Where the Heart Is (7 page)

‘It’s the bourbon, I guess. It’s a mite too strong after London’s watered-down whisky,’ one wit was suggesting as Francine made their apologies to the Ambassador and explained that they would have to leave.

‘But I still don’t understand what you’re doing here, Bella. After all, you do have a house of your own.’

Bella tried not to feel too low as she sat with her mother in the kitchen of Vi’s house. It wasn’t just her mother’s attitude that made her feel so unwilling to be here, Bella acknowledged, it was the house itself. Her mother might have insisted on Bella’s father fitting out the whole house with everything that was new and up to date when they had first moved into it a couple of years before Bella had married, but now that she knew what really made a house a home, Bella could see how cold and barren of loving warmth her mother’s house was. Somehow the house was cold and unwelcoming–just like her mother?

‘I have to say that I think it very selfish of you not to have made such a dreadful fuss about it that your poor brother and dearest Daphne felt unable to move into it. It’s your fault that they aren’t living up here, you know. Daphne would have been such a comfort to me, and of course if Charlie had been here working with your father,
as he should have been, then that wretched woman would never have got her claws into him. It’s all your fault, Bella. You do realise that, don’t you?’

Her mother’s voice had risen with every imagined injustice she was relaying, causing Bella’s heart to sink even further. There was no point trying to reason with her mother when she was in this frame of mind, Bella knew. Although her mother’s neighbour, Muriel, had assured Bella in a conspiratorial whisper as she had left that ‘Your dear mother hasn’t had any you-know-what whilst I’ve been here, dear,’ Bella suspected that her mother’s current overemotional mood had its roots in alcohol.

‘Did you hear me, Bella?’ Vi demanded. ‘It is your fault that I’m in this wretched state, and that your father has left.’

Bella wanted to be patient but her mother’s selfishness and the injustice of her accusations, never mind their inaccuracies, tried her temper to its limits.

‘I don’t want to hear another word about Charlie or Daphne, if you don’t mind, Mummy,’ she began firmly, but once again her mother overruled her.

‘Well, that’s just typical of your selfishness, isn’t it, Bella, not wanting a poor mother to talk about her beloved son? Isn’t it enough for you that you practically drove poor Charlie away with your selfishness is not giving him that house? That poor boy, forced to stay in the army–and live apart from dearest Daphne when they could have been living up here, and all because of you.’

Bella put down with some force the kettle she had been just about to fill and turned to her mother.

‘Mummy, that is ridiculous. You know perfectly well that why Charlie is still in the army and not up here working for Father is because he tried and failed to get himself dismissed from the army on the grounds of ill health and they very sensibly, in my opinion, saw through him and have insisted that he must do his duty, like all the other young men who have had to enlist. As for Daphne, it seems to me that she was only too pleased to have an excuse to go home to her own parents.’

‘You are a very unkind sister and daughter, Bella. And it’s all because of that dreadful … that person.’

Even now her mother could not bring herself to mention Lena by name, and blamed her and not Charlie for the fact that Lena had had Charlie’s baby.

Bella felt angry on Lena’s behalf, but she also felt that now that Lena was so happily married to Gavin it could do more harm than good to keep reminding her mother that Charlie was the baby’s father and not Gavin, who was, after all, being a far better father to the little girl than Charlie, married to someone else, and who had refused point-blank to accept his responsibility towards Lena, could ever have been.

‘I think you should go home now, Bella. I’ve got an awful headache, I really must go and lie down.’

Her mother’s voice was thin and fretful, and Bella could see that she was plucking at the edge of the stained tablecloth, a habit Bella had noticed she had developed. A wave of pity and defeat
washed out Bella’s earlier anger. She lit the gas under the kettle, then went over to her mother and said lightly, ‘I am home, Mummy. Remember, we talked about it this morning and I said that I would come and live here with you for a little while so that you wouldn’t feel as lonely.’

‘Did we? I don’t remember.’ For a moment her mother looked so lost and confused that Bella’s heart ached for her.

