She didn’t like to think about that.
Instead, she thought about the letter she’d written to Danny at the camp and she realised he couldn’t have received it before he’d written this letter to her. She could only hope that he’d received it before he left and that at reading it he would know how sorry she was and how completely she returned his love. She hadn’t written anything about the bad things that had happened that summer. Not yet. As much as she wanted to tell him, it hadn’t seemed right to let him go with news like that.
After reading the letter for the third time, Mena took up her pen and began her reply, toying constantly with the coin on the chain around her neck as she wrote. She had a good idea how long it would take to find him from all the letters that had been sent back and forth between her brothers over the years. She knew she had to write straight away to confirm Danny’s intentions so there was no misunderstanding. And she would say yes, of course she would marry him if that was what he wanted to ask. She didn’t mind a jot if he wanted to propose in a letter and she would tell him so. She thought she’d tell him about Montalvo too, but she talked herself out of it. She didn’t want to blacken things. She could write and tell him afterwards.
Chapter Twenty-Four
October 1944.
A
fter that first letter in September, Mena wrote many more letters to Danny while she waited to hear from him again. She would lie awake most nights wondering how he was and what he was doing, and she was always up early to look out for the postman. She knew by now that Danny was in Holland because she’d received two more V-mail letters from him.
The first told her how happy he was at getting the letter she’d written when she went to the camp that day, and how sorry he was that she hadn’t been allowed to see him. It reached him on the morning of the jump, he’d said, and he read it on the plane. He’d told her everyone was grey-faced and quiet as usual as the C-47s took off and crossed the English Channel, but not him. He’d said he was grateful to her for getting him through that and knowing she still cared for him like she did would get him through a great deal more in the weeks to come.
The second V-mail came a week after the first and in it Danny had explained that he hadn’t had much chance to write. He’d been in the thick of it, he’d said, and she was left to imagine the rest because any mail was heavily censored and he couldn’t go into details. Early in the month though, Pop had been able to fill Mena in a little on what Danny was doing.
They received regular letters from Mary, who received regular letters from Edward. It seemed that by the time Mena received Danny’s second letter, the fighting in Holland - code-named, Market Garden - had moved on. Danny, with the 82nd Airborne had landed near Grave to take certain strategic bridges across the Maas River and the Maas-Waal canal, working their way to Nijmegen to take the main bridge there. Edward Buckley with the British 1st Airborne were to take the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem and hold the town until relieved. Along with the US 101st Airborne the paratroopers were to pave the way for the British Guards Armoured Division who were heading the XXX Corps’ advance: a combined force of several allied divisions with whom the various airborne units were to link up. Allied casualties were high and Pop had said that both Danny and Edward were fortunate not to have been killed or captured.
Mena wrote to Danny every day. She wrote silly things most of the time, she knew that. She wrote them in her room late in the afternoon, listening to the same two tunes on her phonograph until
In the Mood
was as familiar to her as a childhood nursery rhyme and her mother had to ask her to stop continually humming it. Mostly, she wrote about her day, which she soon realised was incredibly dull, so she took to updating Danny on what was happening in whatever book she was reading. She thought he wouldn’t mind what she said in her letters as long as she kept writing them and as long as she told him how much she loved him at the end of every one.
She was waiting for the reply to the letter she’d written in the meadow at Wigston before telling him about the baby. She had to know that he was serious about marrying her first. Then she would just have to hope that he felt the same way afterwards. Danny would understand wouldn’t he? It was just a baby after all - no fault of its own. She wished it was their baby as the man in the personnel tent at Shady Lane had assumed.
She often fantasised to herself that Danny was the father. Some days she would look at herself in the mirror for a whole hour or more, just staring at the bump like she could see the baby inside, and through her fantasy she’d learnt to smile at it. It was definitely showing now through all but the loosest of dresses and the close-fitting utility clothing everyone was wearing to save on material wasn’t helping to hide it. She’d even felt it kick once or twice, or thought she had.
