Where the Heart Is (24 page)

‘Got a minute, Con?’

Con exhaled noisily, and then chomped impatiently on his cigar as Joe, the landlord of the Pig and Whistle, stood in front of him blocking Con’s access to the side door he had just opened. Con had called at the pub on his way to the theatre to replace one of the light bulbs that had gone the previous night. He’d managed to get hold of some that were stamped 100 watt, but gave off only the same amount of light as a 40 watt bulb. They should stop any complaints about the lack of light whilst continuing to ensure that the room remained dimly lit.

Con was wearing a new suit, his camel-hair coat resting on his shoulders and his trilby tipped at a rakish angle. The suit was one of two he’d recently had made up by a tailor who’d been recommended to him by the same flash Harry who’d sold him the suit lengths, one brown with a cream stripe in it, the other navy with a chalk stripe. Top-quality goods and no questions asked or answered. Not that the stuff had come cheap. The suits had cost
him the best part of fifty quid, but he could afford it, Con admitted, thanks to Ricky’s constant supply of still wet-behind-the-ears young soldiers, and Con’s own cleverness with the cards.

Eva, mind, was costing him an arm and a leg, as well. He’d made a big mistake buying her that necklace she’d been going on about. Of course, then he’d thought that she’d be moving on, since she’d been going on about ENSA keeping asking her to work for them, and he hadn’t bargained for the owners of the Royal Court Theatre deciding to extend her contract with them, which had meant that she was staying on in Liverpool.

‘It better be only a minute, Joe, I’m a busy man,’ Con told him.

‘Just thought I’d warn you I’ve had one of Ed Mulligan’s boys round asking a lot of questions about your bit of business upstairs.’

Con tensed. Ed Mulligan ran a local protection racket, backed up by a gang of thugs whom he sent round to deal with anyone who refused to pay him.

‘What did you tell him?’ Con demanded.

The landlord spat the wad of tobacco he had been chewing into the narrow alleyway through the open side door.

‘Told him he’d be better off speaking direct to you.’

Con shrugged, dismissing his own earlier concern along with Joe’s warning. So what if Ed Mulligan did demand a bit of protection money from him? With what he was making he could afford it easily enough. Ed might even be able to
recommend some better premises. Ricky had been saying for a while that they should think about expanding into providing the boys with something to keep their minds off the money they were losing. He’d talked about them not just having a bar but also getting a few of the Royal Court’s chorus girls to act as ‘hostesses'.

‘A pretty girl and a shot of bourbon go a long way to soothing a loser’s feelings,’ had been Ricky’s comment.

Eva had talked him into taking her to Blackpool for a night when she had her day off later in the week. Con hadn’t objected. It would give him an opportunity to try out the Jaguar roadster he’d picked up at a bargain price, via one of his new black market contacts.

Whistling confidently, Con headed for the Royal Court. If he was lucky–and he certainly had every reason to think that he was lucky these days–he might be able to snatch five minutes to flirt with that new singer who was understudying Eva, whilst Eva herself was on stage for the matinée performance.

Bella knew that Lena was worried about her, and she knew that Lena must wonder why she had rejected her attempts to comfort her. But if she hadn’t, then she would have broken down and then … The truth was, Bella knew, that she just didn’t deserve Lena’s sympathy. She had let Jan down. If she had behaved as a woman in love should behave, then he might even still be here. She had let him down and she deserved to be punished, not given sympathy.

It was late in the afternoon. She had waited until everyone else had left the nursery before leaving herself, and now she was reluctant to go home, knowing that her mother would be full of a hundred small complaints when all Bella wanted to do was shut herself in her bedroom and think about Jan and how she had betrayed him.

It had been a hot day and that heat still lingered, the sky a cloudless deep blue, the warmth coming up from the pavement, and scenting the still air. The knowledge slid into Bella’s heart that the weather was perfect for lovers, with its heat there
to stroke bare limbs, and its stillness engendering a lazy sensuality made for walking hand in hand, for kissing and touching and for …

Gritting her teeth, she started to walk faster, her heart thudding with a mixture of anger and pain. She hadn’t been sleeping, and whilst her body felt drained of energy the turmoil of her thoughts would not allow her any rest. If she had not sent Jan away then the two off them might have been enjoying the balmy warmth of this late afternoon. Jan could have been home on leave, he could have been waiting outside the nursery for her, ready to whisk her off in his car to a romantic hotel near a secluded cove where they could have …

Stop it, stop. Stop tormenting me, Bella wanted to cry out to her own thoughts, but why should she have any relief from them? She deserved this pain.

