Angel of the North (3 page)

‘It was very good of you to spare the time to help us, especially after the terrible time you’ve had at the hospital lately,’ Mrs Elsworth condescended.

‘Yes, it was high jinks at the infirmary, the night before April Fools’ Day!’ Marie pulled up her sleeve to display her newly healed scar. ‘Glass splinters shooting into
the ward like bullets, and then we were dragging beds around with only hurricane lamps and torches for light. But we were lucky, there was none of us badly hurt, not like people in the buildings
round about.’ She pulled her sleeve down again. ‘It put the Victoria wing out of action, though – three wards lost. We’re about 160 beds fewer because of it, but I was more
upset by the damage to the Metropole Hall on West Street than anywhere else.’ She sighed heavily. ‘It had the best dance floor in Hull. I’ll really miss that place; I learned to
do the Lambeth Walk there.’

That earned her a disapproving frown from Mrs Elsworth. ‘There are more important places to worry about than dance halls, my girl.’

Mr Elsworth, who was in the civil defence, backed his wife up. ‘Control HQ, for example,’ he said. ‘When that land mine fell outside the Shell Mex building on Ferensway we
hardly knew what had hit us. People blown in all directions, ceilings and walls caving in, furniture and filing cabinets picked up and dropped anyhow, and fires breaking out all over the place.
People dead, people wounded, and a lot of those who weren’t were shocked rigid and useless for anything. A few of us were trying to put the fires out, and give the layout of the building to
the rescue services, but it was a complete bloody shambles.’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘I was glad I’d lent the Wolseley to you, Charles, or that would have gone up, too. All the
official cars outside were blown sky high. And nothing left of the policeman but bits of his uniform.’

‘I know that poor man’s wife,’ said Mrs Elsworth. Her eyes were so reproachful Marie felt as guilty as if she’d dropped the bomb on the Shell Mex building herself.

‘I know, it was awful, but I wasn’t talking about what got hit the worst, just what I’ll miss the most.’

‘Doing the Lambeth Walk, evidently. Poor Dr Diamond killed as well, and only the day after we’d seen him when we went to give blood. Charles came home early that night, didn’t
you, Charles? They had to clear the dance hall to make room for homeless families.’

Charles looked as if he’d have liked to cuff his mother round the ear.

Marie’s jaw dropped. ‘Dance hall? You never told me you’d been to a dance hall!’

‘Hang it all, you were at work, and it was my first night on leave. It won’t last for ever. I’ve got to make the most of it. Live life to the full, while I can,’ he
protested.

The heat rose to Marie’s cheeks. ‘So it seems,’ she said. ‘I’m helping to move a hundred and odd patients, imagining you out of the shelter and safely tucked up in
bed, and you’re swanning off to dance halls – without a word to me!’

Charles reddened. ‘It’s pretty obvious you go dancing without
me,
if you miss the Metropole Hall so much,’ he retorted. ‘We’ve hardly ever been there. I
suppose you dance with a lot of foreign servicemen.’

Unable to deny the charge, Marie was silent for a moment, now on the defensive. ‘Well, there was never any harm in it! I went with Nancy, or Margaret – when she was alive –
even after she got married, if her husband was working. And we always left by ourselves.’

‘Well so did I!’ Charles protested, with a glance in his mother’s direction, ‘and I didn’t get the chance to tell you; I went on the spur of the moment. So while
you were moving your patients about, the place was closing, and not long after that I
was
tucked up in bed. It hardly seemed worth mentioning.’

So why had his mother mentioned it, Marie wondered, catching that grim expression on Mrs Elsworth’s face. Probably because she wanted to put a spanner in the works. Probably because she
didn’t want any girl who’d left school at fourteen, whose parents could barely afford the rent on their house on Clumber Street, getting her hooks into her privately educated darling
Charles. She frowned.

‘More old edge than a ragman’s saw,’ Marie’s father had once said, of Mrs Elsworth, and her father was pretty good at sizing people up, she thought.

Marie had every intention of getting her hooks into Charles, in spite of his mother. They’d been good friends as children until the parting of the ways on the day they
left St Vincent’s for secondary school – Charles to fee-paying Hymers College, Marie to St Mary’s. After that the crown prince of the Elsworth clan had associated with friends
suitable to his private school, and Marie had barely seen him, until the war came. They met again at a dance at Beverley Road Baths, when he cut in on her partner during an ‘excuse me’.
Before she knew what was happening she found herself gliding swiftly over the floor in his arms, leaving her former partner standing. Charles had propelled her expertly round, while reminiscing
about the funnier incidents and high points of their infant days in a voice that had become thrillingly deep.

