Wives at War (6 page)

‘You still see her, though?'

‘We go over the river to visit Mammy whenever we can find time. We pretend everything's all right for Mammy's sake.'

‘This farm where your kids stay, isn't that Polly's property?'

‘Dominic signed it over to someone else.'

‘Why did he do that?'

‘I can't imagine.'

‘Polly looks after it, though?' he asked.

‘Polly looks after a lot of things,' Babs answered, ‘mainly herself.'

He waited, watching her from the side of his eyes, then after a moment or two got up and uncapped the bottle. ‘More?'

Babs shook her head.

She finished the whisky in her glass and got to her feet.

‘Time I was off.'

‘Stay,' Christy said. ‘Talk some more.'

‘I need my beauty sleep,' Babs said.

‘No you don't.'

‘Thanks for the compliment,' Babs said. ‘But I really can't burn the candle like you can. Don't let me rush you, though. Stay up as long as you like.'

He put down the bottle and glass and waited.

Babs crossed the room and offered her cheek.

‘'Night, Mr Cameron,' she said.

He kissed her, his lips dry against her moist cheek. She leaned into him for a moment, pressing her breasts against his arm. He did not draw back but what she detected in his eyes was not desire.

‘'Night, Babs,' he said, and returned to fiddling with the wireless set, seeking, so Babs imagined, not the soothing strains of a late-night orchestra but the voice that filtered through the static, ranting in a foreign tongue.

3

Polly could see nothing of Fin Hughes except his legs and feet. The legs were clad in immaculately pressed lightweight worsted trousers, the feet in hand-lasted brown brogans. His stockings were a pale brown colour, so fine that they seemed more like skin than lambswool. The right trouser leg had ridden up, however, and she could make out the clip of his suspenders and a section of white calf bulging above it, muscular enough but already stippled with the faint blue veins of middle age.

‘Do you have a spanner there, Polly?'

She had several spanners, a whole battery of spanners. Fin had personally selected them from the rack in the garage, brought them into the kitchen and arranged them on a newspaper on the draining board above the sink.

For all his meticulous preparations Fin was no handyman and Polly took a certain malicious satisfaction in putting him into situations that exposed his lack of competence. She was, she knew, being entirely unfair, but in a society when a man's ability to use his hands effectively counted for more than his ability to use his brain, it was easy enough to make Fin feel small.

Small he was not, not in any way at all. He was tall, elegant, polished, and a good deal less effete with his clothes off than with his clothes on.

‘Which one do you want?' Polly said. ‘Tell me the gauge number.'

‘Gauge num— Ah, the second smallest.'

His voice echoed from the hollow stone chamber beneath the sink. He had a fine courtroom voice, a rich, tawny drawl, and it was unusual for him to ‘ah' or ‘erm'. Fin, of course, knew no more about gauge numbers than she did but he was too vain to admit it.

She took a spanner from the row and passed it down to him. He groped for the tool with a long lean-fingered hand. His shirt cuff was stained and there was dirt under his fingernails, and Carfin Hughes, scion of the legal profession, certainly didn't like getting his hands dirty.

Polly smiled to herself and yielded up the spanner.

‘Can't you fix it, darling?' she asked.

‘Of course I can fix it. It's the flange nut on the stopcock.'

‘Is it really?'

‘I'll have pressure restored very shortly, I assure you.'

‘Jolly good!' said Polly.

There was nothing seriously wrong with the plumbing. Falling water pressure was general throughout Manor Park, for an inexperienced crew from the Auxiliary Fire Service had ruptured a main pipe. A chap in a damp blue uniform had called round a couple of days ago to inform householders that full pressure would be restored as soon as possible which, these days, meant next month or the month after, or possibly not at all. Somehow, though, Polly had neglected to inform Fin of the fireman's visit.

‘God, but it's stiff.' Metal scraped on metal. ‘Damn and blast it!'

‘If you can't manage—'

‘I can manage. I can manage. Whoever installed this antiquated system should be shot, though. Why hasn't the stopcock been greased? Didn't your husband ever do it?'

‘He had a man come in to do it for him.'

‘Are you being sarcastic?'

‘Of course not,' said Polly.

She watched the trouser leg lift in a spasm of effort, saw his hips twist and jerk on the carpet of newspaper that he had spread beneath the sink.

The useful little dribble of water from the tap dried up completely.

Panting, Fin said, ‘How's that?'

‘Not good.'

‘Christ!'

‘Oh, do come out,' Polly said. ‘You'll only lose your temper.'

He had lost his temper before now, once with the lawn mower and twice with the cistern in the upstairs bathroom. His legs straightened and relaxed. Polly guessed that he would be staring up at the knot of lead and copper piping on the underside of the sink and plotting some face-saving excuse.

‘Is anything happening, anything at all?'

‘It's stopped,' said Polly.

‘Oh!'

‘Might I suggest you turn the flange of the wing nut on the stopcock in a clockwise direction.'

He said nothing. The long leg in the worsted trousers bent again and, a moment or so later, the cold water tap released a gush that settled into a weak barley-sugar-shaped coil.

‘Is that better?'

‘Somewhat better,' Polly said. ‘Awfully clever of you. Do come out now.'

He emerged cautiously, piece by piece. She relieved him of the spanner and offered her hand. He pulled himself to his feet, brushed his trouser legs and scowled at the cold-water tap.

‘That
is
better, isn't it?'

‘A little bit,' Polly conceded.

‘Well, it's the best I can do without proper tools.'

He washed his hands with a thoroughness that would have put a surgeon to shame and dried them on a towel that Polly gave him.