Wrapped in the punishing agony of her own thoughts she was walking up the drive to the house before she realised that there was someone waiting by the front door for her.

The colour left her face, as she demanded, ‘Bettina, what are you doing here?’

‘I’ve come to talk to you. But let’s go inside first, shall we?’

‘My mother will be waiting for her tea. She’s—’

‘Lena has arranged for your neighbour to take your mother out for tea so that we can talk undisturbed.’

‘Lena? What has she got to do with you being here?’

‘Everything,’ Bettina answered her succinctly,
picking up the key that had fallen from Bella’s grip and putting it in the lock herself. Once they were inside the hall she continued, ‘Lena came to see me to tell me how worried she is about you.’

‘Lena doesn’t understand,’ Bella told Bettina flatly. ‘She thinks I deserve sympathy because I’ve lost Jan, when the truth is …’

‘The truth is what?’ Bettina pressed her. ‘Let’s go into the kitchen. Mama has sent you one of her special carrot cakes, and I’m desperate for a cup of tea.’

Bella pushed her hair off her forehead. She felt slightly sick and somehow very weak. She hadn’t been able to face eating since she’d read Jan’s letter. Why was everyone trying to be so nice and kind to her when she didn’t deserve it?

Bettina pushed her down into a chair and filled the kettle, a job that should have been hers, Bella recognised, but somehow she felt too weary to do anything other than punish herself as she deserved to be punished.

‘What is this truth that is making you so wretched, Bella? And don’t tell me that you aren’t because I can see for myself that you are. No wonder Lena is so worried about you.’

‘I don’t deserve her worry. Not after the way I treated Jan. If it wasn’t for me he might still be alive, do you realise, Bettina?’

Bella couldn’t sit still. She got up out of the chair and paced the kitchen floor in her agitation. ‘Your mother has sent me a gift. She wouldn’t feel like doing that if she knew how cruelly I treated
Jan. I was so wrapped up in my own pride, my own moral “rightness", thinking about myself when I should have been thinking about Jan.’

Covering her face with her hands, Bella sank back into the chair she had vacated.

The kettle was almost boiling. Bettina lifted it from the ring to pour a little of the water into the teapot, returning the kettle to the ring to boil, and then turning to Bella, eyeing her with sympathetic concern.

‘Bella, I know that you loved my brother and that he loved you.’

The kettle was boiling. Bettina poured the hot water from the teapot into the sink, then spooned tea into the pot–three very small teaspoons of it just to pay lip service to the adage of ‘one spoonful per person and one for the pot'; tea, like so much else, was rationed–before switching off the gas and then lifting the kettle from the ring to pour the boiling water onto the tea.

Even the smell of freshly made tea was comforting, Bettina recognised, although she doubted that poor Bella was taking much comfort from the rich aroma.

‘I loved him, yes, but I refused to show my love for him, to give my love to him as he wanted me to, to give myself to him,’ Bella emphasised deliberately to Bettina, folding her arms tightly around herself as though to contain and control her emotions. ‘Jan wanted me to go with him, to go to him. He asked me to when … when he came to tell me about his wife’s death. I refused him, Bettina,’ Bella announced bitterly. ‘I sent him away.
I told him it would be wrong and that if I agreed there’d come a time when he’d resent me for not protecting his honour as a married man. But it was all a lie, I can see that now. It was myself I was protecting even though I pretended to myself that it was him.’

‘Bella, you’re being far too hard on yourself,’ Bettina told her, pouring tea into the two cups she had removed from their hooks and put on their matching saucers before going to the pantry to find the milk.

‘Here, drink this.’ She handed Bella the cup of tea she had poured for her, and then sat down with her own cup to start cutting the cake.

‘Please,’ Bella begged her, distraught, ‘please don’t sympathise with me. That’s what Lena wanted to do and I can’t let her. She thinks far more highly of me than I deserve, but if she knew the truth, she wouldn’t. I let Jan down.’

‘No, Bella.’ Putting a slice of the cake onto a plate and pushing it towards her, Bettina got up and went to kneel beside Bella’s chair, putting her arm around her shoulders.

