Wives at War (16 page)

Kenny said nothing for a moment, though he didn't appear perplexed by what she had told him or, indeed, by what she
hadn't
told him. ‘Whose support do you need, Polly?' he said at length. ‘Uncle Kenny's or Inspector MacGregor's?'

‘Inspector MacGregor's.'

‘It is Dominic, isn't it? He's up to something. He's trying to involve you and you're not having it?'

‘It would be awfully helpful to find out precisely where Christy Cameron's brother is and what he does.'

‘Can you give me a clue?' said Kenny.

‘He's an officer in the US Navy.'

‘Really?'

‘That's absolutely all I can tell you.'

‘That's probably enough to be going on with,' said Kenny, and, helping himself to more tea, tactfully changed the subject.

*   *   *

Rosie followed the others to the door of the old vestry where the time clock and punch cards were housed. There was no stampede, no pushing to be first to the cast-iron turnstile through which each employee, even foreman Bass, had to pass to gain admittance to the church.

The women went in meekly, like bees into a hive. Some, Aileen Ashford among them, lingered outside to have a last puff on a cigarette or absorb a final mouthful of more-or-less fresh air before their long shift began. In addition to the dentist's wife there were Mrs Findlater, a former schoolteacher, Doris Maybury, wife of a general practitioner, and twin sisters, Eleanor and Constance, the spinster daughters of an Episcopalian minister.

Rosie strutted past them with her head high. She punched in, walked down the corridor to the cloakroom, changed into her overall, stuck on her cotton mobcap and headed for her cubicle, which, mercifully, hadn't been reallocated. The unit she'd been working on when she'd collapsed had been removed and the cubicle thoroughly dusted – not only dusted but disinfected, as if miscarriages might be contagious.

She seated herself on the swivel chair and swung around until her thin legs were sticking out into the aisle.

From the steps of the pulpit foreman Bass, whistle in hand, blandly surveyed the scene. He was an elderly gentleman who had been with Merryweather's for years. He had white hair, white eyebrows and a fluffy moustache, badly tobacco-stained.

Aileen emerged from the cloakroom and trotted down the aisle.

She checked her step when she saw Rosie's legs, checked again when she encountered Rosie's sugary smile.

‘Good morning, Aileen,' Rosie said, and got to her feet.

Aileen raised her slender shoulders and pressed her delicate little hands against her chest, like mouse paws. ‘Good – good morning, Rose.'

‘Rosie. My friends all call me Rosie.'

‘Rosie … Good morning, Rosie.'

‘How are you, Rosie?'

‘I beg your pardon.'

‘Whuh-what you say next – how are you, Rosie? Rosie, are you well? Rosie, can you still have babies?' Rosie's voice cut through the sudden silence like an intercessory prayer.

Mr Bass stroked his stained moustache and kept the whistle in his fist.

‘Rose, I think you should sit down,' Aileen Ashford whispered. ‘I don't think you're quite yourself this morning.'

‘Course I'm not quite myself,' Rosie said cheerfully. ‘I'm not carrying any more. I lost it, if you recall, Aileen. I luh-lost it while you just stood there looking down at the dummy lying on the floor.' Aileen Ashford would have turned on her heel and fled if Rosie hadn't caught her by the sleeve. ‘Now, can you hear me clearly, can you make out what the dummy is saying?'

At least Mrs Ashford knew how to maintain grace under pressure. Five years of marriage to a bossy and merciless dentist had taught her how to take her medicine like a man. ‘I do believe I can hear you, Rose. Everyone can.'

‘Good,' said Rosie. ‘I am vuh-very well, thank you, Aileen. I am still perfectly able to bear children and my husband and I will seize every opportunity to ensure that I do.'

‘There's no need to … You are making such an exhibition of—'

‘I'm telling you now so you won't have to go whispering behind my back. I am not going to let you lot chuh-chase me away. If you want to know how I am in future, ask me face to face.'

‘I'm sorry you feel you've been victimised, Rose. It has nothing to do with me, of course, but…'

Cheeks dappled rosebud red, the dentist's wife ran out of excuses. Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes and she covered her lips with her mouse-paw fingers, not, Rosie knew, because she felt remorse but simply because she'd been singled out and was afraid that she too might become an outcast.

