The Soldier's Bride (47 page)

‘We’re in agreement then?’ her voice followed him. ‘I shall start divorce proceedings tomorrow?’ Again he nodded, went into his room and closed the door. Tomorrow he would tell Letitia the news. She would hardly believe it – this turn-around. He hardly believed it himself. One thing was certain: from tomorrow he would spend every day with Letitia, and that included spending the whole of Christmas with her.

There was a gleam in Madge’s eyes these days whenever he came face to face with her – malevolent, taunting. Perhaps I know something you don’t, it intimated. You think you’re getting away with it, it challenged. Go and see my uncle. Suck up to him – if you can. You’ll get nothing out of him.

Robert Lampton, sitting up in bed in his rambling Victorian Middlesex mansion, looked waxy – an old age waxiness, eyes watery behind dusty spectacles, mouth sunken, teeth in a glass beside him. Like his home with its redundant gas mantles, thinning carpets, dusty drapes, its great domed mirrors, huge dark pictures and high cobwebbed ceilings, he was of another age. But he was as welcoming and pleasant towards David as ever he’d been.

At seventy-three he had finally resigned his directorship – Babbington, the store’s Chief Buyer, and Taylor its General Manager, had been elected on to the Board at last year’s AGM. But Robert still held the shares that could give a majority vote to either David or Madge. With the perversity of old age, he evaded any query as to what he intended to do with them, and said to David in cracked cheery tones:
‘I’ll see the both of you all right when me time comes, me boy, don’t worry. Always been fair.’

The toothless smile of reassurance, David suspected, was the same as he’d given to Madge – insurance against any faltering in the loyalty to him which he seemed so much in need of, forcing each of them to visit him regularly once a week.

Meeting Madge by accident last week with that taunting gleam in her eyes, David hoped their visits wouldn’t clash this morning. He yearned to be away, on edge with nerves. You perverse old bugger, he thought, smiled, shook the narrow blue-veined hand, the old-man odour of the house following him as he left to go to see how the store was doing.

Like a man who fears he might be asked to bid farewell to a loving friend at any moment, David visited the emporium as regularly as he visited Robert Lampton. Wandering slowly, nostalgically, through its departments, he returned the friendly nods of the staff he passed, each time the knowledge that this could be the last time, knowing just how he’d feel when it finally came.

Every department was always bustling with customers. He strolled through the shop with an ache in his heart for what could so easily cease to be his as each floor manager came to greet him.

‘Good morning, sir!’

‘Good morning, Mr Seymour. How are things?’

‘Very well, sir. Thriving.’

‘Fine.’

‘Good morning, sir! Nice to see you here.’

‘Nice to be here, Mr Wells. Looks busy.’

‘Oh, it is, sir, it is!’

The cylindrical metal money boxes rattled as spring pulleys were tugged by sales assistants, whirring along overhead tramways to the cashier’s office behind its glass windows to be emptied, filled with whatever change was needed, the tops screwed back on to be whizzed back. A somewhat old-fashioned store but people loved it, didn’t want modern ways. They flocked in through the revolving doors, breathing in the welcome smell of this emporium as they entered – a smell of carpets, fabric and furniture. David took a deep breath, filling his own lungs with its nostalgia, and felt he could cry.

It seemed to be taking ages, solicitors’ letters passing to and fro. A simple case they’d said – no one contesting it. Solicitors, however, Letty concluded, never seemed to feel justified in earning their fees unless they were seen to earn it, and that meant reams of correspondence, wodges of Instructions to Counsel, Further Instructions and Affidavits, all held together by a myriad of rusting pins and cracked sealing wax, prevented from sliding out of scruffy beige files by a mile of faded pink tape. That was the way Letty saw it.

Always patient, David soothed her.

‘A couple more weeks, my sweet. Three at the most.’

‘It feels like three years!’ she moaned. It had been horrible to be termed ‘the Woman Named’. Made her feel dirty, unsavoury; made a sordid affair of her and David’s love for each other.

‘It’s already August,’ she went on angrily. ‘What the hell are they doing? If you ask me, she’s deliberately holding things up.’

David’s arm tightened encouragingly. ‘Be patient, darling.’

