paul shook Carmel’s hand off and growled, ‘That Paul is dead and gone. This is the Paul you have to deal with now, but you are still my wife and what I say goes.’
‘No,’ Carmel said. ‘Not in this. I gave birth to Sam and he is my child as much as Beth. If you will not allow him to stay here, then I will leave you and take the child with me, and Beth too.’
‘Not Beth,’ Paul said. ‘I would fight you through the courts for Beth.’
He wouldn’t win though, Carmel told herself. But could she take that risk? She turned stricken eyes on Terry.
‘I am not having that man coming here ostensibly to see his son and really to see you,’ Paul went on. ‘And that is my final word on the subject.’
Then Terry knew what he had to do, for all it would break his heart. He had hoped at the end of all this he would be still able to see his son, be a father to the boy, take joy in his growing up, but all this he would have to give up for Carmel’s sake.
‘If I relinquish all ties with my son,’ he said, though he was having trouble forming the words, ‘will you allow him to stay with Carmel?’
‘Ah no, Terry,’ said Carmel, who knew what it had cost Terry to say that. She almost explained it to Paul, but she knew that this man who’d returned to her would have no sympathy for Terry under any circumstances.
Terry shook his head helplessly and said to Paul, ‘Well, will you?’
‘And you will have no contact with my wife for any reason?’
‘None,’ Terry said. ‘You have my word.’
‘Then yes, he can stay,’ Paul said.
Carmel sighed with relief, for she knew it would tear the heart out of her to lose Terry and she didn’t think she could bear to lose Sam as well.
In fact, when she watched Terry walk dejectedly away that day, she felt as if her heart had shattered into a million pieces. She was glad that Sam chose that moment to begin complaining and she was able to hide her tears from Paul, who wouldn’t understand them and might become
angry. She couldn’t linger in the baby’s room long, though, for she heard Paul shouting at Beth again.
Ruby had been unaware of the drama being played just the other side of her wall. It was Beth who told her in the end. Fed up with being shouted at, and frightened of the atmosphere presiding in the house, she took herself outside and sat on the swing Terry had made for her, swaying backwards and forwards, and letting the tears trickle down her cheeks unheeded.
Ruby, going out to her bin, heard the child crying and popped her head over the fence. ‘What’s up, bab?’
‘Oh, Auntie Ruby…’ Beth cried, relieved to see a familiar and safe face.
Ruby had seldom seen the child so downcast. ‘Come on, bab, can’t be that bad.’
‘It can, Auntie Ruby,’ Beth said. ‘My real daddy is back and he is old and horrid and has made Terry go away.’
Whatever Ruby expected Beth to say, it was not that. At first she could barely take it in and stared at the child in stupefaction for a second or two before saying, ‘Your real daddy, Beth? Are you sure that was what your mom said?’
Beth nodded. ‘It’s what she said. But he don’t look nothing like the picture what Mom gave me.’
Ruby decided she had to find out what was what. ‘How would you like to come round here and have a cup of cocoa?’ she asked. ‘You must be cold without your coat, and I’m sure I have some chocolate biscuits in the tin.’
‘Chocolate biscuits,’ Beth repeated. Now that Ruby mentioned it, she was cold, and cocoa and chocolate
biscuits in a familiar house where no one was shouting was suddenly a much more attractive prospect than going back inside her own home. ‘OK,’ she said.
Ruby only waited till she had the child settled before she set off for Carmel’s, only instead of nipping in the back, this time she went up to the front door and knocked. She hoped the child had got it wrong. She had nothing against Paul, but the man was dead and gone—or everyone thought he was—and Carmel had been that happy with Terry and her little family.
When Carmel opened the door, Ruby had only to look into her deadened and yet heartbreakingly painful eyes to know that Beth might be right after all.
Before either was able to speak, a haggard, white-haired man appeared by Carmel’s side and snarled out while Ruby was coping with the shock of his appearance, ‘Hello, Ruby. I wondered how long it would take you to come snooping around here.’
