The War Widows (14 page)

‘I hate Japanese, all of them,’ said Su, rising quickly.

The truce was over. It was time to pay their bill and gather up the hats and mittens. It was going to be a long journey uphill before nightfall.
When they got outside, it was snowing lightly and the pram was nowhere to be seen. They all looked at each other with horror.

‘Oh no!’

Only the tracks of its wheels, disappearing down the dark alley to the side of the theatre, were visible, tracks fast covering over with snow.

There was a kerfuffle in the doorway as they tripped back through the entrance of Santini’s shouting, ‘The pram’s gone! Our shopping is gone!’

‘Anyone see pram go walking?’ pleaded Susan, her English collapsing with emotion. Lil was trying to hold on to both children, while feeling sick.

There was much staring out of the steamed-up windows, and shaking of heads, but little action. After the sympathies no one was showing much interest except the waitress, who came running at once.

‘Can I help?’ she asked, seeing the panic on their faces.

‘While we came in for a drink, our pram was stolen,’ Lily explained.

‘Now Daw Esme will shout,’ Susan butted in, all of a tremble, her eyes wide like jet coat buttons, full of fear.

‘And stockings. I have no stockings,’ sobbed Ana.

‘A cup of tea is what you need…on the house,’ said the young waitress.

‘What is on the house?’ Susan asked.

One of the regulars, who was blowing cigarette smoke into their faces, winked, ‘Free,
gratis
, cost you nowt, love. A good ’un is Maria, allus on top of the job.’

‘Shutta that flannel, Percy, ’snot for you…
Capisci
? He can buy his own cuppa,’ came the reply from the counter. ‘That man sit all afternoon with his teacake until pub opens. If I seen you with pram, I warn you. Leave nothing with four wheels outside shop in centre of town unless it is chained with lock. You stay warm in here, Maria will sort you out.’ She scurried to the boiler and made a cup of tea for each of them.

‘All my shopping and Ivy’s pram, oh dear, oh dear!’ Susan shook her head, trembling.

‘Far away in back street, long gone,’ shouted the waitress from over the bar. ‘No good people, pickpockets, nick spoons off table till we chain them down, toilet paper from washroom and soap, ashtrays…all disappear. Anything not stuck down, it walk.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Now war is over, it is all cheating. No one care. It is all looking after number one.’

‘It’s just the pram’s not ours. We borrowed it for the day,’ Lily sighed, knowing it was gone for good and it was all her fault. They were not used to taking it into town. Neville was pushed only to the local shops and the park.

‘How can we go back with nothing? It is getting dark and so cold. I am Susan,’ said Su, holding out her hand. ‘Susan Winstanley, and she is Ana Winstanley This is kind sister, Lily Winstanley.’

‘Bene…
All you Winstanley girls no worry. I find my brother-in-law, Angelo. He bring taxi and take you
home,
pronto.
I am Maria, Maria Santini,’ she smiled back with a warmth that made Lily feel slightly better.

‘We’ve no money left for a taxi, I’m afraid,’ Lily explained, embarrassed to be caught short. With shopping and paying for the drinks, she had just a few coppers left.

‘You pay me later. My fault I am not warning you. You must always keep pram in sight. So many
bambini
since war and not many prams. Are you visiting?’ Maria asked.

‘We came to find our husbands but he is killed. We bring our girls to see Winstanley,’ Susan lied. ‘I am the widow of a cousin down south, come for funeral, didn’t I?’ She looked to Lily for support.

Lily flushed. The poor girl was doing her best to sound convincing but her heart wasn’t in it.

‘I’m sure Mrs Santini doesn’t want to know all our sad business, Susan. I’d better go and get the van from Levi and collect you later.’

She rose as if to leave but Maria darted forward, almost pushing her down. ‘You sit. You all have shock. Sit and drink tea.’

It was not that Maria Santini didn’t love a drama to break up a long afternoon serving sodas and sundaes, cups of tea and hot Bovril, but her husband was home from hospital and it was not one of his better days, and now there were these three women to sort out.

‘Maria! What are you doing?’ She could hear a plaintive cry from the top of the stairs.

‘Marco! Don’t you strain yourself! I’m coming soon,’
she yelled back. Leaving him to play with little Rosaria for a few minutes until Nonna Valentina took over in the flat was too exhausting.

Enzo was a lazy boy in the kitchen and she didn’t trust him at the till. Not all the Santinis were as honest and hardworking as she was, or feared the wrath of her mother-in-law. They were Nonna Valentina’s sons and grandsons, and could get away with anything. Maria was only an in-law.

There was something familiar in the faces of the foreign girls, something she recognised so well: that wide-eyed look of strangers in a foreign land, cold, conspicuous, unsure of the lingo, straining to understand. It was cruel to give them tea but the coffee was not much better, milky and weak.

It was only a few years ago that it had been Maria’s own fate; brought over from Palermo by Nonna Valentina to marry Marco, a distant cousin, the youngest of the Santini brothers. She was soon put to work behind the counter, in the kitchen; one of a succession of brides and cousins expected to cook, clean, have many
bambini
and keep the ice-cream parlour up to scratch while the men expanded their growing empire. The war had changed everything when they were interned for being aliens but the good people of Grimbleton missed their ice creams and made a fuss, bringing them all home.

Marco went to war and now he was upstairs wheezing, not fit to be out of the sanitarium. Rosaria spent her waking hours with Nonna Valentina, or sometimes in the kitchen. She sat in her high chair supervising the
preparations with an eagle eye, but it was good for her to see something of her daddy.

‘Come and meet my Marco while you wait,’ Maria said, taking the tray out to the three women. ‘You meet my Rosaria.’

‘Thank you,’ said the English girl with slumped shoulders, who towered above her. ‘We don’t want to be a bother.’

‘You no bother. Come up the stairs and meet my Marco. It is good for him to have company…’

‘Marco, I have a surprise. Poor ladies lost their pram-no-good thieving scum again. You talk to them while I finish orders,’ she smiled, ushering them up the wooden stairs to the rooms above, which looked out across at the King’s Theatre. ‘Susan, Ana and Lily Winstanley…meet my husband.’

He shuffled forward like an old man. The trousers hung off his buttocks, once firm and strong. His face was ashen but his eyes were still black as coal and his hair smooth as jet.

‘I ring Angelo for taxi,’ Maria smiled. ‘Find
bambini
biscuits in the tin.’ It was time to leave them and clatter downstairs. ‘You tell them all about us. How your papa and mama come to England for better life. That will keep them entertained.’

After the mix-up all their sons were proud to be called up, for they were British citizens. Now Valentina, the Widow Santini, hovered over them all like an avenging angel. Antonio was running the local billiard hall and American bar. Angelo owned two taxis and a private charabanc coach. Marco ran the ice-cream
parlour and the horse and cart selling cones around the parks.

Angelo had failed his medical. Toni did his duty and Marco got a direct hit in his chest on D-Day, coming home a physical wreck. He now spent his time out on the moors in the Moses Heights sanatorium, trying to breathe and gather strength.

There were plenty of grandsons helping run the place but none of them was Maria’s son. Rosaria was born prematurely when everyone despaired of the two of them ever producing a child to satisfy Santini honour. Marco was proud and everyone was happy.

Now Maria had to work all hours to keep body and soul together and give Marco the comforts he craved.

During the war the making of real ice cream was forbidden, but the Santinis devised ices made from condensed milk and sweeteners, flavoured with fruit syrups that passed regulations. There were four other rival establishments in the town, all touting for business on the streets, but everyone knew Santini’s ices were the best. Thank goodness Lancashire folk liked their ice cream in cornets and wafers, sundaes and floating on fizzy pop.

‘I scream, you scream, we all scream for Santini ice cream’ was painted on the side of many a horse-drawn cart.

Santini’s had the finest site in town, a café squashed between the Regal Cinema and the King’s Theatre, with some of the better shops and the parish church close by. It was handy for the theatre queues, audiences nipping in for cones between shows, parades, afternoon
shopping. It was a good place for an evening rendezvous, to wait for buses and within easy reach of several pubs.

Children came for knickerbocker glories when they came to see the pantomime, and theatricals called in for snacks between shows. Maria made it her business to know who was in town in Grimbleton, and Angelo got business from her customers. She was training up Enzo, one of Antonio’s sons, in the back kitchen but he needed watching. Without a son of her own, Enzo would be expected to take over the parlour when he was a man.

‘Ragazza
for the kitchen,
ragazzo
for the business-girls for the kitchen, boys for the business’ Pepe’s old rule held in the family and Maria was not proper family until she produced a son. Nonna Valentina Santini had made that clear enough.