‘Thank you for sparing me a moment, Aileen,' Rosie said. ‘I do appreciate it.' Then, seating herself, she swung round to face her desk just as foreman Bass, tactfully hiding a grin, blew the whistle to signal the start of the working day.

7

The man and the boy leaned on the gate and peered down into the sty.

‘Does the pig have a name?' Christy asked.

‘Aye, he's called Ron.'

‘Ron? Why do you call him Ron?'

‘Dougie says he looks like a Ron,' Angus explained. ‘He can be a right bully if he doesn't get his own way.'

‘I'll bet he can,' said Christy.

‘Dougie says he'd like to get a sow to keep Ron company but Miss Dawlish says if he starts that nonsense she'll pack her bags an' leave.'

‘What does Ron eat?' Christy asked tactfully.

‘Everythin'. He'd eat you if you went in there. He's fierce, so he is.'

Christy knew little or nothing about pigs. There had been a dozen small grey and white hogs penned behind Ewa's house on the outskirts of Warsaw but they had been slaughtered before the Germans entered the city and the real butchery began. He remembered too the flayed carcasses that hung from hooks in the Washington Market, but they had never looked as if they'd been alive.

He glanced at the boy, who was glowering at the boar, willing him to show his mettle. Ron, however, was not in fighting mood and went on nonchalantly nudging a turnip through the clabber.

The boy resembled his mother, though his hair was tufty brown, not blond. He had a remarkably deep voice for a kid, Christy thought.

‘How come you aren't at school?'

‘Gotta rash. Miss Dawlish thinks it might be the chickenpox. Have you had the chickenpox, Mr Cameron?'

‘I guess I have,' Christy said. ‘Yeah, I must've had.'

‘Don't you remember?'

‘Not exactly, no.'

‘You'll have to ask your mum,' Angus said. ‘Mums always remember when you've been sick.'

‘I'll ask her,' Christy said, ‘next time I see her.'

‘Where does your mum live?'

‘New York,' said Christy. ‘Know where that is?'

‘Aye, it's in America. My uncle lives in New York.'

The pig edged up to the gate and peered at Angus with an optimistic expression as if, like a dog, he expected the boy to toss the turnip for him to retrieve. Angus craned over the gate and rubbed his knuckles against the pig's brow. Ron grunted with pleasure and pressed his snout against the boy's knees.

‘You a soldier, Mr Cameron?'

‘Not me. I take pictures.'

‘With a camera?'

‘Yep.'

‘Gonna take a picture o' Ron then?'

‘Sure, why not?'

‘Now?'

‘After lunch.'

‘Promise.'

‘Spit on my hand.'

‘Eh?'

‘Like – like cross my heart.'

‘Spit on your hand.' Angus opened his fist and released a careful droplet of pure white froth on to his palm. ‘Like this?'

‘You got it,' Christy said and, spitting into his palm in turn, held up his hand. ‘Now we shake.'

‘Mix the spit?' said Angus.

‘Sure.' Christy pressed his palm against the boy's. ‘The promise is now binding. Okay?'

‘Oh-
kay
!'

Much taken with this new transatlantic ritual, Angus grinned at the stranger his aunt had brought to visit. If ‘the Yank' hadn't quite lived up to Angus's high expectations just at first he was living up to them now.

‘You gotta six-shooter?'

‘Nope, no six-shooter.'

‘You gotta a horse?'

‘I'm a New Yorker, son, not a cowboy. You have to go west to find the big ranges and wide-open spaces; the prairies.'

‘You've been there, but?'

‘Once or twice,' Christy admitted.

‘You seen Indians?'

The pig, disappointed, slumped down in the mud with a squelching sound and began to gnaw at the turnip. The boy was too full of questions to settle.

Christy recalled an assignment to a Sioux reservation at Waverley Falls. He'd exposed forty-two rolls of film on the trip but the photographs had proved too raw for the editorial board and all but three had been scrapped. That wasn't a story the kid wanted to hear, however. It wasn't the truth that appealed to young Angus Hallop, but the myth, the cheating image.

‘Sure,' Christy said. ‘I met with Big Chief Running Wolf.'

‘Apache?'

‘Sioux,' said Christy. ‘I pow-wowed with him while the braves danced round the fire. I even got to smoke the peace pipe.'

