Red Sky in the Morning (33 page)

‘Come on,’ he was saying. ‘Let’s go and find the best seats.’

‘But – but we haven’t got our tickets yet.’

‘Ne’er mind about that. Dad’s fixing it.’ He took her hand and began to pull her towards the stairs leading up to the circle. ‘Come on.’

‘But won’t the girl inside want to see our tickets?’ Anna remembered her father taking them to the pictures. The usherette had inspected their tickets and torn them in half
before guiding them down the steps to their seats with the narrow beam of light from her torch. Tears threatened at the memory, but Bruce was saying, ‘Nah. Me dad runs this place. The girls
all know me. I’m always here.’

Her eyes wide, Anna asked, ‘Does he own it?’

The boy glanced at her, seemed to ponder for a moment and then said, ‘Not exactly.’ He seemed to be choosing his words carefully. ‘But, like I say, he runs it.’

‘I see.’ Anna wasn’t sure she did. But she surmised that Douglas must work for the people who did own it, that he was some kind of manager.

By the time they had chosen their seats, the adults had caught up. Their faces illuminated by the light from the screen, they sat in a line in the front row of the circle, Douglas between Betty
and May, then Rita, Anna and, finally, Bruce on the end of the row.

Anna leant forward and glanced along the row. Douglas was laughing again. He was leaning towards her mother, whispering to her. May was smiling and nodding. Anna leant further forward to see
Betty on Douglas’s other side. She was staring straight ahead at the screen with, for her, a morose expression on her face.

In the intermission between the feature film and the supporting picture, the Pathé News boomed out the latest about the war, how the RAF had begun a round-the-clock bombing campaign.
Sitting two seats away, Anna heard her mother’s gulp and glanced to her left to see that May’s head was bowed and that she had covered her face with her hands.

‘There, there, May. Don’t cry,’ she heard Douglas say as he proffered a white handkerchief. Then Anna saw him put his arms along the back of the seat and around May’s
shoulders. He now sat half twisted towards May, his back towards Betty.

Throughout the whole of the second film, Betty stared stonily at the screen, looking neither to right nor left and speaking to no one.

They left Bruce on the steps of the cinema. ‘You go straight home, boy,’ Douglas instructed. ‘I have to take these lovely ladies home and I might be
late.’ Anna caught him winking at his son.

Douglas had borrowed a bigger car so that he could take them all home together. As he drove, he sang at the top of his voice, but the three women and Anna were silent. When they arrived at the
farm, May, sensing the atmosphere, hustled Anna upstairs to bed, with a hurried, ‘Thank you for a lovely evening.’

Rita too yawned and said, ‘Well, I’m for bed too. Nighty-night.’

‘Don’t I even get a cup of cocoa?’ Douglas asked, pretending peevishness as the door closed behind the others, leaving him alone with Betty.

Betty flung her handbag on the table, sat down in Luke’s chair by the range, kicked off her shoes and began to massage her feet. She glanced up at Douglas. ‘You’ll get a thick
ear, m’lad, unless I get an explanation. And it’d better be good.’

Feigning innocence, Douglas said, ‘Now what have I done?’ Before Betty could answer, he grinned and wagged his forefinger at her. ‘Oho, I do believe the lady’s jealous.
Just because I was kind to little May.’

‘Jealous? Me? Huh, don’t flatter yourself. It’s nothing to do with May. It’s your son I want to know about. You never told me you was married.’ She glared up at
him. ‘That you’d
been
married.’ She corrected herself, but even so her look suggested that she doubted his story. She nodded at him. ‘I saw how your son looked.
Surprised, that’s what. As if he’d never been told. Now, sorry, but I don’t believe a lad of his age hadn’t been told before now that his mother had died having him. And if
he hadn’t,’ she went on pointedly, ‘then it wasn’t a very nice way to break the news to the lad, was it?’

Douglas sighed and sat down opposite her. Adopting a hangdog look, he said, ‘Betty, you’re a woman of the world.’

Betty grimaced comically. ‘Aye, aye, there’s something coming if the flattery starts.’

Douglas gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Like I say, you’d understand, but I wasn’t sure that May and her family would.’

Betty raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh aye. It matters what May thinks, does it?’

‘Not just May. All of them. You’re living here and I want to keep seeing you. I want to be able to come here. And I’m not sure the old man likes me much anyway.’ He
laughed. ‘I didn’t want anything else rocking the boat.’

‘So?’

‘Well, it’s not something a chap likes to admit. Dents the old confidence a bit. My wife left me five years ago. Ran off with some wide boy . . .’

