Gull Island (21 page)

‘Why did you run all that way? You could have seen it from here.’

‘From here?’ Rosita laughed. ‘No one could read those small letters from here!’

‘Caroline, my dear, tomorrow you must see an optician. I think you are fearfully short-sighted.’

Barbara had searched for her daughter without finding even a hint of where she might be. She even went to see Bernard’s mother, Mrs Stock, but without opening the door more than an inch, Mrs Stock said she knew nothing about her.

By Easter 1935, Barbara faced the fact that the farm would have to be sold. Without Graham there was no possibility of her and the girls coping with all the work. Besides the heavy work, she didn’t have the knowledge. She braced herself to tell her daughters her decision. She dreaded their
reaction
but instead of tears and distress and begging and pleading for her not to take them away, they were jubilant.

‘Does it mean we’ll wear shoes all the time and not boots?’ Kate asked.

‘We’ll be able to go to dances and see films and shows!’ a delighted Hattie shouted.

Barbara became caught up in their excitement and when a buyer was found, the three of them threw aside the years of drudgery with glee.

They arrived in the town that had been Barbara’s home with all their belongings on the back of a cart and rented a terraced house. The size was laughable after the huge old farmhouse. ‘But,’ Barbara told the girls, ‘it’s only temporary, just while we get ourselves settled.’ The money from the sale of the farm and the animals was put into the bank and Barbara, Kate and Hattie looked for work.

Kate was slim and willowy and rather like Barbara, with the same
dreamy eyes and gentle manner. She found work in the local school, looking after nursery-age children, a job she quickly came to love.

Hattie was overweight and followed her father in appearance. Her features, apart from the eyes, were large in the round, flat face. Her hands were wide and clumsy. She had no burning desire for any particular job. Her attitude to life was simple: she anticipated a short working life filled with fun and amorous adventures, before finding a husband and settling down in a home of her own. A factory offered a better wage than a shop or cleaning and she quickly found herself a niche with friends as
determined
as herself to have a good time.

They saw the Careys and admired their new shop but Molly Carey didn’t tell Barbara that she knew where Rosita was, or that she now called herself Caroline Evans.

‘We haven’t seen hair nor hide of the girl,’ she lied, avoiding Barbara’s eyes.

Barbara took the girls to the beach where Luke’s cottage stood silent and neglected. There was no sign of Luke, although his boat was still in its usual place. While the girls walked on the beach and explored the abandoned house, Barbara sat and stared across at Gull Island. She wondered what had happened to her daughter and felt somehow this was the place where she would one day find her. She wondered too about Luke, far away in France, and young Richard who had disappeared on the day his father had taken on the shop and from whom Mrs Carey had received only a few brief notes.

A sea fret was gathering low over the water, moving out and gradually engulfing the rocky island. She shivered as it cut off the sun. Melancholy overwhelmed her as she felt the chill breeze creep over her skin and she called to Kate and Hattie. It was time to leave. The lonely beach
represented
the past and there was nothing to be gained by looking back. It was tomorrow where happiness lay, not here with the ghosts of yesterday’s woes.

Instead of going straight back to the terraced house where they were settling into a comfortable existence, she went to the newspaper shop again.

‘You will tell me if you hear even the slightest hint of where I might find Rosita, won’t you?’ she asked Mrs Carey.

‘I’ll always want to do what’s best for you and Rosita, you can be sure of that.’ The ambiguity of the reply was lost on Barbara.

‘Best we tell Rosita that her mam and half-sisters are in town,’ Mrs Carey said to Henry later. Henry nodded vaguely, tickled the dog’s ear and went on enjoying the comic he was reading.

Rosita was fitted with glasses and, putting them on for the first time, she was startled. Her familiar and fuzzy world was transformed. She walked home wearing them in a state of bewilderment. Everything was so bright and clear. She hadn’t realized how beautiful the familiar pigeons were, so many colours and such wonderful patterns on their feathers. Starlings, she saw in amazement, wore fragmented rainbows on their backs. People across the street had faces instead of a pale blur. She spotted people she knew from an amazing distance and they had features whereas before, she now realized, she only recognized them by their clothes or the way they walked.