She didn't thank him for his efforts with a kiss. Except in the bedroom upstairs or more rarely in Fin's flat, they never kissed. She did not love Carfin Hughes and he did not love her. He did, however, appreciate her and that, in the midst of a miserly war, was quite enough for Polly.

He took the newspapers from under the sink and the collection of spanners and went out through the back door. She heard the rattle of the garage door and the clang of the bin lid and felt dank air from the garden seep into the kitchen. She shivered. She was cold. She was seldom anything but cold these days for the house in Manor Park Avenue was far too large now that Dominic and the children were gone, and in an unusual fit of altruism she had persuaded Margaret Dawlish, her housekeeper, to move to Blackstone Farm.

Fin returned. He washed his hands again, dried them carefully, ran a comb through his thinning hair, took his jacket from the back of a kitchen chair, slipped into it and glanced at his wristwatch.

‘Art thou ready, my Polly?' he said.

It was precisely one o'clock. It was always precisely some time as far as Fin was concerned. He lived his life by the clock, which Polly assumed was a lawyer's habit and not something for which he could be blamed. She shared office space with him on the fifth floor of the Baltic Chambers in Glasgow and had witnessed first-hand the volume of business that flowed through the practice.

‘We should really be moving,' Fin said.

‘Yes, yes, I heard you.'

‘Don't forget the eggs.'

She'd made up a small packet of shell eggs, precious as gold these days, that she had bought from Dougie Giffard to give to her mother. She carried the packet out into the hallway and placed it on a chair by the door while she put on her coat, hat and scarf and unhooked her gas mask from the hallstand.

The dark, cloud-ridden day made the house seem even more empty than usual. She would be glad to be out even if it was just to visit Mammy and Bernard for a couple of hours. Fin would pick her up again round the corner from the Peabodys' terraced cottage at half-past four. By then he would have made his weekly pilgrimage to check on his elderly parents and before they went their separate ways he would take Polly to tea in a tiny café tucked into a side street off Byres Road.

Polly enjoyed the hour they spent together in the café, sipping weak tea and eating toast. Many Italians had returned to Italy to fight for the Fascists or had been interned. Some had been shipped to the Isle of Man, others to Canada to sit out the war. She wondered what would have become of her last lover, Tony Lombard, if he'd stayed in Britain; what would have become of Dominic too; what might become of them yet if America entered the war.

She followed Fin down the drive to the motorcar parked behind the hedge. The big black Vauxhall Cadet looked suitably ‘official'. Fin had picked it for that reason. The Cadet was hardly economical but Fin always seemed to have a tankful of petrol when he needed it.

Polly slid into the passenger seat and closed the door. Fin fired the engine, rolled the car out into Manor Park Avenue and turned left, heading for the city and the Clyde bridges.

Polly sat back, knees together, coat collar, fur trimmed, pulled up to warm her cheeks and ears. She watched the park glide past. The iron railings had been removed and the flowerbeds converted into vegetable allotments. Without railings to protect them the trees seemed larger and figures in the distance – young boys, old men – smaller, as if war had altered the scale of one's perception.

‘I hear your sister has taken a lodger,' Fin said.

He drove with great authority, almost dashingly, like a man more used to sports cars than ten-year-old saloons.

‘Who told you that?'

He tapped the side of his nose with a gloved finger. ‘Little bird.'

‘Rosie?'

‘Lord no. Little bird. Enough said.'

‘Well yes, it's true. Some fellow she met at the Recruitment Centre.'

‘Why didn't you tell me?' Fin said.

‘I didn't think it was important.'

‘Have you met him yet?'

‘Why would I want to meet him?' Polly said.

The streets were quiet, even the thoroughfare. Trams were few and far between and no other cars were visible down the long straight stretch that led past Ibrox. Fin gave the accelerator a firm tap and brought the speed up to forty.

‘Curiosity,' Fin said. ‘Have the billeting officers not been on at you again to open your house to strangers?'

‘I think they've given up.'

‘They never give up,' said Fin. ‘It'll be a requisition order next.'

‘And you'll deal with it.'

‘I will.'

They drove in silence for a quarter of a mile.

Then Polly said, ‘Did your little bird tell you Babs's lodger is American?'

‘My little bird did.'

‘Is that why you're so interested in him?' Polly said.

‘Am I interested in him?'

‘Of course you are. If you hadn't been interested you'd have brought up the subject last night.'

‘I had more on my mind last night than your sister's lodger.'

‘Be that as it may, darling, you're fishing, aren't you?' Polly said. ‘You think I'm holding something back.'

‘Are you?'

‘No.'

Tenements closed around them and the road narrowed. Sunday shift at the shipyards filled the air with a secular racket and the outskirts of Govan, Dominic's old stamping ground, were almost as busy as a weekday.

‘Are you fishing because he's an American?' Polly said, at length.

Fin changed gear and gave most of his attention to the road.

There were no traffic lights, no policemen on points duty but the threatening rumble of an army convoy in the vicinity rendered him extra vigilant.

Fin said, ‘What part of the United States does he call home, I wonder.'

‘Didn't your little bird—'

‘Could it be Philadelphia, do you suppose? Or New York?'

Polly pressed her knees together and tucked her elbows into her sides. ‘It did occur to me that this chap might be connected with Dominic,' she said, ‘but no, it's pure coincidence that he's turned up here.'

‘I'm not so sure I believe in coincidence these days.'

‘Perhaps I should make a point of meeting him.'

‘No,' Fin said. ‘Wait and see if he comes to you.'

‘Do you think he will?' said Polly.

‘I think he might,' said Fin, and, spotting the army convoy up ahead, fisted the wheel of the Vauxhall and drove down into the docklands in search of a back route to the bridges.

*   *   *

Sunday afternoon in the Alba Hotel in Greenock: Christy was waiting for a guy codenamed ