The Girl on the Beach (16 page)

‘No, but I know what it can do. I hoped you might feel the same.’

‘I don’t know what I feel. It’s too soon.’

‘Too soon, how can you say that? We’ve known each other over two years. You’ve come to the house, called it home …’

‘Perhaps that was presumptuous of me. Your mother said—’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Eve, I didn’t mean that. We love having you, all of us, me particularly. I just thought it meant you might return my feelings.’

She stood up. ‘Alec, leave it please. You’ll spoil everything if you keep on.’

‘Very well.’ Disappointed, dismayed and hurt, he helped her mount, remounted himself and they rode back to the farm in silence, and that afternoon they caught separate trains and went their separate ways.

‘God I’m nervous. This is worse than going on an op.’

‘Remind me not to do it, then,’ Tim said, watching his friend fiddling with his tie. He tied that tie every day of his life, so what was so difficult about fixing it today? It wasn’t going to be a silk-cravat-and-morning-suit sort of do; most of the men would be in uniform. ‘Anyway, you’ve done it before.’

‘I know, but that was different.’

‘How different?’

‘We weren’t much more than kids, Julie in particular. She had been brought up in an orphanage and that made her kind of young and old at the same time, an innocent in some ways, wise beyond her years in others, but it made her vulnerable. And there was this chap who was pestering her …’

‘You mean you just felt sorry for her?’

‘No, I don’t. There was more to it than that. We were happy as sandboys. It was a great adventure, getting married and having our own home and a baby. He was a grand little chap …’

‘Hey, this is your wedding day. Don’t dwell on it.’

‘I’m not. You asked and I was only pointing out that this time it’s different. Pam is more mature; she knows what she wants …’

‘And that’s you.’

‘Yes, and I want her too. I wouldn’t be marrying her otherwise.’ After six months of courtship, in which their love had grown stronger and more enduring, they had decided not to wait until the war was over to get married. Life was so uncertain and Pam wanted to seize what happiness was theirs while they could and, though he doubted the wisdom of it, he felt the same. Being married again was a statement of optimism in the future.

‘Good. Now we’ve got that out of the way, put your jacket on, it’s time we were on the way to church. You can’t have the bride turning up before we do.’

Harry followed Tim out to the car, an open-top two-seater, though the hood was up against the cold March wind. Where his friend had found it, and how he had
managed to get petrol for it, he did not know and thought it better not to ask, but it was Harry’s and Pam’s for the next five days. Tim drove him to the church.

They were met at the door by Jane Godwin with a tray of buttonholes: a carnation and a spray of fern wrapped round with silver paper. ‘You’re in good time,’ she said. ‘Pam won’t be long. Last minute nerves, you know …’

‘She’s not changed her mind, has she?’ Harry asked in alarm.

‘Good Lord, no. She had you marked out from the first, Harry me lad, the last thing she’ll do is back out. She just wants to look her best for you.’ She paused to look into his face. ‘You aren’t having second thoughts, are you?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Good.’

Tim took one of the flowers and fastened it on Harry’s uniform jacket, did the same for himself, then they made their way into the church and down the aisle to the pew at the front.

Harry was conscious that the church was full on both sides. ‘I didn’t think there’d be so many here,’ he whispered to Tim.

‘Why not? Very popular couple, you are. There’s Pam’s relatives and yours and as many as could make it from the station, including some of the Yanks we’ve got to know, half the Women’s Land Army, all the pub regulars, not to mention anyone who has ever bought Godwin’s bread.’

Harry turned to look behind him. His mother and father, Roly and Millie and her husband in a captain’s khaki uniform were all there. He grinned at them.

‘Good luck, son.’ his father said.

‘Are you nervous?’ Millie asked.

‘A bit.’

‘I’m on tenterhooks. I hope Dotty behaves herself.’