As euphoria faded, she began to go back over the difficulties of her miserable childhood. She discussed it with Miss Grainger and they realized that poor sight was the reason for much of her so-called stupidity. Copying vaguely-seen shapes from a blackboard was still a painful memory. She’d had no idea until now that there was more, much more to see than the blurred and indistinct images she could make out by screwing up her eyes and looking through the slits.

She remembered going into a shop to buy some sweets her mother had pointed out and coming out of the shop with the wrong ones simply because she hadn’t been able to see the label far back in the window. Then there were the buses she had allowed to go past because she couldn’t read the destination board in time to raise her hand and stop them.

She had several times waved at people she didn’t know, mistaking them for friends, and had been accused of ignoring those she did know and passing them in the street. It hadn’t been stupidity, simply her poor sight. She almost screamed in her delight, but her new-found dignity forbade it.

Far from making her unglamorous, the new acquisition became a beauty aid. She fingered the frames with elegant fingers, waving her hands about her face, bringing her large, luminous eyes to everyone’s attention. Many of the girls with whom she worked wished they too needed to wear them.

By the time 1939 came, bringing fears of imminent war, Rosita was first sales and earning enough to put money away in a savings bank.

Although she often visited the town where she had been born, she had never met her mother or, to her knowledge, either of her half-sisters; two dull girls obeying their father to please him, and looking at her with a smug smile when she had earned a slap. She doubted whether she would know them if they did meet. It had been so long they would be strangers. She knew they were back, as Auntie Molly Carey had told her. She thought about them occasionally, not without bitterness, and wondered if they
would ever meet and, if they did, whether they would acknowledge each other.

To Miss Grainger she told her story. It began when that good lady had discovered her need for glasses. The excitement of seeing clearly and the realization that her problems could have been explained so easily made her pour out the story in a gush of grateful emotion.

She continued to stay with Miss Grainger; the difference in age was no barrier to their liking each other. They read books and discussed them, they saw plays and films and, best of all, it was because of Miss Grainger that she began to enjoy accounts.

It was part of Miss Grainger’s job to keep the ledgers up to date and offer them annually for audit. Within two years, Rosita was sharing the work with her and in 1939, when Miss Grainger was taken ill, Rosita did them unaided and was congratulated by the auditors for the immaculate and efficient way she presented them.

‘You have an instinctive gift for figures, Miss Evans,’ one of them said. ‘Have you considered becoming trained for the work? Secretaries with accounting skills can earn a very acceptable salary these days, you know.’

‘Thank you for suggesting it.’ Rosita smiled confidentially. ‘But I plan to run my own business one day. What I have learned will be very useful.’

‘Oh? What business would that be? Pretty dresses no doubt.’

‘No. A newsagents,’ she replied almost without thought. She laughed later as she told Miss Grainger. ‘The only people I know who run a
business
of their own are the Careys so it was the first thing to come into my mind.’

‘Selling newspapers and tobacco isn’t a bad idea.’ Her friend puffed at the Four Aces cigarette held in a large amber holder. ‘Smoking is a popular activity and becoming more acceptable. And everyone needs a daily paper. Yes, you could do a lot worse.’ She stretched open the new box of twenty and removed the vouchers contained in it. They were saving to send for a pair of Gibsonette-style shoes for Rosita, for which they needed 120 vouchers.

When Hitler’s army marched into Poland and war was declared, Luke wasn’t very concerned. It all seemed a long way off and could hardly affect the small café that Martine and he continued to run, near the beach in Calais. It wasn’t until British soldiers began arriving in France that he began to wonder what he and Martine should do.

‘You must leave,’ Martine said one morning when, looking very worried, she returned from the market. ‘Go now, today. A delay might mean your life.’

‘We won’t be panicked into anything.’ Luke smiled and smoothed the frown from her face tenderly. ‘I’ll write to my partner Jeanie and arrange for us to go there at the end of the month. But only for a visit.’ But he didn’t write. He believed that with the German army busy in Poland, France was safe. ‘By the time they think about attacking France and Holland, the British will have beaten them back to where they belong. There’s plenty of time to think about leaving.’