‘Jan loved you. He told me a little of what was said between you—’

‘There, you see. I let him down, and he was so upset that—’

‘No, Bella. He was not upset, quite the contrary. He told me what you’d said to him and he said that he admired you for it; that he agreed with you and that he believed you had saved him from doing something that would have shamed him and caused him to shame you.’

Bella’s hand was trembling so much that she had to put her cup down, her tea untouched, her gaze fixed on Bettina’s face.

‘He really said that?’

‘Yes,’ Bettina assured her. ‘He praised you to me and said how much he felt he owed you, how you had encouraged him to stand by his marriage and how you had put your own feelings to one side for that marriage. Now, Bella, please do drink your tea before it goes cold.’

Bella picked up her cup and took a sip of the hot, reviving liquid.

‘Jan understood that you had done that, not because of convention but for him, so that he would never have any cause to reproach himself,’ Bettina told her gently. ‘He admired you so much for that, Bella, and so do I. You could not have given my brother a better gift nor a better memorial than the one you did give him when you gave him his honour through your own sacrifice.’

Bella, who had been about to take another sip of her tea, put her cup down again, her suspicions suddenly aroused by Bettina’s words

‘Lena begged you to say that to me, didn’t she?’ she accused her. ‘She’s always thought I’m a far better person than I really am. I let Jan go to his death without …’ Bella bit her lip, and reached for her tea cup again, this time taking a deep gulp from it as though seeking courage from it, before putting it down again. ‘It didn’t have to be like that. It’s not as though I haven’t been married and had a husband. I could have gone with him, shared that intimacy with him.’

‘If you had then don’t you think that now, instead of blaming yourself for what you didn’t do, you’d be blaming yourself even more for what you did do?’ Bettina demanded.

Bella shook her head. ‘If I had then there might have been the promise of a child–Jan’s son.’

Bettina kneeled down at her side again and put her arms around her, holding her tightly so that Bella’s downbent head was on her shoulder as she said softly, ‘Oh, Bella …’

Now the tears that Bella hadn’t been able to shed before came, torn from her with the words that revealed the deep-rooted source of her pain, the child she could have had.

‘We would have had Jan’s son,’ she told Bettina, the words muffled against Bettina’s shoulder. ‘Me and you and your mother. We would have had him to love and to cherish, and somehow Jan would have known that something of him remained with us.’

‘We would have had all those things, yes,’ Bettina agreed, lifting her hand to stroke Bella’s curls gently. ‘We would have had joy and delight in such a child, Bella, but what of the child, the son that would have been Jan’s? What of him and his happiness?’

‘What do you mean?’ Bella asked her, lifting her head to meet Bettina’s gaze.

‘What I mean is, what of his happiness?’

‘His happiness would have been my first concern. I would have loved him beyond anything or anyone because he was Jan’s, a living memory of our love. I would have told him about Jan, brought him up
to understand what a wonderful man his father was and how much we all loved him.’

Bettina’s own eyes were filling with tears now but she still shook her head and said, ‘Bella, can’t you see what a terrible burden that would be for any child to bear? To grow up without his father, and in the shadow of all that that father had been, to all three of us? He would have to carry the weight of our love for Jan and our expectations for him. He would perhaps even feel that he had to be his father and become the same kind of man that his father had been. Jan would never have wanted that for his child and I know that in your heart you wouldn’t want it either. I could be selfish and say that there is nothing I would like more than to hear that you are to have Jan’s child, but it would be selfish. We both know that. You’re a strong person, Bella, not a selfish one. You’ve already proved that.’

Their tea forgotten now, each woman looked at the other.

‘No,’ Bella denied, weeping because she knew that what Bettina had said to her was true.

‘Yes, you are,’ Bettina countered, ‘and Jan loved you for that strength. He depended on you for it and he depended too on it to guard him from damaging you both in the eyes of the world. You were the foundation stone on which Jan built his own ability to endure his marriage. He had the most profound love and respect for you, Bella, more profound than any mere feverish passion of desire. Jan considered you to be his soul mate. He had seen that, felt it in you right from the first, I
know that. He believed that it was your fate to meet. It would grieve him dreadfully to see you like this, and all the more so if he knew that you were punishing yourself out of a foolish belief that you had let him down in any way. You did not. On the contrary, you held Jan up, Bella. You held him up to be the very best that he could be.’