They sat on a bench under the trees of Kensington Gardens, glad of the shade. Couples and families strolled by, women and girls in bright summer dresses and wide hats, the men shirtsleeves and lightweight trilbies, braces on show, coats slung across their shoulders.

David leaned away to fish in his pocket for his cigarette case – the gold one she’d bought him two years ago for his birthday in March with his initials engraved on it.

Listlessly she watched him take out a cigarette. He smoked strong Players Navy Cut. As he lit up, she looked away towards a small cluster of pigeons, pink feet kicking up tiny puffs of dust as they plodded about in search of crumbs. At least the females were – indifferent to the males, pea brains still on sex, iridescent breasts puffed up while they warbled futilely.

Acrid smoke was floating by her face. Without switching her gaze, she knew it trickled lazily from his nostrils, its toxic enjoyment held in his lungs for as long as possible.

‘You smoke too much,’ she remarked, heard a small grunt of ironic acknowledgement escape him.

He knew he did. How could he not? She knew the tensions, felt them herself – waiting, waiting. She worried about the persistence of that pain he kept getting. All due to tension. Perhaps when this was over … Letty closed her eyes. Dear God, please let his divorce come soon.

The sun had moved round from the heavy summer foliage above them. Its warmth touched her short hair. She lifted her face to it, drank it in. Behind her the well-stocked flower beds wafted a scent of lavender and roses and the tangy perfume of the box hedge.

There was going to be a war. Everyone knew that now. No dodging it like last year. Hitler had made up his mind to march into Poland, and Britain had promised Poland its support. If Hitler did carry out his intentions, and there were no indications that he wouldn’t, then Britain would go to war.

Terrified, Letty saw the inescapability of conscription, had hoped that perhaps Chris’s job on the newspaper might make him exempt. But for all he was twenty-four, was engaged to be married, he still had that sense of adventure that had nearly got him into the Spanish venture.

‘If the balloon goes up, I’d much sooner volunteer than be called up,’ he’d told her last week – had then dropped his bombshell. ‘I’ve already written off applying to train as a pilot in the RAF.’

She’d been terrified all right. Had burst out, ‘Chris! No!’

‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ he’d told her, his clean-cut handsome features only concerned that she was fearful for him.

‘But what about Eileen?’ she had gasped.

‘She understands,’ he’d said. ‘I’d be called up anyway if there is a war. Everyone will. And I’d love to fly. I’m waiting to hear from them. I’ve had a university education so I’m bound to be accepted.’

He had decided to postpone his wedding for the time being – much against the wishes of Eileen and her family – this when hundreds of couples were rushing headlong into marriage as though it were their last ever chance before the balloon did go up.

As August moved towards its close, everywhere there was this haste, this rush to do things that for years had been left undone. The whole country was in flux as September arrived and Hitler marched on into Poland, cocking a snook at the British Government. Troops commandeered nearly all the trains. If it wasn’t troops, it was children – hordes of them evacuated out of the city, from the vulnerable East End with its industry and its docks, into the country away from the bombing that everyone knew would come.

Anderson shelters, named after Sir John Anderson who had designed them, were being delivered to be installed in suburban gardens. Lucy told Letty that they had paid a man to put theirs in, and were building a rockery over it to try to make it look a bit more presentable.

In town brick public shelters were being constructed on any odd piece of ground. All done at a frantic pace, giving the feeling of life as they knew it coming to an end. Letty, quite expecting to see those down-at-heel sandwich men on every street corner, boards displaying the words: beware –
THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH
! was surprised to see so few. Two days later, it felt her world was indeed coming to an end.

On Sunday morning, with Chris standing by the window, she and David on the sofa, they listened to the radiogram.
She felt David’s hands come over hers and grip convulsively. She smiled at him, trying to make it encouraging even as he tried to encourage her while from the radiogram droned the sad, flat, disillusioned voice of Chamberlain telling them the country was at war with Germany.

His voice dying away, the National Anthem swelled from the fretted loudspeaker of the radiogram in an almost desperate crashing crescendo of national pride. As one Letty and David stood up, her hand in his, Letty’s chin held high, her eyes on Chris in a silent prayer for his safety.