‘I think I’ve been in love with you since we were five years old, when I used to dream about the fairy princess with the piercing blue eyes and the flaxen plaits. I see you’ve
chopped them off,’ he joked, his eyes full of laughter as he appraised her now much shorter hair.

‘I’d look a bit silly with plaits, at twenty-three,’ she said.

‘Perhaps, and now I shall pick up that outsized torch I used to carry for you, and love you just as much with a flaxen bob.’

‘Idiot,’ she laughed, but she was inclined to believe him. At school, he’d always sat as near to her as he could get in class and at dinner, and he’d fought her battles
in the school playground. At the womanly age of five, she had known that Charles Elsworth was seriously smitten with her, and that she could wind him round her little finger.

‘You’ve managed all right without me for long enough,’ she said. ‘We’ve hardly exchanged half a dozen words since you went to Hymers.’

His expression became serious. ‘Till now, I’ve loved you from afar – rather like Dante loved Beatrice. He didn’t have to see her all the time to make her his ideal, and
write reams of poetry about her.’

Marie raised her eyebrows. ‘I wasn’t afar,’ she said. ‘I was only half a dozen streets away. So how many poems have you written about me?’

‘Well, to tell the truth –’ he hesitated and broke into a grin – ‘poetry’s not really my strong point.’

She laughed at that. Charles’s hazel eyes still danced as they looked into hers, and his sense of humour was the same, regardless of the polish he’d gained. She warmed to him. Her
own partner saw it, and abandoned the field.

Now, every time they crossed the road on the walk from his parents’ grand house, with its vast rear gardens on wide, tree-lined Park Avenue, to her parents very modest home in narrower,
close-packed and treeless Clumber Street, he moved smoothly to the kerbside, and offered her his arm. She pretended to despise all the old-fashioned courtesies and attentions he showed her, but
deep down she loved them. Charles made her feel as if she counted for something.

The gardening finished, Marie and Charles walked to her parents’ house. The milkman was standing on the doorstep, hands in his fingerless gloves, licking his indelible
pencil.

‘She’s never in, your mam. She owes two weeks.’

‘I haven’t got it,’ Marie told him, cheerfully. ‘You’ll have to come again, when she is in.’

Charles followed her through the wrought-iron gate, and handed him a ten-shilling note. ‘Here you are, take what they owe you.’

The milkman counted the change into his hand. ‘Yer ration’s goin’ to be cut, startin’ next week.’ The news seemed to give him some satisfaction.

‘How much?’

‘A seventh. Pint a week, for you,’ he said, and was out of the paved front garden in two strides, slamming the gate behind him.

‘Seems to have made your day, anyway,’ Marie called after him.

‘Less work, in’t it?’ he said, climbing back into his cart and taking up the reins. ‘There’s summat to do your roses good, though. Gee up!’ The horse moved
forward, and the cart rumbled away, leaving a heap of droppings steaming in the road.

Marie opened the door, and the strains of ‘How High the Moon’ drifted towards them. Her parents had left the radio on.

Charles followed her in, closed the door, then pinned her to the wall in the tiny passageway. ‘This is the first time we’ve had a house to ourselves. What games shall we mice play,
while the cats are away?’ he asked, brushing his lips against hers. Her spine tingled. Charles was a beautiful kisser. Not that horrible tongue-down-your-gullet style of kissing that made her
want to go and gargle with carbolic, but real, lingering, sensuous kisses, that made her melt. Made her want to . . .

Not surrender! No, no no! Best put a stop to that, before it went any further. Her eyes snapped wide open. She ducked under his arm and picked up the black kitten her mother had taken in, and
began to stroke it. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but the cat’s back. Say hello to Smut.’

He let her go. ‘Hello, Smut!’

She laughed and put the kitten down. ‘Off you go, Smut.’

‘It’s nice to be on our own, anyhow, without any younger brothers about, giving a lot of lip to their elders and betters,’ he said, helping her off with her coat and hanging it
on the newel post. ‘Horrible when they’re younger, like yours, with their frogs, and their pet rats, and their marbles and cigarette cards, everlastingly pestering people to play
battleships, and hanging around where they know they’re not wanted. I bet you were glad when he was evacuated.’

