The September Girls (56 page)

Eleanor had been the only person who wasn’t surprised when Fielding and Fergus had announced they were getting married. ‘I always knew they were sweet on each other. I wonder what happened to make them realize it?’

As expected, Brenna wasn’t too pleased. She wanted a perfect wife for her son and Fielding didn’t meet her idea of perfection. ‘How will she manage with only one arm when they have children? It used to take me all my time to change a nappy with two.’

At this, Eleanor had got quite impatient with her. The girl had actually agreed to become a Catholic, was seeing a priest weekly, and Eleanor suspected she was only doing it to please Brenna - she doubted if Fergus gave a damn what religion his wife was. ‘For goodness’ sake, Bren, knowing Fielding, she’ll soon learn to change nappies when the occasion calls for it. If she doesn’t, they’ll be living in Parliament Terrace, won’t they?’ The young couple were going to occupy Marcus’s old bedroom. ‘Nancy and Cara will help.’

‘I’ll be the baby’s grandmother,’ Brenna said, bristling with indignation, as Eleanor had known she would. ‘If me daughter-in-law needs help,
I’ll
give a hand if I’m around. Any road, she’s a nice girl and I really like her. I’m sure she and our Fergus will be very happy.’

Since then, she’d accepted the situation and had joined in the preparations for the wedding. Although it wouldn’t be until next spring, clothes had to be made, a job Eleanor had taken upon herself to do and had already begun altering the beautiful things that had been found in the attic, starting with the easiest, the pink ball gown for Cara that needed only slight adjustment.

For herself, she had chosen the ice-blue velvet dress with lace panels to turn into a costume. There was nothing to fit Nancy, so Eleanor intended making an outfit out of two afternoon dresses of different shades of cream. Brenna had taken a fancy to an elegant grey silk visiting dress that wouldn’t require too much alteration apart from the hem being taken up.

A white crêpe negligee and matching nightdress were to be transformed into a wedding dress for Fielding. She visualized it having a long cape top to disguise the fact that the dear little girl’s left arm was missing. It would be one of the best-dressed weddings Liverpool had seen in quite a while - clothes like these were no longer available in the shops.

It was such a pity Sybil would be unable to come. Eleanor would love to have made her something pretty out of her grandmother’s clothes, but Bombay was thousands of miles away and she would never be allowed leave even if a close relative was getting married and Fielding and Fergus were neither. Eleanor finished a tuck and started on another. She wished Sybil would write more often, but she’d sent just three letters since New Year when she’d come to Jonathan’s funeral.

Jonathan! She paused in her sewing and her eyes misted over. She thought of him virtually all the time. It was nine months, two weeks and three days since he’d died. Everyone thought she’d taken it surprisingly well and she supposed she had, but it was all due to Hector Ingram. He wrote to her every Sunday and the letter usually arrived on Tuesday when she would write back to him. They confided in each other their deepest, saddest thoughts, holding nothing back. They didn’t tell each other that time was a great healer or that one day the pain would ease, as other people had tried to convince her. Perhaps the people were right, but Eleanor found it no help at all when all she wanted to do was grieve, not listen to platitudes from those who hadn’t lost a child as precious as Jonathan had been - or as precious as Morag had been to Hector.

His last-but-one letter had torn at her heart.

‘Why don’t you move Morag to the cemetery and let her lie beside Jonathan?’ she had suggested when she answered his letter. ‘After all, they died together and they’ll be company for each other. Then you can live anywhere you like, knowing she’s not alone.’

‘I think I will,’ he’d written back.

She had invited him to stay for Christmas and New Year, knowing how terrible it would be for him to spend the first anniversary of Morag’s death on his own. It was the least she could do for someone who was still suffering as badly as she was over the loss of a child. She was quite looking forward to seeing him again.

 

It was Nancy who found the Yank and brought him back to Parliament Terrace. He’d been standing outside the cathedral looking lost, so she’d asked if he would like a cup of tea. It was November and the rain hadn’t stopped all day. He was a very personable young man, brown-haired and brown-eyed, barely eighteen and very shy, nothing like the Yanks Cara and Fielding had so far come across who’d tried to lure them into bed with nylons and packets of chewing gum, even when they were merely out shopping or at the pictures.

