Dancing in the Moonlight (31 page)

Lucy bit down hard on her lip, her stomach churning. Such talk terrified her. John was nineteen years old and he hadn’t got an aggressive bone in his body. He had no idea what he’d
be letting himself in for. He spoke as though it was an exciting game. Just last Sunday he and Matthew had disappeared for hours and come home full of watching a practice of the gas decontamination
unit in operation. But war wasn’t a game; it was vile, savage, barbaric.

Her dark thoughts were broken by voices calling her name. The others had gone to the cinema, the Ritz in Holmeside, which had only been open a couple of years and had been fitted out lavishly
with chandeliers and deep-pile carpets. She’d pleaded a headache to avoid going, but really she had wanted to go over some accounts in peace and quiet and, she admitted to herself, when she
wasn’t at work she preferred to be within the security of her own four walls.

They came surging through the French doors into the garden, crowding around her and laughing and chattering as they described the Astaire and Rogers musical, interrupting each other constantly.
Ruby and John’s voices rose above the others as they disagreed over something. Lucy smiled ruefully. She’d never imagined she would find her brother’s and sister’s bickering
comforting, but just at the moment the normality of it was balm to her soul.

Just over a week later, on Sunday September 3rd, at eleven-fifteen in the morning, the eight of them were clustered together again, but this time there was no laughter as they
sat listening to the radio broadcast by the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we had heard
from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been
received, and that consequently this nation is at war with Germany.’

Lucy’s face was chalk-white, her heart thudding so hard it was painful, but as she glanced at the others, no one spoke and even John was motionless. And then the sound of the air-raid
sirens outside shattered the stillness and sent everyone diving under the kitchen table, amid shrieks and frightened squeals from Daisy, Flora and Bess.

It was only after the noise had dwindled away a little while later, the expected aerial onslaught being unforthcoming, that Lucy said flatly, ‘I think you lads had better get started on
the air-raid shelter this afternoon.’

‘But I don’t understand, lad. They’ll call you up soon enough, you can rest assured on that. Why go and willingly stick your head in the noose?’

Jacob smiled at Dolly. She’d said she didn’t understand his decision, but the truth of it was he couldn’t explain what he didn’t fully understand himself. He was no hero,
and he wasn’t even sure if he was doing it for King and country. He just knew that the last nine years or so had been different from what he’d expected. Before he had seen Lucy again,
after her husband had been murdered, he’d begun to settle into a life without her. Afterwards, well, he’d gone mad for a while, he thought ruefully. Wine, women and song. He knew Abe
and Dolly had been worried to death. Then one morning he’d woken up to find yet another pool of vomit by the bed and had staggered to the mirror to look at his bleary-eyed face. He’d
stared for a long time at a reflection he barely recognized, remembering nothing of the night before, but some woman’s cheap perfume was rank on his clothes and he hadn’t a penny left
in his pockets.

From that day to this he hadn’t touched a drop of liquor, and he’d started courting the nice lass he’d taken up with before he’d seen Lucy again. It hadn’t lasted
– Felicity had told him one day, when they’d been walking out for a year or more, that she felt she couldn’t compete with the perfect memory he held of his childhood sweetheart,
and he hadn’t disabused her that his memory of Lucy was far from perfect now. Which had said a lot about how he felt about Felicity, in hindsight.

And so he had taken to working longer and longer hours in the forge, burning off his dissatisfaction and sense of loss, and not least his sexual frustration, with physical hard work. And it had
helped, to some extent.

There had been the odd occasion when he’d longed to go out and get drunk, usually after a family get-together at Christmas or New Year, which he showed up at to please his mother, who was
forever complaining she didn’t see him from one year to the next. At those times when Tom was present, his brother inevitably commented on Lucy’s meteoric rise within the community and
deliberated on what she must be worth now, letting Jacob know that she was well out of his league. Tom needn’t have bothered, if he had but known. That one meeting with her had told him
whatever she’d felt for him when they were youngsters was gone, and there was nothing so dead as the cold ashes of love.