‘No I wasn’t,’ Marie protested. ‘I like our Alfie. We work pretty long hours in nursing, anyhow, so I didn’t see much of him before he was evacuated, and I never
minded his cigarette cards and his marbles. I even played battleships with him sometimes.’

Charles threw his coat on top of hers and followed her into the front room. ‘Oh, well, you might be singing a different tune when he gets older, and starts sticking his nose into
everything you do.’

Marie moved the fireguard to stir the coal fire into life. ‘Like the tune you sang, when Danny told that story about how your mother had found my hairclips in your bed?’

An indignant flush rose to Charles’s cheeks, and he pulled at his tie. ‘Quite. I hope you don’t take any notice of him, little shit-stirrer.’

‘I don’t think he means any harm by it. It’s just his heavy-handed idea of humour. You were a boy yourself once.’

‘I was a different boy from him, then. I say, I’m starving, aren’t you?’

She stood up and went to draw the curtains hanging at the long bay window. ‘We should have stayed at your house for some of your mother’s steak and kidney pudding, instead of having
to faff about making something here.’

He caught her and held her close. ‘So we could listen to Danny’s tittle-tattle and attempts to be funny all night? No fear. I’d rather be here with you, just our two selves
with no ghastly younger brothers around; that’s enough company for me. We’ll have a cosy evening in.’

‘That’s if the sirens don’t go. We used to have some lovely cosy times here, before the war, with our Alfie on the carpet playing with his train set, and Mum and Dad teaching
me and Pam how to play whist. She was only eleven then, but she soon learned to play a decent game, and she could shuffle like a cardsharp. It seems like a different world when I look back on it,
it was so peaceful,’ Marie said, and the thought struck her that of the two children it was Pam that she missed the least. Alfie might be a bit of a scallywag, but he was a real companion.
Whatever was going on, he wanted to be in the thick of it. Pam was quieter, and more self-contained, a very stately little body, with a high opinion of herself – maybe because she’d
always been their mother’s favourite.

‘With just you and me, it will be a lot more than cosy,’ Chas said, holding onto her more determinedly this time, brushing his lips against hers.

A surge of dangerous desire made her take fright, and back off. A lot more than cosy might be a lot less than safe.

‘Shall we find something to eat? You’re not the only one that’s starving.’

He held her at arm’s length, and kept hold for a moment or two. ‘I think you realize I’m starving for a lot more than food,’ he said. ‘But we’ll go and forage
first – if you insist.’ He released her, led the way through the dining room into the kitchen and began opening cupboard doors.

‘There’s a dance on at the Baths,’ she suggested. ‘I wouldn’t mind going for a jig.’

Chas turned from his foraging, and looked directly into her eyes. ‘When we’ve got a house entirely to ourselves, for the first time ever? How long do you think it will be before this
happens again? You are joking, I hope?’

‘No. And the cupboards are bare, except for a few bread cakes and some potted meat Dad made. And a few jars of pickles and bottled pears from last year. I told you we should have eaten at
your mother’s.’

‘Potted meat on bread cakes will do. I say, what’s this?’ He pulled a couple of corked bottles out of the cupboard.

‘Dad’s wine, elderberry and parsnip. Be careful of that.’

‘Your dad won’t begrudge a drop to a serviceman defending his country, will he?’

‘You’re not defending his country, you’re standing about in his kitchen. But it’s not that he’d begrudge it – it’s just that it’s a lot stronger
than you’d think.’

‘Oh, it won’t be too strong for me. I can hold my drink all right. You make the sandwiches, and I’ll pour the wine. Where are the glasses?’

‘Oh, Chas, not with beef paste and pickled beetroot. A cup of tea will do for me, thanks. I might have a glass when I’ve done the washing-up.’

At half-past eight, Marie drew all the blackout curtains, and then joined Charles on the sofa in the front room. He poured her a glass of parsnip wine, and raised his own
glass. ‘Here’s to us,’ he said, and took a sip.

‘Hey, this stuffs not bad. Not bad at all.’

‘Glad you like it. Usually kept for high days and holidays, like Christmas and New Year. We popped a few corks for Mam and Dad’s silver wedding last year as well.’