Dancing in the Moonlight (33 page)

‘Did we?’ Flora giggled. ‘How awful. What other terrible things can you remember?’

The moment to ask him had gone. Lucy joined in the ensuing conversation, but within a few minutes Jacob stood up and took his leave of the others before she walked him to the door. Once they
were alone in the hall he said quietly, ‘I’m glad we’re parting as friends, Lucy. I’ve thought of you often over the last years.’

She wanted to tell him there hadn’t been one day when he hadn’t been in her thoughts, but the spectre of his brother was there suddenly, dark and threatening. Besides, if he had a
wife or a sweetheart she’d embarrass him, and herself too. He had said he had come because he didn’t want any hard feelings between them – that was all. The control it took to
keep her voice from trembling made it sound stiff when she said, ‘Of course we’re friends, Jacob.’

She wished Ruby and the twins hadn’t come home when they had, but it had been she who had insisted they close the shop early now that the blackout was causing so many accidents. Once it
began to get dark, with no street lamps lit and black curtains at every window so that not the slightest chink of light could escape, cars were crashing and people were slipping off kerbs and
walking into lamp posts. But perhaps it was for the best that they had been interrupted. She’d been about to make a fool of herself.

Her tone of voice wasn’t lost on him. He stared at her for a moment more, drinking in every detail of her face, and then opened the door himself, stepping down into the dusky twilight that
had fallen since he’d been in the house. He turned, and found that by standing on the bottom step as he was, his head was on the same level as Lucy’s. He had intended to shake her hand
and tell her to take care of herself. Instead he leaned forward and brushed her lips with his own.

‘Jacob . . . ’

He spoke over her breathless protest, his voice husky. ‘Write to me, Lucy? While I’m away? Please?’

‘I – there must be someone who’ll write to you? I – I mean someone special—’

‘I’m looking at her.’

‘But—’

‘I tried. Heaven knows I tried, but women always know when you’re short-changing them.’

She mustn’t do this. Somehow Tom would know, and even if Jacob was away fighting he wouldn’t be safe from his brother. But he was going away to war. Safety didn’t come into it.
And he’d said he had little contact with his family. And, most of all, she wanted to write to him. To reach out and touch him with pen and paper and be touched in return. That wasn’t
too much to ask, was it?

‘Take the day you know and leave the morrer to God, hinny . . .’ Her mother’s voice caressed her as the warm evening breeze ruffled her hair.

It had been years, over a decade, since she had heard that beloved voice in a moment of crisis. She had never thought to hear it again. Without thinking any more, she reached out and touched his
face. ‘I’ll write,’ she breathed softly.

This time the kiss was long and deep as he stepped up to take her into his arms, and when he raised his head he looked at her for a long time before letting her go. When he walked down the path
and the twilight swallowed him up, no promises had been made. How could they? No one knew what the next day or week, let alone month, would bring. Or even if they would see each other again.

It was enough, though. For now, it was enough.

‘Well, I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself, besmirching Tom’s good name like this, and you his da.’ Enid sat glaring at her husband over the kitchen
table, where they were eating their evening meal and listening to the reports of the war on the wireless. ‘Who are you to say that he hasn’t got a bad heart, if he’s a
doctor’s certificate to prove it?’

‘Give me patience!’ Aaron lifted his eyes to heaven as he ground his teeth. ‘You’re not a stupid woman, Enid, so don’t act like one. Doctors can be bought, if you
know the right people, and our Tom knows the right people sure enough. He’s no more got a bad heart than our other three. There’s Jacob, who signed up in the first month, and Frank and
Ralph both prepared to do their bit if it comes to it, in spite of having a wife and family apiece, but Tom’ – he flicked his hand in a gesture of disgust – ‘he’s a
nowt.’

‘You’re wicked, Aaron Crawford. That’s what you are.’ Enid’s voice was trembling. ‘And are you saying you want Frank and Ralph to go over the water? Is that
it?’

‘Don’t talk silly. Of course I don’t, but they’re willing to if needs must. At the moment they’re serving King and country better in the shipyard and it might be
like that till the end of the war, but who knows? What I’m saying is that they’re not lily-livered.’

‘And Tom is?’

