Always in My Heart (6 page)

Peggy Reilly had heard about her plight from the plumber and had called round immediately to offer help and practical advice. Cordelia sighed contentedly.
Dear Peggy, she was such a treasure. That visit had seen her move into Beach View while the repairs were done, and it hadn’t taken a great deal of persuasion from Peggy to make the arrangement permanent. The newly refurbished house had been sold, the money carefully invested, and Cordelia was content to live out the last of her years at the heart of this warm and loving family.

‘Silly old fool,’ she muttered as she clattered her teacup in the saucer and blinked away the sentimental tears. ‘Sitting here blubbing when you have so much to be thankful for – you should be ashamed of yourself.’

‘To be sure, is it talking to yourself now, Cordelia Finch?’

She glared at Ron, who’d come into the kitchen in his muddy boots, the equally filthy dog, Harvey, scrambling in behind him. His sudden entrance and bellowing voice had startled her. ‘At least I can have a sensible conversation that way,’ she retorted, ‘which is more than I’ve ever had with you.’

He waggled his greying brows, his blue eyes twinkling with humour in the weathered face as he rolled up the ratty sleeves of his disreputable old sweater and hitched up his sagging and much-patched trousers. ‘Is that right now? And what great things are ye debating? The price of bananas? The amount of sugar you’ll not be letting me have in me tea?’

She fiddled with her hearing aid as she regarded the boots and the panting dog that seemed to be grinning at her, and tried to look cross – though it was hard
to achieve when the pair of them eyed her with such cheekiness. Like his dog, Ron was a charmer, an old Irish rogue in his mid-sixties with more blarney than was good for anyone. But he did make her laugh. ‘Get those boots off,’ she ordered, ‘and do something about Harvey. He stinks to high heaven.’

‘He’s been rolling in the compost again, heathen eejit,’ Ron muttered as he toed off his boots, flung them back down the stairs in the vague direction of the basement scullery and grabbed Harvey by the scruff. ‘Will ye be following the boots, ye great lump,’ he growled.

The Bedlington-cross eyed him mournfully as he was dragged towards the concrete steps. Harvey was a big dog, with a shaggy brindle coat, floppy ears and long legs. In possession of an entire catalogue of expressions which he used to great effect when he knew he was in trouble, he was as scruffy and unruly as his owner.

They were both a pain in the neck, but Cordelia could forgive them anything, for Harvey and Ron had proved their courage many a time during the air raids as Harvey sniffed out survivors beneath the debris, and Ron helped to rescue them.

‘I don’t know what Peggy will say if she sees this floor,’ she muttered as Ron shut the door on Harvey, who proceeded to howl as if he’d been abandoned in the pit of hell, and not in the basement right next to his bowl of food.

‘Peggy will not be seeing any floor for a while yet,’
said Jim cheerfully as he appeared in the doorway carrying a pile of dirty nappies. ‘She’s to rest and be looked after, so she is. Treated like a queen.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Where do I put these?’

‘There’s a bucket under the sink,’ Cordelia replied as she pointed to the faded gingham curtains that hid all the cleaning paraphernalia. ‘Let them soak in there.’

She watched as he delved beneath the old stone sink. Jim was another rogue, with a glint in his eye and enough blarney to make you blush. A handsome man in his forties, Jim could charm the birds off the trees, and sell sand to the Arabs. He could also turn his hand to some dodgy dealing, which often led to trouble between him and Peggy – but it was clear that he adored Peggy and his family, and for Cordelia that was enough to redeem him.

Cordelia brought her wandering thoughts back into order as she heard the three lodgers coming down the stairs to knock on Peggy’s door. Fran and Suzy were nurses at Cliffehaven hospital and little Rita drove a fire engine. They were all young, with good appetites, and would need this filling hot breakfast to start the day, for it was bitterly cold out there.

‘Let the dog back in before he upsets the baby with his racket,’ she said wearily. ‘But clean him up a bit first.’

Ron winked at her and she did her best to glare with disapproval at such cheek – but she could feel her face burn, for he always made her want to giggle like a silly schoolgirl when he flirted like that.

Ron went to sort out his dog and Jim went outside to see if there were enough eggs to perhaps keep a few as barter for extra margarine or flour.