‘Why don’t I make us both a nice cup of cocoa, Mummy, and then we can listen to the news together?’

‘The news? Is it that time already?’

Bella had a particular reason to want to listen to the news today.

Half an hour later, on the pretext of going upstairs to unpack her suitcase, Bella made a quick inspection of her mother’s bedroom. Its general untidiness, along with the unmade bed, was upsetting, all the more so because her mother had always been so fastidious.

At least she wasn’t drinking any more like she had been when Bella’s father had first left. It had been such a terrible shock for Bella to discover her mother drunk, buying gin from a criminal selling it on the black market.

Bella was so grateful to her mother’s doctor for the help he had given, sending Vi to a nursing home where she could be probably looked after. But she was not the person she had been, Bella knew, although whether that was because of her drinking or because her husband had left her, or a combination of both, Bella did not know. It was
impossible to imagine Bella’s auntie Jean or her auntie Francine behaving as her mother had done. They were both so much stronger in their different ways, women to be admired, not pitied. Bella now felt so much closer to her auntie Jean, who had been such a rock and so very kind to her since Bella had taken her courage in both hands and gone to tell her what had happened. She didn’t feel she deserved the love and kindness Auntie Jean had shown her, but she was very grateful for it.

Her aunt had been coming over from Liverpool to visit her mother at least once a week all through the winter and the bad weather, but Bella had no intention of allowing Auntie Jean to be put upon. It wouldn’t be right.

Automatically she picked up the clothes her mother had left scattered around the room, putting those that needed washing aside, pulling back the bedclothes and remaking the bed. The furniture–bought new when her parents had first moved to the house, and of which her mother had been so very proud–like the rest of the house had an air of neglect about it.

The Bella who had lived in this house, spoiled and selfish, wouldn’t have had the first idea about how to keep house or cook, or do anything that the Bella she was now did with such accomplishment and pride, and all the more so because they were lessons hard-learned and self-taught.

She and Lena had had such fun learning to cook together. Her own kitchen had been filled with the sound of laughter as well as the smell of food, both seasoned with love.

Her poor mother. Bella couldn’t think of anything worse than being married to a man like her own father, a cold-hearted bully who thought of no one but himself, but her mother continually made it plain that she would rather be married to him than deserted by him.

Back downstairs Bella filled two hot-water bottles, one for mother’s bed and one for her own.

It was eleven o’clock before she finally went to bed herself, having seen her mother safely up, and then having gone back downstairs to make a start on cleaning the kitchen. Now physically tired, she should have been ready to sleep but instead, as though it sensed her weakness and that her guard was down, the news of Bomber Command’s continuing raids on enemy targets allowed her thoughts to slide towards Jan, who was a fighter pilot and not a bomber pilot, but whose life was still in danger with every mission he flew, and who she had no right to be thinking of at all. They might have admitted their love for one another and shared a little precious time together, but Bella had told him then that there must be no future meetings, no letters, and even no thinking of one another in their most private thoughts because Jan was married. She had meant what she said.

Bella knew she had made the right, indeed the only possible, decision but there were times when the temptation to let Jan into her thoughts betrayed her. As she knew all too well, letting him into her thoughts was only a heartbeat away from letting him into her imagination–and her memory–and that once there, in no time at all she would be
remembering how it felt to be held in his arms, and to hold him back. How it felt to be kissed by him and to kiss him back. How it felt to be loved by him and to love him back, and then the pain would begin all over again. A double-edged pain–for herself and for the woman Bella believed she was betraying with her thoughts. She loved Jan beyond any shadow of doubt, and loving him surely meant wanting the best for him, and the very best future happiness for Jan would be for him to be happy with his wife. That was what she must pray for and hope for him, no matter what the cost to herself, because any other kind of lesser, more selfish love was not the love Bella believed her wonderful Jan deserved.

‘I can’t believe we’ve been here over a month already,’ Lou announced as they all lined up outside their hut, ready for morning inspection, blinking in the late March bright morning light.