Carmel turned and looked at Paul, but said nothing.
Ruby, annoyed at the way he had spoken to her, said, ‘I am not snooping. I came to tell you that Beth is in my house and she told us that you had arrived home, Paul, and I came round to see for myself as any concerned friend would.’
‘Of course they would,’ Carmel said in a voice thick with unshed tears. ‘Come in, Ruby, and we will tell you all about it…’
Later Ruby said to George, ‘The man has suffered, that much is certain, but he is changed and I don’t mean appearance alone. He seems angry all the time and is that nasty to Carmel. Anyway, I’m going to listen out for the nippers tonight while they go and see the old man. Carmel wanted
to go on her own, prepare him like, but Paul wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘And Terry?’
Ruby shrugged and sighed sadly, before saying, ‘He had to go, didn’t he? And Carmel is going round like she is encased in misery.’
Carmel wished Paul had been agreeable to her preparing Jeff. She thought he was going to collapse when he opened the door to them both. Like Carmel, he hadn’t at first recognised the son, but then he was completely bowled over by the news. He put his arms around Paul’s emaciated body and hugged him tight while tears rained down his face.
‘Praise be!’ he cried. ‘Oh, thanks be to God! Come in, come in.’
Carmel stepped into the hall. She had been here just once before and she noted the house bore no resemblance to the last time she had seen it. Now it had an air almost of faded grandeur. Jeff led them to a small room he called his ‘snug’ and he explained he spent a lot of his time in there.
‘Most of the house is shut up now,’ he said. ‘Emma is probably turning in her grave, but there you are.’
She could indeed be turning in her grave, because she had died in the spring when Sam had been only a few months old. If Emma had still been alive, Carmel knew she wouldn’t have walked down the path, let alone gone inside. She knew Jeff had never liked the place and told her he considered it too ostentatious for his tastes and that he had not chosen it.
‘I sometimes look back on my life,’ he’d said, ‘and see
what I have achieved. Through working myself into the ground I now have a beautiful mansion, a top-of-the-range Rolls-Royce and an extravagant way of living. I also have two sons I hardly know, a wife who can’t bear me near her and a house that never has been and never will be a home.’
She had felt so sad and sorry for him when he’d said that, and now she looked across at him almost drinking in the sight of Paul, whom he thought he would never see again. She couldn’t expect Jeff to share in her heartache at her losing Terry, for all he liked the man, and as he called to the cook to fetch champagne he poured himself and his son each a large Scotch and Carmel a sweet sherry, ‘to be going on with’.
Jeff wanted to know, as Carmel had, what had happened to Paul, where he had been. Carmel let Paul’s words wash over her and remembered Emma’s awful funeral, which Jeff had inveigled her into attending.
‘It wouldn’t be right, Jeff.’
‘Please, my dear?’ Jeff had pleaded. ‘I need someone on my side to cope with this, and Matthew can’t get leave, or says he can’t, which amounts to the same thing. It isn’t as if she can hurt you any more.’
‘Oh, Jeff…’
‘It would mean so much to me if you would come.’
What could she say to that? She thought of the very many ways that Jeff had helped her and her family, and much against her better judgement she agreed to go.
Lois had been staying with her parents for a few days before the funeral so hadn’t known that Carmel was going to attend until they got out of the cars at the
church. Carmel saw Lois’s eyes widen and then she felt herself begin to shake as she saw they were unloading a wheelchair and realised that Lois’s mother was also going to be there.
There weren’t that many, in all truth, for Emma had successfully alienated and ignored any friends she may have had long before she became too ill for visitors. Yet in the church Carmel felt uncomfortable and could almost feel the animosity around her and the malicious eyes boring into her back. At the reception, she saw all the Chisholm women glaring at her, and Lois’s mother in black from head to foot, sitting in her wheelchair, looking ever inch some sort of murderous spider, her glittering eyes scanning the room, looking for her latest prey and coming to light on Carmel.