‘Over-paid, over-fed, over-sexed and over here,’ was how the Yanks were usually described, but Nancy’s Yank was different. His name was Eddie Malone, and his father was of Irish descent, his mother Scottish.

When Cara first saw him, he was in the kitchen, nursing Kitty on one knee and Sean on the other, and her mother was beaming at him. Earlier, Mam had taken the children to the park, while Cara had gone to Eleanor’s to see Fielding try on her half-finished wedding dress - she had looked like a miniature Greek goddess.

‘This is Eddie Malone, he’s American,’ Nancy announced, then to Eddie, ‘Cara is the children’s mother.’

‘I’ve got a brother and sister back in Boston only a few years older,’ Eddie said bashfully. ‘I’ve got two more brothers, too: one of them’s called Sean.’ Kitty, only two months away from her second birthday, was looking at him adoringly as he jiggled her up and down, and Sean, only weeks away from his first, was clapping his hands joyfully.

‘And he knows a lad called Caffrey,’ Mam said. ‘I was wondering if one of me sisters ended up in America and it could be her son.’

‘If she’s had a son, your sister must have got married, Mam, and her name wouldn’t be Caffrey any more.’

Mam looked disappointed. ‘I didn’t think of that, darlin’. Any road, Eddie’s just had a jam sarny, and he’s coming back for tea on Sunday with one of his mates. Nancy was lucky enough to get a tin of corned beef this avvy, so we can have corned beef hash.’

 

On Sunday, they didn’t have hash for tea because Eddie arrived with a bag full of groceries. Nancy nearly fainted when she saw the contents: a large piece of cooked ham, fresh vegetables and fruit, a tin of pineapple bigger than anyone had ever seen before, three tins of cream, a jar of pickled onions and one of chutney, and, most precious of all, two packets of tea.

‘Where did this come from, Eddie?’ she gasped. ‘Have you been raiding the kitchen, or something?’

‘It was given to me when I said I’d been invited to tea with some English folk,’ Eddie explained. ‘They said you were short of food over here.’

‘Well, if that isn’t the truth, I don’t know what is. Thank you, Eddie. We’re all very grateful, but I hope you don’t mind if we don’t keep it all to ourselves. I’d like to share it with people who aren’t so lucky.’

‘I’d better telephone Eleanor and invite her to come,’ said Brenna. ‘We can’t let her miss out on a feast like this. Come on, Joey. You can dial the numbers for me. I know how much you like using the phone.’ Joey had started school at Easter and could already count up to a hundred with only a little help.

Fielding was rooting through the bag and came up with an orange. ‘Do you know what this is, Kitty?’

Kitty shook her head. She’d never seen an orange before.

Eddie’s friend, Dexter, was a broad, beefy young man with a good-humoured face, much less shy than Eddie, but with the same innocent young eyes. He was awed, he said, when he’d noticed the houses only a few doors away had been demolished by a bomb.

‘It was dark when I came last time and I didn’t notice,’ Eddie explained.

‘Were you in this house when it happened?’ Dexter asked.

‘Sitting at this very table,’ Nancy said dramatically. ‘Me, Cara, Fielding and little Kitty - she was only a babe in arms then.’

‘Were you frightened?’

‘Petrified out of our wits, lad, but there was nothing we could do about it.’

‘Boy, you Brits have certainly been up against it.’

‘Dexter is a whizz on the piano,’ Eddie said proudly.

‘There’s a piano in the parlour,’ Cara said, ‘and he can show us what a whizz he is.’ Dexter’s fingers were short and podgy and she didn’t believe he could be all that good.

But Dexter’s podgy fingers positively flew over the keys when he was seated in front of the black, satinwood piano. Eleanor had had lessons when she was a little girl but, since then, the lid hadn’t been lifted except to be dusted.

‘Macnamara’s Ragtime Band’ was followed by ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’, ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’, and ‘A Foggy Day in London Town’, the song that Fielding had sung in Gozo, which had given so much pleasure and drawn so much applause.

‘Sing, Fielding,’ Cara commanded, expecting a refusal, but Fielding had been treading on enchanted ground since she’d got engaged to Fergus and willingly jumped to her feet and joined in the song. When it had finished, Dexter whispered something to her, and she began to sing, ‘Yours till the stars lose their glory . . .’