So did Harry. His niece was well named Dotty. She was somewhat spoilt, and as her father was so rarely to be seen, was hardly ever chastised. He really hadn’t wanted Dorothy to be a bridesmaid because she reminded him of George and, today of all days, he did not want that reminder, but when Millie had suggested it, Pam had agreed at once. This, he realised, was to be the big occasion his first marriage had not been, even though it was wartime and it had taken a great deal of organising to get everyone together on the day. Pam’s mother and his own ought to be in charge of the conduct of the war, he thought ruefully – they’d have it won in no time.

He looked back towards the church door as the organist, who had been quietly playing ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’, struck up the wedding march. He rose and moved out into the aisle, not once taking his eye off the bridal procession as it made its way towards him. Pam looked stunning in a flowing white dress and veil, lent to her by a friend who had married just before the war. She carried a bouquet of red roses. Her cheeks were blooming and her eyes shining and at that moment he knew he wanted this marriage more than anything. Behind her were two of her friends in short burgundy dresses that matched the bride’s flowers, ushering Dorothy ahead of them, in a velvet dress the same colour, trimmed with white lace. She had a little basket of tiny white rosebuds in her hand and looked very solemn.

Pam reached him, smiled happily and took his arm. He smiled back and together they turned towards the rector. A little shiver ran down his spine as he heard him say: ‘If any of you know cause or just impediment why these
two persons should not be joined in matrimony, ye are to declare it.’ No one had, of course, and the service continued without interruption.

It was a moving service, but a happy one; both spoke their vows clearly and then Harry slipped the ring on Pam’s finger and it was done. They signed the register and went back down the aisle, her hand tucked into his arm, smiling at everyone. Rose petals were used for confetti and both mothers fetched out box cameras and took pictures outside the church and again when they arrived back at the bakery, where everyone enjoyed a feast that had taken all the ingenuity of Jane Goodman, Hilda Walker and the landlord of The Papermakers to bring about, not to mention generous contributions from Harry’s American friends. The celebrations went on all afternoon, but Harry and Pam did not stay to the end. Once the speeches were over, Pam changed into a going-away costume and they climbed into the little sports car and drove away with tin cans rattling behind them.

Harry stopped the car as soon as they were clear of the village and got out to untie the cans. He flung them in the back, got in the car and turned towards her. ‘I haven’t kissed you yet, Mrs Walker.’ And he proceeded to do just that.

‘Mrs Walker,’ she said and giggled. ‘It sounds funny.’

‘You had better get used to it. You’ve got it for life.’

‘I know. Oh, Harry, I couldn’t be happier, not if you were to offer me the Crown Jewels.’

‘I’m not likely to do that. Not that I wouldn’t, of course, if I had them to offer. You’ll just have to make do with a plain gold band and five days on the Broads. We can’t go far; the petrol won’t last out.’ He had decided not to go to the coast; for one thing the beaches were mined and
they wouldn’t be able to go on the sand, and for another it would remind him too much of Julie.

‘That’ll do me. We’ll laze about, take out a rowing boat, go for long walks and we won’t talk about the war at all.’

‘That suits me.’

They did their best to do just that and, at the end of it, returned to Swanton Morley where he had rented a small house close to the end of the runway. It was called Honeysuckle Cottage because there was a vigorous specimen of that plant climbing all over a tiny wooden porch at the front door. Harry was convinced it was the clinging honeysuckle that prevented the porch from disintegrating. Everything about the place was small. It was no more than four rooms, a kitchen and sitting room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, each with a tiny window which was easy to blackout. There was no running water, no gas or electricity, no main drains or sewerage, nothing but four walls and a roof. There was a well which provided water, oil lamps and candles for light when it became too dark to see, and the lavatory was a bucket under a bench in a tiny hut at the bottom of the garden, which had to be emptied but which made good manure for the garden. It was decidedly primitive, but it was home, and they furnished it with help from Pam’s parents and a special chit for furniture given by the Government to people who had been bombed out or were newly married.

Harry could sleep at home every night when he was not on standby. Pam was blissfully happy with her airman husband and he with her. They began to make plans for what they would do when the war was won – a proper home, a good job and a family were high on the list.

Julie settled back at Ringway, watching the men come and go for parachute training, being cheerful, friendly and efficient without getting close to any of them. She wrote frequently to Florrie, who was now driving bigwigs all over the place, and to Alec, though her letters to him were a little constrained. She had half suspected he was becoming fond of her and that last leave had filled her with alarm. She was in no position to commit herself to anyone, but she could not bear to cut him off altogether. He was a kind of lifeline to normality and she longed for normality. Time and time again she thought about telling him about her loss of memory, that she had no idea of her real name or if she had a family who might be thinking her dead, worst of all that she had been a mother. So much had happened since, it seemed unreal, a distant dream and sometimes she had to pinch herself to prove she was alive and awake. What would he make of such a confession?

At other times she was tempted to tell him she reciprocated his feelings and say nothing of her past, but how could she do that to him? He was too obviously sincere, much too nice a person to deceive. In a way she was glad they were apart; if they were together, within talking and touching distance, she would not be able to hold out. She still had odd snatches of memory, at least that’s what she thought these fleeting visions were. Unless she was psychic. One such twinge came in late May when she was at the cinema watching a newsreel about the raid on the German dams. The destruction had been caused by bouncing bombs, so it was explained, which were dropped at low level and skimmed along the surface bouncing off the waves. ‘Like skimming pebbles into the sea,’ the commentator said. This was followed by a demonstration of someone doing it and
Julie sat bolt upright. She had done that, some time in the past she had done that and she had not been alone. She groped and groped at her memory, but nothing more came to her. Too unsettled to sit still, she left the cinema and caught a bus back to Ringway, where there were friends and colleagues to take her mind off it.

‘I don’t know where she is,’ Ted Austen told the couple who faced him. The woman might once have been a big woman, but she appeared frail, with hollow cheeks and a haunted look in her eyes. The man looked as though he could handle himself, and though he must have been in his late forties, Ted did not want to tangle with him. He could beat him all right in a scrap but it would draw attention to himself and that he most definitely did not want.

He led a semi-nomadic life, trying to avoid the police, not only because of his black market activities, but because he knew he should have registered for call-up and he hadn’t done so. He changed his lodgings often and at first kept his illicit stores in his various wardrobes, but he didn’t trust his landladies not to snoop and latterly there had been too much to hide successfully. He had taken to concealing it in bombed-out factories and warehouses, moving it regularly, until the council had started demolishing the buildings as unsafe and flattening the ground. So he had hired two adjoining lock-up garages. He kept his stores in one, where his favourite customers knew they could contact him on certain days. Usually he met them in different pubs, going round in a battered van using black market petrol. The van was dressed up to look like an ambulance, which had been a stroke of genius on his part. He had only to wear a white coat and set the bell ringing and he whizzed through
roadblocks and cordons and no one questioned him. He kept it in the second of the two garages.

Someone had ratted and sent these two to him and he’d have his guts for garters if he ever found out who it was. He was thankful the garage doors were shut and there was nothing for them to see. ‘I haven’t seen her for goodness knows how long – it must be nearly three years, when we both worked at Chalfont’s.’

‘But you knew her quite well?’ the woman asked.

‘Not well,’ he said guardedly. ‘Sometimes we sat together in the canteen, sometimes when the siren went we’d go to the shelter together. I took her to the pictures once or twice, that’s all.’

‘But it’s not all, is it?’ the man said. ‘You got her into some dodgy business with the black market.’

‘Not me,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the wrong man there. If she was into the black market it wasn’t anything to do with me.’

‘If not you, who then?’

‘How should I know? I didn’t ask her business and she didn’t ask mine.’

‘Did you know any of her friends?’

‘Only Julie Walker and she’s dead.’

‘We know that.’

‘Then you know as much as I do. If your daughter didn’t die on the same day as Julie, she might have left London for somewhere safer, or she might have died in any of the raids afterwards. I never saw her again.’

Stuart handed him his calling card. ‘If you do get news of her, will you be good enough to contact me at this address? Even if it’s only something very tiny. There’ll be a reward.’