As Carmel saw the Chisholms approach her, she looked about for Jeff, but he was nowhere to be seen. Then the older woman, flanked by her daughters, almost spat out, ‘This is all your doing, you know. Made Emma’s life a misery.’
Carmel thought that was rich, but before she had chance to speak, Melissa said, ‘We know the sort of place you were brought up. Had to have Paul, didn’t you, and he had been promised to me for years. You are nothing but a dirty gold-digger.’
‘Guttersnipe,’ the older woman said. ‘And no thought for Paul, dragging him down into the scum with you. No wonder you broke Emma’s heart.’
‘This is monstrous,’ Carmel said, incensed. ‘You have no right to call me names. All you are doing is cheapening yourselves and, as for Paul, I made him do nothing. You didn’t know him if you think that.’
‘Not know him?’ Melissa scoffed. ‘I have known Paul since the day I was born.’
‘You knew Paul the boy, manipulated by his mother,’ Carmel said scathingly. ‘I fell in love with Paul the man.’
Before any could reply to this, Marjory Baker, whose chair had been pushed over to them by a waiter, suddenly said, ‘Emma couldn’t stand the girl.’ She stared at Carmel with spiteful dark eyes. ‘Said you were a trollop, and that you used to entice the men.’
‘That will do,’ Jeff said, coming upon them at that moment. ‘I am surprised at you. Carmel had nothing to do with my wife’s death and you all know it. She died of cancer.’
‘That she was too heartbroken by that one’s doings to fight,’ Marjory Baker said.
‘That’s rubbish,’ Jeff said. ‘And now I think I will take Carmel to where the company is more congenial.’
‘That means home, Jeff,’ Carmel said as he swung her away.
‘But, my dear…’
‘No, Jeff,’ said Carmel, and her voice was like steel. ‘The very air is poisonous here and I have been away from my family long enough.’
Later, Lois told Carmel of a furious Uncle Jeff virtually throwing the Chisholm women out and wiping the floor with her mother, which left her dumbstruck, probably for the first time in her life.
‘I just can’t see why they all thought you had anything to do with Aunt Emma’s death. I mean, you hadn’t made a voodoo doll of her and gone round sticking pins in it, had you?’
‘Lois,’ Carmel said decidedly, ‘if I had ever thought of
doing such a thing I wouldn’t have waited so long about it.’
The news flew around like lightning that Paul Connolly, whom everyone thought killed in France, was home again, large as life. A lot felt sorry for Carmel and Terry and that lovely little lad they’d had, and owned that coming back from the dead was not always the best solution for everyone, but really all this was nobody’s fault. All in all the general consensus was that war was a bloody bugger.
The only one who didn’t feel this was Father Robertson. In his opinion the only true marriage was the one he had conducted of Carmel with Paul, a Catholic man to a Catholic woman, their union blessed by the sacrament of Nuptial Mass in which the two had taken Communion, as expected. That had no comparison to Carmel’s hasty marriage to a man of another faith, or even worse, no faith at all. Well, of course that marriage didn’t stand any more and it was the best thing all round, in his opinion. This was actually what he told Carmel that first Sunday after Paul’s return, and she had been so burdened with sadness at the loss of Terry, she couldn’t speak to him.
Paul found it hard to settle into the house and into postwar Britain. It was difficult to realise that people’s lives had gone on and they hadn’t just marked time while he had been away. He was furious that his motorbike had been sold.
‘Paul, be reasonable,’ Carmel pleaded. ‘Terry didn’t think that you would ever need it again. He didn’t think you were even alive.’
‘Huh. So you say.’
He didn’t understand the shortages either, the make-do-and-mend culture ingrained in the people through the war. He just wouldn’t co-operate with having five inches of water in the bath and refused to believe there was a shortage of coal and that that too was rationed.
He hated the food with a passion. Paul had never experienced a wartime menu and so he didn’t see why he couldn’t lather butter on the bread as he liked, though he detested the grey stodgy national loaf. Nor did he see why he couldn’t have as many cups of tea as he wanted, though he didn’t want national dried milk in it. He said he couldn’t abide dried egg. He was a
headache to feed but then he turned his nose up at or criticised most of the meals served up anyway.