‘Aye. He is. An’ it gives me no pleasure to say it about me own, whatever you might think to the contrary. He’s bad, Enid. Through and through. And you’ve had a hand in
that. Spoiling the lad from the day he was born and shutting your eyes to what you didn’t want to see. I could wallop the others when they were bairns and misbehaved, but if I raised my hand
to Tom, the roof went off the house. And he was the one who needed it, not Frank and Ralph and Jacob.’

‘There you have it in a nutshell.’ Enid stood up, flinging back her chair so that it rocked on its legs for a moment before toppling over. ‘You never took to our Tom, not from
when he was a babby. He kept this family going in the Depression before the government needed the shipyard workers back on side, but were you grateful? Not a bit of it. And you’ve turned
Ralph and Frank against him. They’ve never got a good word for the lad these days.’

‘He’s not a lad, Enid. He’s a full-grown man and one who chose his own road a long time back – a dirty road. And aye, it is to my shame I walked it an’ all.
I’m not proud of meself. But as to Ralph and Frank, they’ve made their own minds up about their brother, so don’t try an’ put that one on me. You want to ask them sometime
what they know about him, and I don’t mean hearsay either, but you wouldn’t do that, would you? It might open the can of worms you’ve laboured for years to keep closed.’

Aaron pushed his plate away from him, reaching for his jacket and stuffing his cap on his head. ‘I’m going down the pub, an’ don’t wait up.’

After the door had banged behind him, Enid walked slowly to the table and sat down again. She didn’t finish the rest of her meal, but sat staring into space. She was tired, she thought
dully. Tired of the state of war which existed in this house and was worse than the ‘phoney war’ that the nation had endured for the last eight months. After war had been declared,
weeks of anxiety, false alarms and uncertainty had followed, and then the country had settled down for a wartime winter. The government had warned they were expecting tens of thousands of
casualties during the first two or three months, and hospitals had been cleared in preparation for the wounded civilians, mortuaries stacked with piles of cardboard coffins, and lime pits dug to
cope with the dead. It had struck terror into everyone. Every home had been issued with a hand-operated stirrup-pump and long-handled shovel to deal with the incendiary bombs that the government
was sure would come raining down from the Luftwaffe, and every night folk had slept with one ear cocked for the air-raid sirens. But the blitzkrieg hadn’t happened.

Enid reached for her cup of tea and drank it slowly.

Instead they’d been bombarded by regulations, exhortations and petty officialdom, and the blackout had become public enemy number one. On New Year’s Eve the headline in the papers
had been the news that more than 4000 men, women and children had died in blackout accidents, whereas during the same period only three members of the British Expeditionary Force had been killed in
action. By February more than half of the evacuees who had fled in September were home again, and this added to the feeling of normality that had grown as bairns played their games in the streets
and back alleys once more.

Enid put down her cup and sighed heavily. But inside this house there’d been no relief or laughter. It had been bad enough between her and Aaron before Frank and then Ralph had left to get
wed and set up house with their wives, but now . . . She brushed a wisp of grey hair from her brow. She just didn’t know what to say to him any more.

Take tonight. She’d waited until she’d dished up the dinner and they were sitting eating, before she’d mentioned about Tom calling round earlier. Tom hadn’t wanted to
worry them, she’d said, but he’d felt it only right to let them know what the doctor had found when he’d been to see him. She had expected Aaron to show some concern, she’d
even hoped it might mellow him towards their firstborn, but he’d looked at her as though she was mad. And yet another row had followed.

She poured herself a second cup of tea.

And this on the heels of learning that the British and French were suffering heavy losses in their attempt to intervene against Germany’s invasion of Denmark and Norway. She didn’t
understand strategy and the rest of it, but even she could see the war had suddenly hotted up. And her lad was out there, her Jacob. Aaron gave her no credit for worrying to death about him.
Instead he’d gone on about Ralph and Frank going out there to join in the bloodbath. Men were a different species. Oh aye, they were.

She shut her eyes, rocking backwards and forwards on her chair a while, her arms wrapped round her waist. She missed Agnes. It had been over fourteen years since she’d gone, but she missed
her old friend like it was yesterday. She had never got thick with any of the other neighbours, she hadn’t wanted to – nosy blighters the lot of them – and Ralph’s and
Frank’s wives were nice lassies, but they had their own mams.