‘A month? It feels more like a year,’ Betty groaned, shivering in the cold wind that seemed to whistle round the base. ‘It’s all right for you, Lou,’ she complained. ‘You’re so good at what we’re supposed to be doing, but I just can’t seem to get the hang of it.’

‘Watch out, Corp’s on her way,’ Ellen, always the cautious one, warned them. They all stiffened into a dutiful silence as their corporal started to walk down the line of uniformed young women in her charge, checking the cap angles, hair length, shoe and button shines.

She was finding that she had a natural aptitude for what they were being taught, Lou admitted as she stood to attention. Perhaps it came from the fact that her father was, as they said, ‘good with his hands’ and worked for Liverpool’s Salvage Corp, although her father had never in Lou’s memory suggested that
his daughters understand what a plane or a vice or a file was, never mind try to use one. The very thought was enough to make Lou grin.

‘Something funny, is there, Campion?’

Oh Lord. She’d been so lost in her thoughts that hadn’t realised that the corp had reached her.

Somehow managing not to make any retort but instead to stand to attention and look straight ahead, Lou cursed herself inwardly. Their corp–Corporal Carter, to give her her full name–was a real tartar, and had seemed to take a dislike to her after she had made the mistake, during her first week, of mentioning that her brother was also a corporal in the army. She’d only been making conversation but obviously the corporal had thought she was trying to be clever or, even worse, to curry favour, and since then she’d been coming down hard on her, finding fault as often as she could, or so it seemed to Lou.

If it wasn’t the shine on her shoes that wasn’t bright enough, then it was the curl in her hair, or–on one occasion–the length of her eyelashes, which the corporal had accused her of darkening with either mascara or shoe blacking, both of which were banned whilst the women were on duty.

The last thing Lou wanted now, with Easter only ten days away, was to provoke the corporal into putting her on a charge, as she had threatened to do the last time she had given her a telling-off. The pettiness of the rules and the discipline irked her at times, Lou admitted, but on the other hand she was enjoying what she was learning, even if she still felt
disappointed about the fact that she was never going to get to learn to fly.

All the recruits were looking forward to their promised long weekend off over Easter, and Lou had already written to her family telling them that she would be coming home. She’d even got Sasha to promise that the two of them would go out together to the Grafton Dance Hall on Easter Saturday–just the two of them.

Lou had missed Sasha, but she still felt a bit on edge at the thought of being reunited with her twin.

She’d have so much to tell her family and, of course, so much that she couldn’t tell them. Halton was a busy base with, if the grapevine was to be relied on, any number of top brass being flown in and then out of it almost daily.

‘They’ve got some American military top bass coming down today, so I’ve heard,’ Betty whispered excitedly to Lou a bit later whilst they were queuing for their breakfast. ‘Bomber Harris is going to be here as well.’

A fully fledged leading aircraftwoman in the queue ahead of them had obviously overheard and turned round to give them each a reproving look. ‘It’s Air Marshal Harris to you, and we don’t make a fuss about Yanks here. This is an RAF base, remember?’

Lou and Betty exchanged rueful grimaces, whilst Ruby, cheeky as always, pulled a face behind the other Waaf’s back.

‘I’m surprised she didn’t start reminding us that walls have ears,’ Betty grumbled, when they were sitting down with their breakfasts. ‘Anyway, everyone knows that the American military are here and that
they’re going to be flying those enormous bombers of theirs out of all those airfields that are being built for them. I’ve got a cousin who’s based in London. She’s been out with one of them already–one of the Yanks, I mean. She says they really know how to treat a girl.’

‘A lot of people think it’s fearfully bad form to step out with one of them when our own boys are overseas fighting,’ was all Lou felt able to say, remembering how anti the Americans her own brother, Luke, had been when they had first arrived in Liverpool the previous year.

‘I’m really looking forward to Easter. It seems ages since I saw my family–or wore civvies,’ Betty complained. She heaved a heavy sigh. ‘I can’t wait to go to a dance wearing a dress and decent shoes. My ankles were black and blue the other Sunday, from being kicked accidentally by chaps in uniform, after we’d all been to that dance in the mess.’