Wordlessly her tall handsome son gazed back at her, his dark eyes concealing what he was thinking. And she couldn’t ask. She merely murmured, ‘All right, Chris?’ saw him nod slowly and went to distract herself by putting on the kettle for a much needed cup of tea.

It had hardly started to steam when in the distance came a strange eerie wailing, rising and falling at slow regular intervals.

‘Air raid!’ The words were wrenched from her. Turning off the kettle, virtually yanking its plug from the socket, she hurried into the sitting room to stare helplessly at David.

Instantly he took charge, ushering her and Chris ahead of him downstairs to the closed gallery and through the door to the cellar below, already shored up against the bombs that could be falling seconds from now.

Half an hour later they were back upstairs, laughing with relief as the sweet single note of the All Clear shivered the air over the City. Within seconds the telephone was ringing, Lucy’s voice near to panic as it always was in any crisis.
Lucy, twice a grandmother, was still as highly strung as ever she’d been as a youngster.

‘Oh, Letty! It’s dreadful. My daughter’s husbands – if they’re called up. Them with young children too. And an air raid only a few moments ago.’

‘It must have been a false alarm,’ Letty told her, in control of herself. ‘Nothing happened. It was so quiet. You heard nothing?’

‘It doesn’t mean a thing!’ Lucy screeched. ‘We’re at war – anything could happen. We could be killed when we’re not looking!’

It took a while to soothe her, Jack audible in the background on the same quest, his quiet voice on the phone he’d wrested off Lucy deep with reassurance, talking to David long after Letty had gone back upstairs.

Chris left two weeks later, stopping off on the way to say goodbye to Eileen and go on from there to Cramwell in Lincolnshire. David and Letty waved him off, watching him carrying his suitcase, his back ramrod straight, his face full of anticipation.

Wiping away the tears that had been held back until he was out of sight, Letty went back inside to gather up the morning mail and open the gallery. Life had to go on. They couldn’t stop because a son was off to war.

Not that there’d be much trade this morning – people much too occupied thinking of themselves, hiding away their own treasures, to bother about buying more. In the office while David went on upstairs she sorted listlessly through the bills, invoices, brochures, and a few letters.
She stopped at the envelope with Garen, Polder & Stanway, Solicitors stamped across the top. Excitement gripped her. At last! She let the rest of the mail fall back on to the desk.

‘David! I think it’s come! This must be it!’

Without waiting for his reply, she raced up the stairs, burst into the sitting room where she knew he’d be, perhaps pouring himself a drink before leaving to pop into his office later or to the store.

He was sitting in the armchair. No, sprawling. His face, screwed up in pain, was a pasty grey, and perspiring. Groaning softly, eyes closed, he was rubbing one hand along his chest and shoulder, head limp against the chairback.

The envelope fell from Letty’s hand as she rushed forward.

‘Oh, God, David! What is it? What’s the matter?’

‘It’s terrible, the pain …’

‘Where?’

‘Everywhere.’

She hesitated no longer but threw herself at the phone and was dialling the exchange before she had even steadied herself. Frantic at the delay she waited to be put through to the hospital. And all the time she could hear David groaning. The sound went right through her.

It seemed wrong, the sun shining so brilliantly outside the green-curtained waiting room. It was hard to sit in one place for any length of time. Her mind a turmoil, Letty sat first on one chair, then another, went to the window to stare out, to the door in the hope of someone, anyone, coming to tell her what was happening.

She’d telephoned Lucy who had squealed as though it were her own husband stricken. She said she’d get Jack to phone back, blubbered a lot of sympathetic nonsense into the phone and rang off – most likely to indulge in a good cry. Jack had phoned back within ten minute from his print works just off Lea Bridge Road in Walthamstow, a large and thriving firm now.

‘I’ll be over straight away,’ he’d said. ‘You need someone with you.’ That was all. She’d returned to the waiting room feeling easier.

She knew she could depend on him. As tall and skinny as ever he’d been when she’d first known him, though now with a noticeable stoop, she would never have believed in those days he could become a rock for her sister to anchor her high-strung emotions to. And now Letty too needed him at this moment, such a floundering ship she had become. But he hadn’t arrived yet and she quaked with fear as she waited.