The letter she’d been waiting for came on a Wednesday. It was the middle of the month and Pop had just lit the fire in the sitting room and updated Mena on how the war was going, telling her on this occasion that after sixty-three days of fighting, Warsaw had fallen.
“The Russians weren’t much help to them in the end,” Pop said. “More politics, I suppose.” He began to prepare his pipe. “It was a slaughter, I heard. Those who survived were evacuated and the city razed to the ground.”
Mena was sitting with Pop by the fire in her dressing gown. She liked it when Pop was home, although she never knew any more than he did when he might have to go out on a house call. If he hadn’t been out during the night, he was always first down and first to collect the post from the mat with his paper, and whenever there was anything for Mena, he would bring it straight to her with a secret smile that suggested he was as excited for her as she was for herself.
As soon as he gave it to her she knew this was the letter she had been waiting for. It wasn’t a V-mail like the rest, presumably because this time Danny had more to say than could be written in the space that V-mail letters allowed. She didn’t know how he managed to get it out to her but she didn’t much care just as long as he had. Mena thought it had taken so long because it had travelled by regular mail. She found herself holding her breath as she tore the envelope open. Would Danny really ask her to marry him? She supposed he would.
It began with promise.
Dearest Mena,
I can’t begin to say how happy I was at receiving your letter. Wigston will always hold a special place in my heart and boy, what I wouldn’t give for a pile of chips and scratchings wrapped in old newspaper and covered with that malt vinegar you put on them. Those days seem like heaven to me now. Many’s the time I’ve been reminded of England since I left. My ears seem tuned to that accent of yours - a ‘blimey’ here or a ‘thanks awfully, old chap’ there from your artillery boys. And it doesn’t seem to matter how bad a situation is, they always find time for a ‘spot of tea’ - even with shells falling like raindrops around them. I guess that’s where the British ‘stiff upper lip’ expression comes from.
I wish I could tell you that things over here haven’t been so bad, but that would be a lie. It’s been awful hard and, well, I’ve said it before - knowing you’re there for me keeps me going. I took a piece of shell in the leg a few days back, but don’t worry, it’s healing well. Just a flesh wound, they said. It’ll give me something to show the grandchildren some day and I guess it could have been a whole lot worse.
By the way, Winkelman told me a story the other day that you might be interested to hear. You remember Mel, don’t you? Who could forget big Mel? Anyway, he told me there was a fight involving one of our boys and a Dutch fella one night. The joker had been drinking and it seems he took more than a fleeting fancy to one of the local girls. Well, the Dutchman was her father and he rightly kicked up a fuss. Our guy pulled a knife on the old man, but before he could use it the girl skewered him with a pitchfork! What do make of that? Well, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was the same knife-happy joker at the dance that night. I know it’s wrong of me, but I like to think so. You could say he had it coming to him, but I guess we’ll never know.
There was this time... Oh hang it, Mena, I know I’m skirting the issue here with all this nonsense, aren’t I? So here’s the thing. Will you marry me, Mena? There I’ve gone and said it. I’ve asked the question I’d have liked to ask you in person, but I guess it’s only right you should know what’s in my heart. Say, how does that cabin by the Kanawha River sound. I just know you’d love West Virginia if you’d give it a chance. I’d pick you wild flowers every day and we’d get a boat and go fishing. That sounds real swell, doesn’t it?
Well, I have to finish up now. I love you, Mena. Write me again as soon as you can.
Danny.
Mena’s cheeks flushed. “Oh, Pop!” she said. She just stared at him for several seconds. Then she re-read the part of the letter where Danny popped the question. “He wants to marry me!”
Pop’s moustache began to twitch until his whole face lit up with laughter. He reached across the settee, hugged her and said, “Then I’m as happy as any father could be. And don’t fret yourself,” he added. “That boy’s a survivor. I knew it the first day I saw him.”
As happy as Mena was, the moment did not last long. It seemed that their merriment had travelled and her mother now appeared in the doorway smiling along with them even though she could have no idea why.
“What’s all this then?” Margaret asked. She came into the room and sat in the single chair by the fire, crossed her legs and clasped her hands together as if in prayer.