Shaking away his thoughts, Jacob took Dolly’s plump little hand in his and looked into her worried face. He was closer to this little woman than he was to his own mother and over the years
he’d come to love her dearly. And he knew Dolly thought the world of him. Growing up, he had always been aware that there was no one like Tom for their mam and, child-like, he’d
accepted it. Ralph and Frank hadn’t seemed to mind, but then the pair of them had always been thick with their da. He had been the odd one out somehow, but having Lucy, it hadn’t seemed
to matter. It was only when he was lying in the hospital after Tom had told him Lucy had left that he fully realized that, in siphoning off the major part of her affection for Tom, his mam had done
the rest of them down, including his da.

‘I have to do this, Dolly,’ he said softly now. He didn’t say, ‘I need to find myself because she wouldn’t have understood that. What he did say was, ‘But I
want you to know something – something I should have said years ago. You’re the mam I always wanted, and I couldn’t have got through without knowing that you and Abe were behind
me in the bad times. My mother is a good woman and she brought me into the world, but I’ve never thought of her as I think of you. I’m proud to be your son.’

‘Oh, lad.’ The tears were running down her rosy cheeks and she couldn’t say more, and when Jacob took her into his arms they stood together for some time with her face pressed
against his shirt front.

The town was quieter than usual when Jacob walked into Bishopwearmouth later that day. Children were being evacuated to safe areas in the country and Sunderland’s exodus
had begun the day before, on September 10th. Clutching their few personal possessions and gas masks, the little ones had gathered at specific times at the train stations, their weepy relatives
waving them off. Few parents knew where their children would end up, although the government had said they’d be told as soon as possible. Jacob wondered if Lucy had sent her daughter away.
The child must be nine years old now, old enough to have an opinion about whether she went or stayed. Several of their customers had related details of the rumpus caused at home when evacuation had
been mentioned to the older children, and although some of them had won the battle to stay, it seemed that the little ones were packed off willy-nilly.

He walked through the warm dusty streets, feeling it could well be the calm before the storm. Everyone was on tenterhooks for the expected bombing to begin and some people he passed were
carrying their gas masks. Air-raid shelters had grown up everywhere, he noticed: the Anderson shelter for those who had a garden and could dig some three feet down and then cover the
corrugated-steel roof with earth, along with turf and flowers in some cases; and a brick-surface shelter where households only had a back yard. For those folk without even their own back yard there
was the Morrison shelter. He had been in a friend’s house recently that had one, and the oblong box, which served well as a table, had proved to be a great den for the children. He’d
peeped inside after hearing giggles when he was sitting having a cup of tea, and found four cheeky little faces grinning at him. The children had been snuggled up among the cushions and blankets
that the shelter contained, reading picture books by torchlight. Their harassed mother, who’d recently given birth to twin boys, had remarked that it kept the older ones occupied for hours,
and every cloud – even the war – had a silver lining.

The afternoon was a mellow one. The sky was high and blue and the air warm, but without the fierce heat of July or August. A breeze caressed his face as he walked and he stopped, taking his cap
off for a moment and running his fingers through his curly brown hair. On such a quintessential English day it seemed impossible that across the ocean Warsaw, a town of ordinary men and women and
children like the ones here, was enduring days of nightmarish bombing, which was devastating the city and killing tens of thousands. At the end of August the news reports had spoken of France and
Britain’s confidence that, if the worst happened, the Poles would hold Nazi Germany in the east and the superior strength of the old First World War Allies would produce a victory. Now even
the most optimistic could see that Poland was doomed. And it could happen here. They had underestimated Hitler.

He shivered, but the chill was from within. Which was why he had to see Lucy one last time before he enlisted. It wasn’t rational, and when he had told Dolly she had been horrified,
reminding him of the downward spiral their last meeting had provoked, but he couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. That was all he wanted to do. He expected nothing, he would ask for
nothing. But he
had
to see her. If she wasn’t in, if she was away, then he would delay enlisting until she was back, because once you’d signed up they had you off to training
camp quicker than a dose of salts, from what he’d heard.