Her voice, unused for so long, was as pure and smooth as it had ever been, but something had been added, a tinge of melancholy, as if she wasn’t just singing the words, but feeling them, experiencing the emotions they expressed. An awful lot had happened to Fielding since she’d last sung in public.

Cara noticed Mam’s face was sad and drawn. Was she thinking about Dad? She’d expected them to stay together until the stars had lost their glory, yet he’d left her for another woman. She reached for her mother’s hand and squeezed it: she responded with a brave smile.

‘He’ll come back one day, I just know it,’ she said in a low voice, as if they’d read each other’s thoughts.

Nancy, who’d stayed in the kitchen to prepare the tea, came to say it was ready, and they eagerly trooped downstairs. It was a long time since they’d looked forward to a meal quite so much.

 

The following Sunday, Eddie and Dexter brought another friend, Nelson, and even more mouth-watering delicacies, including whiskey, two bottles of wine, and sweets and chocolate for the children - they called it candy. Nelson was about six foot four and beanpole thin. Back home, he’d already been the star player in a junior basketball team and had been on the point of taking it up professionally, but the war had intervened. He took Joey into the yard and showed him how it was played.

The Americans were like breaths of fresh air, Cara thought, bringing light into lives that had grown rather dark since the onset of a war that was now in its fourth year. It wasn’t just the blackout, but the never-ending struggle to keep warm, feed their families, a shortage of almost everything, and the people you loved being sent to faraway places, making you wonder if you’d ever see them again. And, worst of all, losing the people you loved, as she’d lost Kit, Eleanor had lost Jonathan, and Tyrone had lost his wife and child.

 

‘This is nice,’ Brenna remarked, glancing around the crowded restaurant. It was Christmas Eve and an elderly man in a dinner jacket was playing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ on a white grand piano. Three giant chandeliers hung from the ceiling, shivering slightly and casting an extra sparkle around the room. ‘I’ve never been here before. I’ve never seen so many fur coats before, either.’

‘I’ve been coming for years, since I was about fifteen.’ Eleanor signalled to a waitress that they were ready to order. ‘Frederick and Hughes has always been my favourite shop.’

‘When I was fifteen, I was cleaning house for some actress - what was her name now? I remember it was Miss Francesca O’Reilly. She was a bit of a tyrant, used to follow me round searching for places I’d missed with the duster.’ She chuckled. ‘It wasn’t often she found any.’

The waitress tottered over. She was very old and her white cap was askew. ‘What can I get you, Mrs Allardyce?’

‘We’d like two Christmas dinners, please, Enid, and plum pudding for afters. Would you like a sherry, Brenna?’

‘I’d love one,’ Brenna said promptly, ‘but could I have a cup of tea while we’re waiting?’

‘Two sweet sherries and a pot of tea, Enid. I need the sherry, it might help steady my nerves,’ she said when Enid had gone. That afternoon, she was meeting Hector Ingram at Lime Street Station. His train was scheduled to arrive at four o’clock, but she was fully prepared for a long wait.

‘There’s no need to feel nervous about anything. Aren’t you two the best of friends already?’

‘Yes, but I still feel nervous at the idea of meeting him again in the flesh - and I’ve almost forgotten what he looks like.’ The tea arrived and she poured milk into the cups. Brenna furiously stirred the pot to make it stronger.

‘Any road, you look lovely. I’m sure he’ll be impressed.’ Eleanor had made herself a dead smart coat out of a pair of tartan travelling rugs found in the attic, even down to a little matching pork pie hat with a black spotted veil.

‘It’s not that sort of relationship, Bren. Hector won’t give a damn how I look.’

Brenna didn’t ask, if that was the case, why she had taken so much trouble with her appearance. Eleanor had had her hair set earlier - it looked smooth and glossy beneath the hat, not a sign of grey - and had been sewing like blazes to have the coat finished for today. Instead, she said, ‘It’s a pity you’ll miss everything tomorrow. Last night, Eddie came all the way from Warrington in one of them jeep things with a turkey as big as an ostrich so Nancy can have it ready in time. He brought a cake an’ all, almost as big as the turkey, loads of balloons and paper hats, as well as presents for the children. He, Dexter and Nelson are having Christmas dinner at the base, so we’re leaving ours till five o’clock so we can all eat together and have a party afterwards. It means they’ll have two dinners, but since they’ve hardly finished growing it won’t do them any harm.’