A moment of searing loneliness brought a pain to her chest. Only Tom loved her. The rest of them . . . She shook her head, a tear seeping from under her closed eyelids. No, only Tom cared, and
she wasn’t going to pretend that she wasn’t glad he’d be staying close, rather than being shipped off over the sea to be blown to smithereens or used as fodder for German machine
guns, whether he’d bought his way out of fighting or not.

She stopped her rocking, wiping her eyes and reaching for her tea.

She wasn’t daft, whatever Aaron might think. Deep down she’d wondered what was what, when her lad had shown her the certificate signed by some doctor or other she’d never heard
of.
But she didn’t care.

She expelled a long breath. No, she didn’t care how Tom had come by it because it was his ticket to stay out of the war. She knew that if Tom had been called up she’d have become
unhinged; there was only so much she could bear. The others she’d grieve over, but her lad . . .

Across town, on the other side of the river, Lucy found herself glued to the wireless whenever she was home. The winter had been a savagely cold one, the worst for a long time
according to the old-timers, and when John had been called up in January as one of two million nineteen- to twenty-seven-year-olds, she had been beside herself. But there had been nothing she could
do about it, not least because John was raring to go. After that, the winter had been a time of petty irritations set against a background of endless waiting – for what exactly no one was
quite sure. And then, as April turned into May, they found out.

Jacob had written every week since he had landed in France as part of the British Expeditionary Force. With French troops occupying the Maginot Line, the British Army had proceeded smoothly to
their positions along the Franco-Belgian border, where they’d built pillboxes and dug trenches. Once the Poles had been defeated, the German divisions had moved swiftly back across their
country to the Siegfried Line.

‘It’s surreal,’ Jacob had written in one of his first letters, ‘but the general feeling among everyone here, French and British alike, is that the Germans have no
intention of attacking us. Insults are exchanged daily through loudspeakers, but not a shot has been fired, and it seems the weather is the common enemy. Nevertheless, and I hope I’m wrong, I
can’t help feeling that Hitler is playing cat-and-mouse again, like he did before the war.’

He had been right. As the ice and arctic winds and snow became a distant memory and cloudless blue skies took their place, Germany invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg on May 10th. The
‘phoney war’ was over. In Britain, Neville Chamberlain had been totally discredited and forced to resign and Winston Churchill had taken his place as Prime Minister, forming an
all-party coalition government, but many feared it was too late for their loved ones in France, who were facing a military catastrophe. The wireless had become an instrument of subtle torture
overnight for Lucy and she barely ate or slept.

Lucy hadn’t heard from either Jacob or John for three weeks when, in the middle of May, the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, announced to the nation that the formation of the
Local Defence Volunteers was taking place with immediate effect. Matthew signed that same day. With German forces now streaming across France and the Low Countries, an invasion of British soil was
imminent, and in spite of little equipment and even less training, the LDV were prepared to wage a guerrilla war in their own streets. Matthew went off to the training centre after work armed with
a pickaxe, along with many others, but what he and the rest of the LDV lacked in weaponry they made up for in spirit. And strangely, although the thought of Matthew engaging a German soldier in
face-to-face combat was terrifying, Lucy was grateful to the newly formed organization. Since John had been called up, Matthew had been champing at the bit to do
something
, as he groaned
umpteen times an hour. The elderly Sergeant Major who was in charge of the unit was treating as a soldier every old-timer, farmer, shipyard worker, miner, shopkeeper or young lad wet behind the
ears who was under his command, drilling his ragtag-and-bobtail army ruthlessly.

Matthew came home late at night full of the evening’s activities and with many a tale to tell. There was talk of the government kitting out the LDV with standard-issue army uniforms and
guns in time, but for now most of the recruits merely sported a forage cap and an armband, and carried pitchforks, broom handles, hand scythes or, as in Matthew’s case, pickaxes. One old
gentleman, Matthew had told them gleefully, had turned up for duty with an enamel colander tied to his bald head with a scarf. He claimed that his wife had insisted he have some protection from
falling bombs. When the Sergeant Major had pointed out through gritted teeth that as yet there
were
no falling bombs, the henpecked husband had retorted that the Sergeant Major could take
that up with his wife, because he certainly wasn’t going to argue with her.