Читать книгу Women on the Home Front: Family Saga 4-Book Collection - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 32

Chapter Twenty-One

‘Tilly, Agnes seems very quiet. The two of you haven’t had a fall-out, have you?’ Olive asked her daughter, taking advantage of the fact that the two of them were alone as Agnes had been asked to stay on at work a bit longer because they were short-handed.

‘No, of course not,’ Tilly assured her mother. She had noticed herself that Agnes seemed a bit low but she had put that down to all the bad news in the papers. It made Tilly feel low herself.

The kitchen was warm with the smell of ironing, the kitchen door open to let in some fresh air. Tilly was helping her mother by folding the ironing, the two of them working companionably together. Sally was working nights and Dulcie had gone home to see her brother, who would be rejoining his regiment once his leave came to an end. Tilly gave a small sigh. She had really liked Dulcie’s brother and when she had first seen him she had created all manner of romantic fantasies inside her head, most of which involved her doing something really brave, like saving his life, after which he clasped her to his chest and gazed deep into her eyes, telling her how wonderful she was.

Dunkirk, and what she had seen and heard from the soldiers rescued from France’s beaches, though, had driven such silly school girlish daydreams right out of her head. Men weren’t fairytale princes; they were human flesh and blood, marked by the things they had witnessed.

‘I went to see Mrs Long today,’ Olive told Tilly.

Tilly put down the petticoat she had been folding. ‘Christopher’s mother?’

Olive nodded, testing the heat of her iron on a damp handkerchief. Some women might spit on their irons to test their heat, but Olive’s mother, having been in service, thoroughly disapproved of such common habits and had taught Olive to dampen a handkerchief and iron that instead. Having satisfied herself that it was hot enough to iron her smart cream linen summer skirt, she turned it inside out and slipped it on to the ironing board, carefully straightening its pleats.

‘Is Christopher’s father going to die?’ Tilly asked anxiously. ‘Christopher thinks he is. He doesn’t say so but I can tell.’

‘I think it’s possible that he may, Tilly,’ Olive answered her honestly, ‘although naturally one hopes that he will not. It will be very hard for Mrs Long and Christopher if he does.’

‘It must have been hard for you, Mum, when Dad died.’

They rarely talked about Jim’s death. Although Olive had always made a point of talking to Tilly about her father, she had tried to talk about him in a light-hearted happy manner, wanting Tilly to know the best of her father rather than the dreadful final weeks of his life.

Standing at the sink, dampening the clean tea towel she was going to use to press her skirt with Olive then turned round and looked at her daughter. Tilly was growing up so quickly now. The war had done that.

‘Yes,’ she said simply, ‘it was hard. I had your grandparents, of course. Your grandmother took your father’s death very hard. I understand now much better than I did then how she must have felt. To have raised a child to adulthood and then to lose them is an unthinkable, an unbearable pain.’

‘You must have missed Dad so much.’

‘Yes I did. But I had you and that made it easier for me, Tilly. I had you to love and look after and I knew that your dad would want me to concentrate on you and not on his death. It will be harder for Christopher’s mother than it was for me because they have been together so much longer, and hard for Christopher too.’

‘Poor Christopher. His life is already difficult, with him being a pacifist. You have to be very brave to stick to your beliefs when other people don’t always agree with them. I don’t really agree with them myself, but that doesn’t stop me being friends with Christopher.’

Her daughter definitely wasn’t in any danger of falling in love with Christopher Long, no matter what Nancy might want to think, Olive acknowledged as she pressed the iron down hard on the pleats, filling the kitchen with sizzling steam and the smell of damp cloth.

Agnes felt so wretched. Even more wretched than she had felt when she had been told that she’d have to leave the orphanage, as she sat in the small back room off the booking office, hidden from public view, eating the fish-paste sandwiches Olive had made up for her lunch. She hadn’t seen Ted for days, not since he had told her that he didn’t think there was any need for them to have tea together any more now that she had settled in at the booking office. And she suspected that he was deliberately avoiding her.

Les, the new driver, on the other hand, she seemed to be bumping into all the time, but Les wasn’t Ted. He didn’t have Ted’s kind smile nor his cheery whistle. She’d never thought that this would happen and that Ted wouldn’t want to see her again. They had been such good friends – the best of friends – and Agnes missed him dreadfully. She couldn’t sleep properly at night for thinking about him and worrying that he might have guessed that what she felt for him was more than just friendship.

Agnes didn’t know when she had first realised that what she wanted most of all was to spend the rest of her life with Ted. She’d certainly known there was something at Christmas when he had hugged her and then kissed her quickly before releasing her. She’d wanted him to kiss her again but he hadn’t and now he never would. A hard lump of emotion filled her chest, making it ache. She felt so ashamed of herself, feeling like she did about Ted when he didn’t want her to. That was a fine way to repay his kindness to her. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell Tilly how she felt. Tilly was full of plans for what they could do together if the war continued, and once they were old enough. They could join the ATS or the WRNS, Tilly had said, and properly do their bit for their country. Agnes didn’t want to go into uniform; she wanted to stay here where she could at least be close to Ted, but of course she hadn’t told Tilly that, because she knew that Tilly would worry about her if she thought that she was unhappy over Ted. Tilly was like that.

She was so lucky to be living at number 13, Agnes acknowledged. She’d even got used to Dulcie’s sharp tongue and had grown to realise that it didn’t really mean anything and that it was just Dulcie’s way. She couldn’t imagine living anywhere where she could be happier, except of course if she was married to Ted and living with him. But that was never going to happen, Agnes acknowledged sadly.