‘What'd it taste like?'

‘Pretty nasty.'

‘Was that in a wigwam?'

‘Tepee,' Christy said. ‘They call them tepees out there.'

‘What else did you see?' said Angus, agog.

He found it easier to lie to the kid than to lie to the kid's aunt.

The lies he was obliged to tell Polly Manone were on-going half-truths, evasions, prevarications, down-played versions of the way it was, not the way it should have been. They were intended not to inform but to manipulate, which was a basic difference between history and propaganda, Christy supposed.

Polly crossed the yard from the farmhouse where she'd been ‘arranging lunch', whatever that meant. She picked her way between the puddles, arms out like a dancer, and looked, Christy thought, gorgeously self-contained.

‘Did Running Wolf fight General Custer?' Angus asked.

‘Nope, he wasn't old enough to be at Little Bighorn.' Christy gave the boy a loose-knuckled rap on the jaw, man to man and almost as binding as spit on the hand. ‘I'll tell you more about the Indians later. Right now I got to go talk to your Aunt Polly.'

‘Aunt Polly!' said Angus, grimacing. ‘What does she know?'

‘For someone with chickenpox, young man,' Polly said, ‘you're far too lively. I suggest you go into the house and ask Miss Dawlish to put you to bed.'

‘I'm not – I'm not…' Angus protested, then realising that he had put himself in a cleft stick, set off at a gallop to hide in the motorcar that Polly had parked by the stable-barn.

‘Some kid!' Christy said.

‘He can be a handful at times.'

‘Is he really sick?'

‘No,' Polly said. ‘He's taking advantage of the rash to have a day off school.'

‘I'm surprised your friend Dougie fell for it.'

‘Dougie knows when to slacken the reins. He's very fond of the children. He had two boys of his own, but they died.'

‘Jesus!' said Christy. ‘I don't know how you survive that.'

‘Nor I,' said Polly.

They moved away from Ron's sty.

It was a grey morning, not cold. The sky over the hills was tinted with amber as if the sun might break through before long.

Blackstone wasn't far from Glasgow and you could see all the suburban townships on the far side of the river piled against the hills. Jamie had told him that the counterfeit operation Manone had fronted had been based on a farm; this farm presumably.

Half-finished villas and bungalows peeked over the ridge about a half-mile off. Polly said that the builders had gone into liquidation soon after war began but that when the war ended some smart financier, with more of an eye to the future than the past, would make a killing by reopening the site.

Christy had no plans, no future, nothing beyond acquiring the information Marzipan needed to set up this woman to take a fall. He felt guiltier than he had done when he'd conned Babs Hallop into renting him a room, for Babs was an innocent and Polly was not. She was slim, sleek and sophisticated but the hard, self-protective shell that real painted ladies possessed was missing and behind her clever talk was a melancholy core.

‘Do you miss your kids?' he asked.

‘Of course I do.'

‘Will he bring them back?'

‘How do I know what Dominic will do?' she snapped. ‘You're the one with all the answers. Is that the price I'll have to pay to get my children back? Will I have to give your government everything I have to ensure that my husband stays out of prison and my children are free to return to Scotland?'

‘I can't answer those questions.'

‘Can't, or won't.'

‘Can't.'

‘Tell me the truth; are you being paid to persuade me to hand over all my money to your government?'

‘Not paid, no, not in cash.'

‘What then? What's in it for you, Mr Cameron?'

‘I get my pass to sail with a convoy, take pho—'

‘Baloney!' Polly said. ‘Is that an appropriate word?'

‘It'll do,' said Christy.

‘Why are you trying to sell me some ridiculous cock-and-bull story about Italian guerrillas, American double agents and plots to bring down
Il Duce
?'

They had strolled to the gate at the far end of the yard. Beyond was a field, half ploughed. Beyond the field were a cluster of pines and the leafless branches of tall oaks and beeches and little silver birch trees, slender and elegant as Polly herself. Down river, where the hills dipped away, you could see barrage balloons in the sky and thin columns of smoke and a squadron of aeroplanes winging in from the south. In the yard Christy could make out the boy and the motorcar. The old man, Dougie, was standing by the farmhouse door with a cat in his arms, the woman, Miss Dawlish, at an upstairs window, all motionless, like model figures on a model farm.