This came to a head one day when he had been home a few days. For the evening meal, Carmel served sardine fritters, mashed potatoes, cabbage and turnip.
‘What d’you call this muck?’ Paul asked as he tasted a piece of fritter and spat it out on to his plate.
Carmel sighed. ‘Sardine frittters,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t points for anything else.’
Carmel looked from her daughter, biting her bottom lip in apprehension at Paul’s raised voice, to her son in his high chair, battering the mashed potatoes on his tin plate with the spoon she had given him, and said, ‘We have to do with what we can get, Paul, and it isn’t always easy.’
‘Not easy?’ Paul shouted. ‘This is bloody inedible. Shit! That’s what it is.’ And the plate and the dinner went sailing through the air to hit the wall with a crash. The baby began to wail and Beth to shake in fear as Carmel watched the potato slide down the wall in glutinous lumps to join the rest of the meal and broken pottery on the floor.
She had had enough and she stood up and yelled, ‘What has that achieved, you bloody stupid imbecile, except make a mess for me to clean up and terrify the children? I just hope you are bloody proud of yourself.’
She saw the raised hand and side-stepped it. ‘Don’t you dare raise your hand to me!’ she screamed. ‘You are a bully, no better than Hitler. You have picked the wrong one to start that sort of caper with, for I will not stand it. You try that again and I will be over in Ireland with Mammy and both children before you can blink, so think on.’
Paul did think on. He was bitterly ashamed of himself. He had never raised his hand to Carmel before and had never imagined a time when he would even consider it. He knew that somehow he had to get a grip on the anger coursing through him.
Paul had been home a week or so, when Ruby saw him pass the house one morning and she took the opportunity to pop next door. Carmel was tackling a pile of ironing while Sam was taking a nap.
‘All right?’ Ruby asked.
‘No,’ Carmel admitted miserably, too dejected to keep pretending everything was fine. ‘Ruby, I don’t understand myself at all,’ she said. ‘For months and months I missed Paul so much and I would have done anything, literary anything, to have him walk through the door. I have told him this, but I doubt he believes me. He is Beth’s father and yet he shows her no affection and I know she would open up like a flower if he did and be less afraid of him. But,’ she said with a sigh, ‘if I try saying any of this he says I have ruined her.’
‘You have not,’ Ruby said stoutly. ‘Beth is a good wee girl and a little ray of sunshine into the bargain. I know that you’ll have little Sammy the same before he is much older. What about any affection Paul gives you? One time he’d have taken the moon from the sky if you had wanted it.’
Tears stung Carmel’s eyes. ‘Don’t, Ruby. Remembering how Paul was is like a dagger piercing my soul. Now…oh, he doesn’t like me out of his sight, but that is more like a control thing than because he wants me near him. He is never out of the house for long and he sits there
sort of brooding. I am almost afraid to speak, because I know he will find something to criticise.’
She looked at Ruby with tearful eyes and went on, ‘I try not to think about Terry because that…that just hurts so very much. I have dealt that man such a damaging blow, I think sometimes maybe he will never get over it. No one should have to bear pain like that. I mean, neither of us planned to fall in love and both of us thought we were free.’
‘I know that, bab.’
‘Paul’s like a stranger, Ruby,’ Carmel said. ‘And a stranger I don’t much like, and together with the heartbreak over losing Terry…Oh God, Ruby, I am so bloody unhappy.’
Ruby knew that full well and wished she could put her arms around her friend, but at that moment they heard the front door open. Carmel immediately scrubbed the tears from her cheeks, adjusted her expression and picked up the iron again, while Ruby slipped out the back door, because though they hadn’t spoken a word about it, they knew this new Paul wouldn’t like them having a chat while he was out of the house.