Mena couldn’t speak. She looked at Pop and Pop looked at her. He smiled tentatively at Margaret and said, “Mena’s had another letter.”
“How nice,” her mother said. “From the American boy?”
Mena nodded.
“Well, let’s see it, dear.”
Mena’s eyes fixed on her mother’s outstretched fingers until they began to flick with impatience. She hadn’t asked to see any of her previous letters and Mena had done well to hide them from her. She could only suppose that her mother knew this was no ordinary letter and Mena had no intention of letting her read it. She wondered what Emma Bovary would have done. She thought she would have concocted some plausible story and dismissed the letter as something quite trivial and unworthy of her mother’s attention, but Mena couldn’t think of Danny’s letter like that.
In the end she considered that Madame Bovary, once discovered, would have reacted more directly, so she faked a smile, stood up and said, “Mother, we’re getting married.”
There was no disguising the derision in her mother’s laugh. “You’re doing no such thing!” she said. “Now let me see it.”
Mena held the letter behind her back. She could feel her jaw tightening, her teeth clenching. Her mother’s nostrils flared back at her beneath eyes full of scorn, but Mena stood her ground even as her mother stepped closer. Mena would not be told whom she could love and she knew the words that would turn her mother to stone before she could take one more step.
“And that’s not all,” Mena said.
Her mother’s advance faltered and Mena moved within slapping distance, smiling back to spite her hateful glare. “I’m having his baby!” she said, defiant in her moment as she watched her mother reel back onto the chair, face clasped between her hands as she crumpled into a pathetic, speechless heap.
Mena turned to Pop, whose expression still held concern for her, but it was now intermingled with the shock of her revelation. Her tone softened dramatically. “We’re going to live in America after the war,” she said. It saddened her to say that to Pop, knowing she would have to leave him behind with her mother and that she would perhaps never see him again after she’d gone. “West Virginia,” she added, going to him and just holding him so tightly.
Chapter Twenty-Five
November 1944.
M
ena Lasseter was having Danny’s baby. That was the lie she would have everyone believe, and why not? Apart from Joan, no one else need know what had happened that night at St Peter’s, although she supposed Danny would also know by now; she’d written straight back to him telling him all about Victor Montalvo: how she’d met him at Shady Lane that May when all along it was Danny she’d gone to see. And she told him how Montalvo had deceived her for his own unthinkable ends and of the fear and misery it had brought her.
She cried every word onto the page and wished her tears would wash each one away again as soon as she wrote it. But it was the truth, come what may. She had been raped and she was pregnant, and the man who wanted to marry her had to know everything about her if they were to live their happy lives together by the river Danny had spoken of.
And it could not come soon enough for Mena.
Her mother barely spoke to her any more, which was fine in itself as far as Mena was concerned, but it created such a disagreeable atmosphere in the Lasseter house that the place quickly lost everything that had once been good about it; even Pop’s dependable smile, which seemed to take the very heart of the house with it. The twins from London had gone, too. Their mother had sent for them at the end of October and Mena missed the energy they brought to the house in the absence of her brothers, which could never now be replaced. Even Xavier and Manfred seemed different, as if sensing the changes in that perceptive way animals often do. They became aloof, like they no longer wanted to be there either, sleeping under beds and showing an uncharacteristic lack of interest at meal times. Mena thought the shine had gone from their marble eyes.
It all served to get Mena out of the house again. At the beginning of November she went back to her voluntary work at the local hospital libraries and she told everyone she knew, and even some she didn’t, about Danny and the baby and about her plans for the wedding, which would take place at St Mary’s just as soon as Danny could get back to her. She told her comforting lie so often that the truth behind it soon diminished in favour of this new ideal until, to Mena, it was no lie at all. It was no longer
her
baby it was
their
baby. Not that it would look much like Danny, she supposed, but they would be in America by the time any obvious inheritable differences began to show. Provided he took her news well and that it didn’t come between them. And why would it? She hadn’t cheated on him after all. She was the victim in all this.