Cordelia carefully avoided the mud on the linoleum as she returned to stirring the porridge. It was lovely to be in charge of a kitchen again, and with a new baby in the house, and all the sweet young things dashing in and out, it chased away the gloom of memories and war and made her feel much more like her old self.

‘To be sure, that is the sweetest wee cub I ever did see,’ said Fran as she came into the kitchen, starched apron crackling over her neat uniform as she helped herself to tea. She tossed back the mane of fiery hair from her face and dreamily stared into the teacup. ‘All that dark hair and those long eyelashes – makes me feel all warm and broody.’

‘I’d have thought that being one of twelve would have put you off babies,’ said Suzy as she followed her to the table and reached for the teapot.

Fran shrugged. ‘Well now,’ she replied. ‘Maybe it does make a girl stop and t’ink, and I’ve had the endless lectures from Father O’Brian which are enough to put a girl off men and babies for life – but when they’re that wee and that perfect …’ She sighed and sipped her tea.

‘I suspect we’re all feeling a bit clucky at the moment,’ said Rita as she came clumping into the kitchen in her usual attire of sturdy boots, thick, manly trousers and moth-eaten WW1 flying jacket. ‘But it will
wear off soon enough when it’s bawling its head off at two in the morning.’

‘And what side of the bed did you get out of this morning, Miss Grumpy?’ teased Fran, her Irish lilt in direct contrast to Rita’s local, rather flat accent.

Rita’s brown eyes twinkled as she tried to bring order to the riot of dark curls that sprung round her face and fell to the sheepskin collar of her leather jacket. ‘The same side I get out every morning. But there was an emergency call-out to a chimney fire just before I got off duty, and I’ve only had three hours’ sleep.’

Suzy’s fair hair glinted beneath the starched cap in the weak sun that came through the dirty windowpane as she helped Cordelia ladle the porridge into bowls while Fran set out a tray to take into Peggy. ‘You’d be better off going back to bed,’ she said, her vowels rounded and smoothed by her careful upbringing in Surrey.

Rita shrugged. ‘I’m up now, so I thought I’d catch up on the arrangements for the motorcycle race next week, and then do a bit of work on the Norton. She’s misfiring again.’

‘You and that bike,’ sighed Cordelia, who secretly envied the freedom and opportunities young girls had these days. ‘It isn’t at all ladylike to be haring about on that ugly great thing, and it’s dangerous.’

‘Only if you don’t know what you’re doing,’ said Rita with a fond smile. ‘Don’t worry about me, Grandma Finch. I’m as tough as old boots.’

Cordelia glanced down at Rita’s thick, laced boots
and gave a sigh of exasperation. She was such a pretty little thing – why on earth she had to dress like a boy, was beyond her.

Having organised Peggy’s tray to her liking and sent Fran off with it, Cordelia sat down to her own breakfast. As the girls chattered, Harvey lay supine in front of the range, and Ron discussed the situation in Malaya with Jim, she felt a warm glow of happiness. This was her home, and these were the people she’d come to love the most – and at this very moment she wouldn’t have exchanged it for a pot of gold.

The plantation office was a simple wooden structure raised above the ground on sturdy concrete pillars to keep the white ants at bay. Nestled deep in the tree-covered valley and powered by one of the many generators on the estate, it was close to the vast storage sheds and the workshops where the trucks were maintained.

The windows and door were heavily screened against the flies and mosquitoes which buzzed and whined with monotonous persistence against the backdrop of jungle sounds. Sarah’s part of the office was sparsely furnished, for apart from the mouldering desk and rather rickety typist’s chair there was just a line of rusting metal filing cabinets against one wall, and a fly-spotted framed print of the King hanging from another. An ancient, rusting fan hung from the rafters beneath the corrugated iron roof, each slow, barely useful rotation accompanied by a most annoying squeak which seemed impervious to any amount of lubrication.

Sarah had been on tenterhooks all day, and although
she had a great deal of office administration to deal with, she found that even the most mundane tasks required added concentration. And yet there were moments when she simply stared into space, lost in thought as the monsoon rain hammered on the tin roof and the shadows deepened beneath the regimented rows of rubber trees.

