The Penny Bangle (37 page)

‘Mum, there’s nothing wrong,’ insisted Robert.

‘You can’t fool me,’ said Rose. ‘You’re fretting about something, aren’t you? When is Cassie coming down to Dorset?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Robert, picking up the
Farming Times
and looking at advertisements for ploughs. ‘She’s very busy at the moment. There are lots of colonels, brigadiers and generals in London, and she has to drive them all around. Well, not all of them, of course. Mum, stop going on at me.’

‘I hope you two haven’t had an argument?’

‘We need to get the guttering fixed,’ said Robert. ‘I’ll go and see Jack Hobson in the morning and ask if he can do it. If he can’t, I’ll do the job myself. What are you going to do about the land girls? Do they want to stay on here?’

‘Shirley says she might, but Tess is getting married,’ Rose replied, and then – to Robert’s great relief – his mother started talking about milk yields, the unreliability of the egg man, and the shocking price of cattle feed.

Frances wrote to Cassie, to tell her that the plans for Charton Minster were all going ahead, and everyone in Charton was getting very excited.

‘The villagers are very pleased,’
wrote Frances.
‘It will mean more business for the shops, and instead of being afraid delinquents might escape to rob and murder them as they sleep in their beds, there will be just ordinary children staying at the Minster.

‘Daisy and I are hoping you’ll still want to be involved. We haven’t said anything to Mrs Denham about you and Robert. But of course we’re hoping you and he will patch things up.’

Cassie put the letter in the bin. She didn’t care about the plans. She’d never set foot in Charton or in Melbury again. So why did it matter what happened to the Minster?

The other ATS girls in the Chelsea house were going out with American boys, were going to parties, going to dances, getting drunk as skunks, and generally having lots of fun.

But Cassie didn’t feel like joining in. When she was not on duty, she lay down on her bed and read her way through piles and piles of movie magazines, given to her housemates by their Yankee boyfriends.

She couldn’t go to the cinema itself because she found she couldn’t bear the newsreels nowadays. They were full of awful revelations about what had been going on in Germany and Poland, about the camps, the gas chambers, the furnaces, the piles of rotting corpses, and they made her cry.

She couldn’t decide what she should do.

She thought she had been desperate to go back home to Smethwick. But now she thought she might stay in the army. She’d probably make sergeant easily – she had the years of service and experience, so she’d be almost certain to get another stripe.

Perhaps she should apply for a commission? She liked the uniforms. Officers had smart, slip-on shoes instead of horrid lace-ups, nicely-tailored skirts and jackets, and they got to wear real nylons, too.

But all her friends were dying to be demobbed, and actually she’d had enough of drill, of marching round a barrack square, of saluting everything that moved, and of obeying orders.

She asked for some demob leave, and she got it. She went back home to Birmingham, back home to Lily, and she tried to get on with her life. She applied for jobs she didn’t get, and wondered if she’d be obliged to go back to the laundry after all.

Lily kept going on at her to find herself a man and settle down, to have some children and raise a family.

‘There’s that nice O’Sullivan boy, he’s just come back from Palestine,’ said Lily, as they ate their breakfast. ‘What about Mrs Flynn’s son, Terry?’ she demanded, as they ate their dinner. ‘You went to school with him.’

Cassie didn’t want to think about the nice O’Sullivan boy or Terry Flynn – both of whom had pulled her hair and said she was a bastard while she was at school.

She was missing Rob so much it ached. She hadn’t believed that there was such a thing as actual heartache, but now she knew for certain it was all too real.

She polished up her penny bangle, rubbing off the silvering and almost rubbing through the alloy, too. She thought – I’m turning into Lily, treasuring a piece of junk which means more to me than any diamonds, pearls or gold.

She longed and longed to see him, talk to him.

She didn’t know what to say.

She started twenty letters.

She screwed them up and put them in the salvage.

She set up imaginary meetings in London and in Dorset. She would get her hair done, she decided, and wear that lovely costume which Daisy’s natural mother had sent her from America.

She’d tell him she was sorry for behaving like a hoyden.

Then Rob would smile, and he would take her in his arms, and he would say, don’t worry, it’s all right. We just had a silly little tiff, as lovers do.

But always, always, always when she’d planned the perfect speech, she’d hear herself again, yelling at Robert, telling him to stick his silver bracelet up his arse.

Then she’d feel sick with guilt and shame.

‘Daisy’s coming to see the Minster, Rob,’ said Rose, holding out the letter to her son. ‘She’s got a few days off, and says she fancies some fresh air.’

‘I thought she was in London, in that new revue?’ Robert glanced up from cleaning harness. ‘Anyway, there isn’t much to see.’

‘There’s the scaffolding going up to fix the roof,’ said Rose. ‘She’s coming to see us as well, in any case. When will Cassie be able to get down?’

Robert pretended not to hear and went on polishing a bridle which already shone.

Daisy arrived and went to see how things were getting on at Charton Minster. The access road had been a problem – half of it was on the Eastons’ land, and Rose knew better than to ask if Lady Easton would allow the Denhams to use her road.

But Daisy didn’t believe in having problems.

The day that Rose had signed the paperwork, Daisy had hired a couple of village men with spades and pickaxes and scythes to cut a path straight to the Minster from a public lane.