Betty laughed inwardly. She liked Douglas. He was all right for a laugh and a good touch for the odd pair of nylons and other scarcities that made a girl’s life a little easier in wartime,
but she had no illusions about him. A wide boy, indeed! Seemed the former Mrs Whittaker went for the same type each time, then. For if ever there was a wide boy it was Douglas himself. Old Pops was
no fool. Betty smiled inwardly. He’d sussed out Douglas Whittaker from the moment he’d clapped eyes on him.

She managed to keep her face straight but she couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her tone. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Left her lad an’ all, did she? Tut, tut. Some women. I don’t
know. Divorced, are you then?’

‘Yes, yes, that’s it. We’re divorced.’

She eyed him shrewdly, wondering. Still, it didn’t make any difference to her. She was only out for a bit of fun. She was never going to be serious about a man like Douglas Whittaker.

Now that handsome pilot officer, Charlie – the one whose plane had gone down – now she could have been serious about him, poor boy.

Betty banished the unhappy thought and smiled. ‘Well, pet, I won’t tell anyone. Your secret’s safe with me.’

Douglas leant across the hearth and planted a kiss on her mouth. ‘You’re a smasher, Betty. Now, about that cocoa . . .’

On the following Sunday afternoon Douglas brought Bruce out to the farm. ‘He’s done nothing but talk about you since Friday,’ Douglas whispered to Anna.
‘Quite smitten, he is.’

Anna blushed. At school the girls teased each other about different boys and Anna had a crush on a boy who sat two desks in front of her. She would sit in class staring at the back of his head
and daydreaming until she earned a sharp reprimand from the teacher. But now here was Bruce’s father telling her that his son was ‘smitten’ with her.

‘Don’t you tell him I said so, though,’ Douglas was saying. ‘It’ll embarrass him. You know what lads of his age are like.’

She didn’t really. The older boys at school took no notice of the younger girls, though she had to admit one or two had winked at her as they passed her in the corridor. There was really
only Jed and he didn’t count.

‘Take him and show him the animals. He’d like to have a look around,’ Douglas urged. ‘Now, where’s Betty?’

‘She and Rita have gone on a bike ride. She thought you weren’t coming today.’

‘Ah yes, that’s right. I did say I might not be able to make it, but then I found I could.’ His smile widened. ‘Then I’ll just go and talk to your pretty mother,
shall I?’

Anna nodded as Douglas beckoned his son over. ‘Now you two, off you go and enjoy yourselves. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t, eh?’ He guffawed loudly.

He turned towards the back door of the farmhouse, where May had appeared in the doorway. Arms outstretched, he walked towards her. ‘Ah, May, how lovely you look.’

Anna watched the tinge of pink in her mother’s cheeks and heard her girlish, nervous laugh. ‘Betty’s not here . . .’

Douglas lowered his voice, but Anna’s sharp ears still heard him say, ‘I know. I was hoping she wouldn’t be. It’s you I came to see. And I had to bring the lad. I hope
you don’t mind . . .’

‘Of course not. He’s very welcome. You both are.’

Anna watched them disappear inside. Then she turned to Bruce. ‘What do you want to see? Cows? Pigs? The sheep?’

The boy shrugged and kicked a stone. ‘Don’t mind. Let’s just go for a walk, eh?’

‘Right. Well, we’ll see the sheep as we go. We’ve some lovely lambs . . .’ Her face sobered. ‘But they’ve to go soon.’

‘To the market, you mean?’

Anna took a deep breath as she nodded. ‘For slaughter.’

Bruce laughed and drew his hand across his throat, making a gurgling sound. Anna smiled thinly, but deep down she didn’t think it was funny at all.

As they walked through the pasture, she saw Bruce eyeing the lambs. ‘You’ve got a lot. How much do you get for each one then?’

Anna stared at him. ‘
I
don’t know. They’re Grandpa’s.’

‘Yeah, but you live here, don’t you? It’ll all be yours one day, won’t it, when the old man snuffs it?’ He glanced at her. ‘Or has he got other
grandchildren?’

Anna shook her head. ‘No – no. There’s only me. They only had one daughter, me mam.’

‘So the farm’ll go to your mam and then to you, won’t it?’

‘I – suppose so.’ Anna was hesitant. She didn’t even like to think about Grandpa dying. She’d lost her father and then her grandmother so recently that the thought
of another death terrified her.

Bruce interrupted her thoughts. ‘You ought to be taking an interest in the place.’

‘I do. I help out a lot when I’m not at school. You can watch us do the milking later, if you like.’