She had been unable to relax enough to take her usual midday siesta, and as the hours had ticked slowly away and the telephone remained stubbornly silent, she became increasingly worried about her father and Philip. Up until today, the local Defence League had been a bit of a joke, with old men and boys playing at soldiers and going off to camp in the jungle or shooting their guns on the nearby range. No one had honestly believed that they might actually have to fight. But the call to the headquarters in KL meant that the attempted Jap invasion was being taken with the utmost seriousness – and that was extremely unsettling.

By mid-afternoon she could stand it no longer and had gone up to the house in the hope that the local radio station might shed some light on what was happening. But it seemed the station was no longer transmitting – which only made her worry more.

It was now late afternoon and the rain had finally stopped, but the temperature had soared and the air was torpid with heat and the smell of rotting jungle vegetation. Sarah placed the cover on her typewriter and pushed back from the scarred desk, which was
one of a pair that her grandfather had imported from England many years before. She needed a shower and a change of clothes, for her blouse stuck unpleasantly to her back and her hair was limp with perspiration – but she remained sitting there, reluctant to leave in case she missed her father and Philip, who were bound to call in here before going up to the house.

She lit a cigarette and restlessly twisted back and forth on the creaking chair as she gazed through the screened windows into the rapidly dwindling light. The Chinese and Malay coolies were splashing barefooted through the mud as they returned with the day’s second harvest of latex, stowed in jars which they carried in straw baskets dangling from the ends of the long poles across their shoulders. The Malay women wore plain sarongs, but in their drab shirts and short, baggy trousers it was hard to tell if the Chinese were male or female for, like their Malayan counterparts, their heads and shoulders were hidden by the wide conical hats that kept off the worst of the rainwater that still dripped from the trees.

Like her father, Sarah had always marvelled at the resilience and stamina of the hard-working coolies who were such an important part of the plantation – and she followed their progress through the trees until they were out of sight.

The latex would be stored and processed in the huge barns that lay just beyond the estate office, and then sent by truck down to Singapore, where it would be loaded onto cargo ships bound for England, America
and Australia. The war in Europe had seen a sharp rise in the demand for rubber, but the convoys of supply ships had to run the gauntlet of German U-boats and aerial attacks. Now that the Japanese had made their intentions clear, the journey would be even more hazardous.

Sarah stubbed out her cigarette and looked at her watch. It was almost six, and time to get home before her mother and Jane returned from the country club. She adjusted the combs in her hair so it didn’t straggle and stick to her hot face, gathered together the pile of letters she’d typed ready for Jock’s signature, and went into his office.

This room was very much her father’s, for it was redolent with pipe-smoke – a pleasure that Sybil had banned from the house long ago. It too had been sparsely furnished, with the cluttered desk taking up most of the space. The large chair behind it was sagging, the horsehair stuffing poking through where the leather had succumbed to Jock’s weight. In one corner stood a coat-tree, adorned with one of Jock’s old sweat-stained hats and a moth-eaten black umbrella, and in another was a small bamboo cabinet which held glasses, soda siphons, and bottles of gin and whisky to offer visitors – or for Jock to enjoy the odd nip when he felt the need for restoration after a hard morning’s work.

Sarah tidied away the documents strewn across the desk, emptied the ashtray, placed his pipe back in the rack with the others and put the magnifying glass back
in the desk drawer. Jock would never admit it, but his eyesight wasn’t as good as it once was, and he swore that the print was getting smaller on the contracts he had to read.

Leaving the stack of letters neatly on a fresh blotter, she left the office and let the screen door clatter behind her as she went down the wooden steps to the clearing where she’d parked the Austin Twelve. Her father had had it imported shortly before war had been declared and it was Sarah’s most treasured possession, for it gave her the independence to get about when she wanted and meant she didn’t have to rely on their driver, who was usually ferrying her mother somewhere.

The black coachwork was dull with dust and rain splatters, and the interior was stifling even though there had been very little sun that day. She climbed in, opened the windows and turned the key, noting the sweetness of the purring engine. The rains had turned the narrow track into a quagmire, the ruts and potholes filled with murky water so it was difficult to see how deep they were. Sarah drove slowly, not wanting to damage her precious car as it slid and slithered up the steep hill to the house.