She’d get it widened and get some men to gravel it later on, she told her mother. She’d also need to see a carpenter about the window frames. Robert hoped his sister would find enough to keep her occupied, and she wouldn’t have any time left over to have a go at him.

But Daisy always managed to find time.

‘What are you and Cassie going to do?’ she asked, as she and her brother sat at the kitchen table one morning after breakfast, while Rose was with her hens. ‘Where will you live – in Dorset?’

‘We haven’t decided yet,’ said Robert, getting up to go.

‘What about you, Rob – will you be a farmer, or will you do something else?’ Daisy got up too and she was at the door before him, with her back against it, so he couldn’t leave unless he physically picked her up and moved her to one side.

There was no point changing tack and going into the house. She’d only follow him and pin him up against a wall.

‘I know you’ve had an argument,’ said Daisy.

‘We’ve had a disagreement.’ Robert shrugged. ‘But we can sort it out.’

‘When do you intend to do it?’ Daisy asked. ‘When will you be seeing Cass again?’

‘I need to go and meet the vet,’ said Robert. ‘He’s due here any minute. He’s always in a hurry, and – ’

‘Robert!’ Daisy glared at him. ‘I’ve written to Cassie twice since you came back to England. I’ve invited her to lunch with me and Ewan. I’ve sent her tickets for the premiere of a film I know she’d love to see. But she hasn’t replied. What’s going on?’

‘She might be in Birmingham.’

‘She might?’ demanded Daisy. ‘You mean you don’t know?’

Robert merely shrugged again and stared up at a cobweb on the ceiling.

So then of course he got the third degree.

‘What are you so scared of, Rob?’ his sister asked him, when she’d dragged the story out of him.

‘I’m not scared of anything, Daze – and now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get things ready for the vet.’

‘When you were in Italy, if you had been caught by German soldiers or the Black Brigade, would you have been tortured?’

‘I expect so.’

‘Then would they have shot you?’

‘Yes, they might.’

‘But you weren’t afraid?’ asked Daisy.

‘I suppose I didn’t think about it.’

‘So why are you afraid to go and see Cassie?’

‘Cassie doesn’t want to see me, Daze – I told you that.’

‘When you told Cassie about Sofia, did you apologise?’

‘Of course I did!’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told her I was sorry, obviously.’

‘So that was it?’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Robert.

‘You didn’t say you regretted what you’d done, and wished it hadn’t happened? Did you tell Cass you love her and she means the world to you?’

‘I – ’

‘You didn’t, did you?’ Daisy sighed. ‘Go and see her, Rob. Get on a train to Birmingham, if that’s where you think she might have gone. Go and say you’re sorry properly, tell her that you love her, and everything will be all right again.’

‘If I go and grovel like you’re suggesting, she’ll despise me.’

‘I’m not suggesting you should grovel,’ Daisy told him patiently. ‘All I’m saying is – you should try to find the strength and courage to make up. If you don’t, you’ll probably regret it all your life.’

‘The vet’s just come.’ Robert moved his sister away from the back door.

‘I’m right,’ called Daisy, as she followed him across the yard. ‘You know I’m right – and Robert?’

‘Yes?’

‘You’ll need to give her something.’

‘What do you have in mind?’

‘She’s got a granny, hasn’t she? She’s been in Birmingham for the duration? Maybe Cassie’s granny would like a holiday?’

One Thursday morning, as Cassie was helping Lily to clean the little house from top to bottom, she heard somebody knock on the front door.

It would be the rent man, she decided. Or the life insurance man, collecting Lily’s weekly sixpence. Or bloody Mrs Flynn, come cadging something yet again.

She thought – oh, let them wait, they can come back some other time. Lily was getting very deaf these days, and so she probably wouldn’t hear them. Cassie herself was busy in the shrine, for dusting and polishing all the junk and clutter in the shrine was one of Cassie’s daily chores.

Since she and Lily weren’t expecting company, Cassie wore an old grey cotton dress which was more than ready for the rag bag, a pair of battered, down-at-heel black shoes, and darned brown socks of which a tinker would have been ashamed.

She had her hair tied up in a red duster, her eyebrows needed plucking, and there wasn’t a single scrap of make-up on her face.

Somebody knocked again, much louder this time.

Lily looked up from polishing and frowned. ‘There’s someone at the door, our Cass,’ she said. ‘It’ll be the rent man. The money’s on the shelf behind the Coronation caddy. Go and pay him, duck?’

Cassie picked up the silver coins and went through to the parlour. She opened the front door.

‘Hello, Cassie,’ Robert said.

She could see all the neighbours’ curtains twitching. Some urchins had stopped fighting or playing knucklebones and turned to stare at them. The rent man suddenly came from round the corner, as if this was a play.

‘Rob?’

She thought she must be seeing things, that she was in a dream. ‘W-what do you want?’ she asked him frowning, still not sure if he was real.

‘I want to see you, of course,’ said Robert. ‘I want to meet your granny.’

‘I suppose you’d best come in,’ she said.

Cassie led Robert through the parlour, past the shrine and into the back kitchen, which looked out on to the brick-paved yard, the mangle and the lavatory – not beautiful green fields.