In 1940 they ran out of time.

‘Go tonight, please, Luke,’ Martine pleaded.

‘We’ll both leave in the morning.’

‘No, my darling, not we, not us. But you must go.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I must return to Papa. He is a very old man now, and afraid. He needs me more than you do. It is my duty. Please don’t try and persuade me different.’

‘I need you. You must come with me. We can take your father as well. I know of a small cove where boats are still managing to leave. A few hours’ discomfort, that’s all. He will come if you explain why we’re going. He won’t want to live through another occupation.’

‘He will not leave, and I can’t either. Please, Luke. We’ll meet again, I know this, but for now it is
au revoir
.’

Luke still refused to leave without her. He had been so happy in the simple life he shared with Martine. What would he do if she left him? He would never find anyone else to share his life so amicably. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I will not go. We’ll live through this together.’

A few weeks later, at three o’clock in the morning, they were woken by furious knocking at the café door. Looking through the bedroom window they saw a group of German soldiers, armed with guns, standing outside. Martine pushed the bed aside, lifted two wide floorboards and gestured for Luke to hide in the place they had prepared in readiness for such an
emergency
as this. There wasn’t much room and it was thick with dangling spider webs and the droppings of mice. For once Luke was glad he was a small man.

The soldiers searched the place and angrily demanded Martine tell them where the Englishman had gone.

‘A lover’s quarrel,’ she sobbed realistically. ‘We had a silly quarrel and now he is gone from me! Left me, gone away with hate in his heart and I don’t know where. I am desolate.’

Luke stayed under the floorboards all that day. With Martine sitting on the bed above him, watching for the return of the soldiers, they talked.

‘Do you not feel ’appy to go ’ome to your little cottage, Luke?’ Martine
asked. ‘Do memories of your papa still worry you? Death is always
difficult
to accept, even the death of someone who made you so un’appy.’

‘When my mother died, Father told me not to cry,’ Luke told her, pushing a spider’s web from across his eyes. ‘He said it was unmanly. I remember Roy coming over and we were hugging each other and sobbing and my father came and tore us apart as if we’d been caught stealing from his pocket.’

‘
Mon petit
, it must ’ave been ’ard for you then.’

‘Roy’s family were always touching, hugging. Roy and I used to roll about on the floor like puppies in mock fights, but if Father saw us I was punished.’

‘I knew this when we first met and I couldn’t get close. Kissing and hugging, they were difficult for you. Your papa, ’e was between us.’

‘Even when I was with the Careys, his shadow was there, making me afraid to show affection the way they all did.’

With his disembodied voice coming from beneath the floor and unable to look at him, Martine took courage and asked, ‘’Ave you not thought, Luke, that per’aps your father was the one with the problem? That he loved young men, er, what you say, too well? Could he not ’ave been fighting that all ’is life? If that were so, then wouldn’t he be afraid of the same thing showing in ’is son? You understand what I am meaning,
mon petit
?’

‘Good heavens. No!’ He took a deep breath, which made him cough, and it was moments before he could go on. ‘My father a homosexual, you think? That’s a crazy idea. He was always—’ He went silent, remembering so many things.

Scenes sped across his inner vision. The time that, being small, he was chosen to play the part of a woman in the school play. His father coming to complain and having him taken out of the production. The new clothes chosen, only to have them thrown away labelled effeminate. So many things became clear as he thought of Martine’s words. It wasn’t him, it was his father. It was his father’s burden he had been carrying all these years. The realization grew like a glorious bubble of joy.

When it was midnight, Martine released him and handed him a small shoulder bag. ‘There is food for three days and little else. You need to travel light and fast. God speed, my darling. We’ll meet again when this is over.’

Luke accepted his fate, not least because he was aware of the danger into which his being there was putting Martine. He should have gone ages ago. If he stayed and her lies were found out – he cut off the rest of the scenario. He couldn’t bear to think what might have happened to her if he’d been discovered.