Jeff came to see them one early afternoon, when Paul had been home a few days. He hoped that his son might have got over the awful shock he must have had arriving home to find Carmel married again, though he would know that Carmel would never have knowingly betrayed him. Maybe, he thought they had begun to gel back together again the way they had once been, but he was appalled at the setup in that house that had once been such a happy place.
Paul took no notice of little Sam at all, and at coming up to a year old he was a delight. Jeff couldn’t understand how anyone could be immune to his charms. On the other hand, Paul took almost too much notice of Carmel, either ridiculing her, or treating her in some other disdainful way. Jeff tried remonstrating with him and it seemed to make matters worse.
He returned home a worried man. He wondered if Paul just needed more time to adjust, or whether something should be said. He wished Matthew and Chris were home. He would value their advice and maybe one of them could have a word if they thought it necessary.
Carmel was so glad to see Lois and Colin back a couple of days later. At first Lois was overjoyed to see Paul, although Carmel had written to tell her the news. She declared it to be a miracle and she threw her arms around him, cried over him and kissed him and said Chris would be delighted. But she too very soon saw a vast difference in his manner.
‘When I remember how you once were together, the change in him is incredible.’
‘I know.’
‘Can he still…? You know what I mean. Is he OK in bed?’
Carmel shook her head. ‘He can perform all right, but sex between us used to be wonderful. At first, I did think that we might achieve some measure of closeness there, but now it feels like a nightly assault on my body, a stamp of ownership when he asks over and over if he is better than Terry. Oh, I don’t know.’ Carmel sighed. ‘Dreadful, heinous things happened to him, things that
should never happen to a human being, and he did say that at the camp it was every man for himself. You couldn’t allow yourself to care about anyone else and I suppose that would get to be second nature after four or five years.’
‘So maybe Paul’s emotions are just buried deeply and could surface again,’ Lois said.
‘Or perhaps snuffed out altogether,’ Carmel said. ‘And only time will tell which.’
By January, Paul’s medical records had caught up with him and he had to report to the military doctor for a medical to ensure a proper discharge from the army. The doctor studied the notes sent on from the hospital in Berlin and knew Paul was a very sick man indeed. He ordered further X-rays to see if the shadow on his lungs had grown. He didn’t tell Paul the level of his concern. Instead he said it was a routine procedure to clear up any minor problems. He also told him the results would be sent to his own doctor in about a fortnight’s time and Paul had no reason to disbelieve what he was told.
And so a fortnight later he sat stunned in the chair and looking at the Dr Baxter as if he couldn’t believe his ears. ‘I wish there was better news I could give you, Dr Connolly,’ the doctor said.
Paul stared at him. He had thought if they found anything wrong they could soon fix it. The doctor had intimated that with his ‘routine’ and ‘to clear up any minor problems’. Paul hadn’t any inkling the news would be so bad. He had heard that there were great strides made during and since the war in the curing of many diseases that had been killers in his youth and
he’d always been a fit man. Hadn’t he survived the labour camp when many hadn’t? Many fell like flies and now here was this doctor telling him…
He wanted to rant and rail at the unfairness of life, to shout at this stupid doctor, throw things, smash up his goddamned room. But he did none of these things because, in his heart of hearts, he knew it would make no difference.
Yet he had to be sure. ‘Are you saying that there is nothing in this God-awful world that you can do to get me right?’
The doctor’s voice was soothing and his eyes sympathetic, but the words were exactly the same, ‘I really am sorry. It is the very worst news a doctor has to give anyone, but the tumour on your lung is huge and completely inoperable. Haven’t you found yourself breathless at times?’
‘A bit,’ Paul said almost impatiently. ‘It was nothing to speak of.’
‘Dr Connolly, you know yourself that the symptoms will only worsen. I could arrange for you to be admitted.’
But Paul had had enough of hospitals and their rules and regulations. ‘No hospital,’ he said to the doctor.
‘But, Dr Connolly—;’
‘My wife is a nurse and I want to stay at home,’ Paul said. ‘How long have I got?