He knew where she lived. Well, the address at least, he corrected himself. He’d never been there. But the houses round Barnes Park were a cut above. She’d done well for herself, but
then Lucy had always been top of the class at school and had left the rest of them standing. He remembered the hours she had spent going over fractions and decimals with him, when the intricacies
of arithmetic had been beyond him and Mr Gilbert had made him wear the dunce’s cap three days running. In front of the other bairns in the playground he’d acted big and challenged any
of the lads who’d needled him about it to a fight, saying real men didn’t need learning and it was a load of rubbish. Inside he’d been dying. When they were alone, Lucy had put
her arms round him and he’d cried like a baby, and even then, at the age of nine or ten, he’d wondered why it cost him nothing in pride to admit the truth to her.

He stopped abruptly. What was he doing? Dolly was right, he was indulging in some form of masochism in trying to see Lucy again. He closed his eyes as he raised his face for a moment, letting
the sun glow red behind his eyelids. What cruel quirk of human nature allowed people to go on loving when they weren’t loved in return? There should be some sort of safety mechanism built
into every human heart that could turn off the flow when required. He should turn round right now and make his way back over the river. It was the sensible thing to do.

But when had sense ever come into the feelings that he had for Lucy? A grim smile touching his lips, he walked briskly on.

The trees in Barnes Park and the surrounding streets were in the last flush of summer, green and lush before the first autumnal frosts set about changing their raiment to gold and red and brown.
This western suburb of Bishopwearmouth was leafy and quiet and an air of restrained, good-mannered prosperity prevailed. Jacob stood looking towards the front garden of the house he knew to be
Lucy’s and was struck by how just a few furlongs could change an area. The neat square of lawn was surrounded by small orderly shrubs, and a path at the side led to the front door, which had
stained glass in the top section. The three-storey terraced house was shipshape and smart from the outside, as were its neighbours, and it struck him afresh just how much she’d risen in the
world.

As he watched from the other side of the road a car drew up a few doors down and two well-dressed women alighted. When the door of the house they entered was opened by a maid in a
black-and-white uniform with a lacy cap perched on top of her head, it took him aback. A maid. It was further proof of the great divide that existed between him and this new Lucy. Did she have a
maid? Maybe a cook too?

He almost turned and walked away there and then, beset by a number of emotions and none of them encouraging.

He stood dithering for a long time – how long he didn’t keep track of – but when the two ladies exited the house again and one of them said something to her companion and they
both looked his way, it gave him the impetus to cross the road and walk up Lucy’s path, his heart thumping. He rang the bell several times and knocked on the door, but no one answered from
within. He glanced at his watch. Half-past four. He would wait until five and then walk back into the town and get a bite to eat somewhere and return later this evening, once dinner was over. Aye,
that’s what he’d do, if he didn’t have his collar felt by the local bobby in the meantime that was. Those two women had clearly wondered if he was up to no good. He smiled with
black humour. That would put the tin lid on this whole daft episode – him ending up in gaol.

He walked down the path back to the pavement, screwing up his face as he rubbed between his eyebrows where a niggling headache had started. When he raised his head, she was walking towards him
and by her side was a child who could only be her daughter. The likeness was remarkable. Transfixed, he stared at them. Lucy stared back and he was aware of the little girl saying something to her
mother, but Lucy didn’t seem to hear her.

They were within a yard or two before he pulled himself together enough to say, ‘Hello, Lucy.’

‘Jacob.’

The sound of his name on her lips impacted on him like a physical pain and the force of the feeling startled him. He wondered how he had managed to keep away from her for so long, but the answer
was standing by her side. The child was the embodiment of the decision she’d made to exit his life without a backward glance at a time when he’d needed her most.
She didn’t
love him.
His head had accepted it long ago, it was his heart that had the problem.