‘Yeah, that’d be fun,’ he said, but his tone sounded insincere. Almost sarcastic. Then he brightened. ‘Come on, you can show me all the fields your grandpa
owns.’

‘There’s a lot,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t think we’ve time to see them all.’

There was a glint in the boy’s eye as he glanced about, surveying all the land around him. ‘He owns all this?’ He waved his hand.

‘Yes. Right down to the river.’

‘The river? Great! Can we go fishing?’ Now he was really interested. ‘I like fishing.’

‘I – I don’t know. I’d have to ask Grandpa.’

‘I like seeing fish wriggle on the end of me line and then—’ He brought his hand down in a chopping movement, demonstrating how he killed his catch.

As they walked on, he pushed his hands into his pockets and walked with a swagger. ‘I’m going in the army as soon as I’m eighteen.’

‘How old are you now?’

‘I was seventeen last month. Roll on next year. I can’t wait to get at ’em.’

Anna glanced at him. ‘Who?’

‘Jerry, of course.’

‘Oh.’

They walked in silence until they came to the river bank and stood looking down at the flowing water.

‘I bet there’s plenty of fish in there,’ he said.

Anna bit her lip. ‘We’ll have to be getting back. It’ll be teatime soon and then there’s the milking.’

Bruce turned towards her and put his hands on her shoulders. He looked down into her upturned face. Then without warning, he bent and pressed his mouth hard on hers. Shocked, Anna tried to pull
away, but found that he was gripping her shoulders so firmly she could not move.

‘There,’ he said as he drew away. ‘Bet that’s the first time you’ve been kissed properly, ain’t it?’

Her mind reeling, Anna could find no words. Bruce laughed softly and, still with his arm about her shoulders, began to lead her back towards the farm.

And that was how Luke saw them as they came into the yard.

When Douglas and Bruce had departed in a cloud of fumes, the sound of the noisy sports car echoing long after they had roared up the lane, Luke said, ‘She’s too
young to be having the likes of him putting his arm around her. Put a stop to it, May, or I will.’

‘Oh, Dad, it’s only a bit of harmless fun. He’s the first boyfriend she’s had.’

‘Boyfriend?’ Luke almost shouted. ‘At thirteen? Have you taken leave of your senses, May?’

‘She’s just flattered by the attentions of a good-looking lad, that’s all.’

Luke’s shaggy eyebrows almost covered his eyes as he frowned. He bit down hard on his pipe. ‘Not the only one, is she?’ he muttered. Then he jabbed the end of his pipe towards
his daughter. ‘I mean it, May. I don’t want her getting romantic notions at her age.’

May flushed and bit her thumbnail, but she argued with her father no further. Luke turned away, satisfied that he had made his point and that it would be obeyed. But if he could have read
May’s rebellious thoughts at that moment, he would not have been so content. As he walked away, May glared after him.
If you think I’m going to risk wrecking my chances of going
back to live in the city by upsetting Douglas and his son, then you’ve got another think coming. I’m a grown woman and I’ll bring my daughter up how
I
like, not how you
say.

Later, when Betty and Rita had returned and they were all seated round the supper table, Luke was still unable to get the two visitors out of his mind. ‘I’d like to know where he
gets his petrol from.’

Betty laughed. ‘Oho, don’t ask, Pops. Don’t ask.’ Then she winked. ‘But if there’s anything you want, you can be sure Douglas Whittaker will know where to get
it. Only no questions asked, if you know what I mean.’

‘Yes,’ Luke said grimly, ‘I think I do.’ He glanced at May, who had lowered her head when the conversation had turned to Douglas. ‘You’re very quiet,
lass.’

Her head shot up. ‘Oh. I – er – no. I mean, I didn’t mean to be.’ She was flustered and red in the face.

‘Know what I think,’ Betty said, cradling her cup in her palms. ‘I reckon Douglas is sweet on our May here.’

‘Oh no,’ May said quickly, but her blush deepened. ‘He’s your young man, Betty. I wouldn’t want you to think . . .’

Betty flapped her hand. ‘Don’t worry about that, May. There’s plenty more fish in the sea. And Douglas Whittaker’s no great catch.’ Then, realizing how that might
sound, she added hastily, ‘Not as far as I’m concerned anyway. I promise you, he’s just a laugh. Besides, he’s a bit old for me. No offence, love.’

‘None taken,’ May murmured. She was older than Betty by about ten years. She was much nearer Douglas’s age than the young Land Army girl. Betty’s eyes clouded as she
added, ‘I’m not getting serious about anyone. Not while this war’s on.’