’Dr Connolly, it’s impossible to—;’
‘No. it isn’t,’ Paul burst out, his eyes wild with fear and panic. ‘You are not talking to an idiot here. You can have an educated guess.’
The doctor knew he couldn’t tell the distressed man in front of him that his death could be imminent. He
wished someone had come with him and so he said. ‘I would say six to twelve months or so. Are you sure your wife will be able to cope?’
‘I’m sure,’ Paul said.
With months before he thought he had to worry about the death sentence hanging over his head, Paul resolved to shelve it and so when Carmel asked him what the doctor said, he said everything was fine.
‘Not quite fit for work yet, but getting there.’
Carmel wondered if he would ever be ready. The doctors weren’t there in the night when sometimes the rasping in Paul’s throat and wheezing in his chest was so loud it kept her awake and she had noted how often he got out of breath. She had worried that it might point to something serious, and was relieved that it didn’t.
‘He will probably pick up in the spring,’ Lois said, when Carmel expressed concern. ‘Let’s face it, these dark and freezing days would put years on anyone.’
She wasn’t concerned much about Paul, though, and Carmel couldn’t blame her, for Chris was finally due for demob on 20 February and Lois could hardly wait. As Matthew was being demobbed then too, Jeff suggested a celebratory dinner for them on Saturday 23 at Penn’s Hall Hotel, a salubrious place in Sutton Coldfield in its own grounds. Chris’s parents and Ruby and George were also invited, yet Carmel wasn’t looking forward to it one bit, for Paul was so unpredictable.
She was nervous when Matthew came to greet her straight away, holding the hand of a pretty young girl he introduced as Alison Sheldon, his fiancée, and Carmel greeted the couple warmly. Jeff had noticed how nervous
Beth was around her father and though he was heartbroken over that, he had placed Beth opposite Matthew and Alison for the dinner and Carmel could see that both of them thought her delightful. Away from her father, Carmel saw a spark of the old Beth appear as she basked in their approval, while Sam had been fed and put to sleep in the hotel room they were using for the night.
Chris had been over the moon to hear of his friend’s survival, but had been distressed by his manner to both Carmel and Beth in the couple of days he had been home. Lois had warned him how changed Paul was, but he hadn’t been that concerned, convinced it was just that he needed to adjust.
However, he had soon seen that Paul’s problems were more deep-seated than that. That evening, as Chris sat opposite him, he was upset by his friend’s manner to Carmel, and by the end of the meal he decided enough was enough.
‘Come on,’ he said to Paul. ‘I need a pint and I am sure it is your turn.’
This was the way they had always been together and Paul smiled as he said, ‘No, I’m sure you are wrong. It’s your turn.’
‘We’ll fight it out when we get there,’ Chris said. ‘Come on before I die of thirst.’
Once they had got the pints in their hands, however, Chris dropped the jocular tone and stance and said to Paul, ‘We need to talk.’ He led the way to a small table in a quiet corner of the bar.
Paul raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Here comes the bloody lecture.’
‘Not at all,’ Chris said. ‘Not yet, anyway. When I’ve
finished you may feel you deserve a lecture for I am going to fill you in first on what our wives, yours and mine, were doing with their time while you were sweating it out in a labour camp and I was working my fingers to the bone to save lives.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘You know the type of woman Carmel was and would be again if you would let her be without finding fault with her every five minutes,’ Chris said. ‘Honestly now, in a war of that magnitude, was she the sort to be happy knitting squares for blankets or rolling bandages when she could be applying them? She went back to nursing at the General Hospital and only the goodness of Ruby and George in taking care of Beth enabled her to use her skills in that way. You have seen the devastation of the city’s buildings—well, they dealt with the city’s injured and maimed and dying, often with bombs hurtling down around them. You have no idea what danger they faced day after day. In fact, the General was hit once, Lois told me, and they lost two good friends. You might remember their old room-mate Jane, and the flirtatious Aileen, as well as a number of other colleagues and patients.’