Maria and Marco lived above the shop in the flat on the top floor. It was just two rooms and a kitchen where she grabbed a few precious hours with little Rosa before finishing the shift as a cleaner in the King’s Theatre to earn some extra money. It was lucky that she didn’t need much sleep. Being busy kept her from thinking about the past and Marco’s deteriorating condition.

Every Saturday she lit a candle in the Catholic chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows, pleading on her knees for an angel to wake Padre Pio of Pietrelcina from his dreaming so that the blessed healer of the sick would work a miracle on Marco’s smashed lungs.

She was young and fit and lonely. Marco was tired and weak, without hope, and she felt more like a widow than a wife. It was not his fault that he could no longer
make love to her. They still tried but it was hopeless, and Marco cried in her arms every time. Rosaria was a miracle, a gift from God that neither had ever dreamed would happen.

Their marriage was so brief, separated by war and now sickness. At the weekend he came home if he was well enough but his weeks were spent up on Moses Heights in the sanatorium with glass windows and doors flung open to the four winds.

She would take the bus after work and wave little Rosa to him through the window, leaving her to sleep on a bench while they spent a few minutes chatting about all the goings-on, trying not to let him know how she was coping without him, trying not to worry him. He was growing weaker, his eyes were often misted over with sadness.

She felt so guilty to be relieved when the visiting bell rang and she could escape back to the bustle of the town away from his sickness.

On Saturday Angelo fetched him home for the night and they cooked a special meal to celebrate.

Sunday nights, after Angelo picked him up, were the worst. There was no café, no theatre crowds, no cinema queues. The town fell silent and she was so alone. Sometimes then she felt like a bird trapped in a cage, a silent canary whose heart was bursting with song yet whose throat was choked so not a note could come. That was when the loneliness stalked up her stairs and rattled at her door. Only being busy took her mind from such fears.

It was not as if she didn’t love the ice-cream parlour.
It was her own living opera, in which all the dramas of life unfolded before her. It was a cosmopolitan haven in this northern cotton town. The walls were plastered with autographed photos of stars of the music halls, theatre, ballet companies, all the stars who had trod the boards of the King’s over the years: Charlie Chaplin in Fred Karno’s Circus, the Lupinos, George Formby, Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels, Nosmo King, Izzy Bonn and Richard Tauber; all the greats had stepped inside their parlour for a snack.

She loved to creep up into the sixpenny gods, the topmost balcony of the theatre, to see the finales of musicals and operas.

Sometimes she stared at those stars on her walls with faraway eyes. If only she had had her chance to dance and sing, to make music in costumes in the limelight, shine in the footlights. She loved the sad ballets and operas, the dying maidens, the star-crossed lovers; all that drama of life and death unfolding before her into a climax of passion, the soaring orchestra, the tears and the silence. Then the National Anthem was played and everyone rushed out, leaving her to the empty theatre, the smell of stale ale and cigarettes, all passion spent.

It was better than any cinema screen to see actors in the flesh. Some stars would chat to her at the stage door. They looked so ordinary without their face paint, muffled in headscarves and trilby hats, creeping back to their digs for the night. Some went straight next door to the Bear and Staff to drink away their wages, then stagger out, waking her in the small hours. She knew their secret admirers, their secret peccadillos, and
she loved them all for they brought the world to her door.

It was easy to transfer these daydreams on to her customers, who crowded her bench seats each day. There were the regulars, shoppers, Charlie Lunn, the uniformed booking attendant who worked the queues in the foyer of the King’s and let her know if anyone special was performing. There were visitors and strangers who intrigued her.

In the quieter moments, when she was busy cleaning the chrome coffee maker and the glass domes of the soda fountain, polishing the marble counter top, she would look again and see Romeo and Juliet in the eyes of the couple holding hands over table five in the corner. She was sure the couple who came each Thursday afternoon, who gazed into each other’s eyes before leaving separately, were lovers from
Brief Encounter
with ‘Guilty’ written across their foreheads. Then there were the tearful eyes of the soldier and his girlfriend, saying their fond farewells. Would the girl betray him, like Carmen? Some of the local women behaved like pantomime dames, gossiping and mouthing their secrets like Norman Evans in
Over the Garden Wall.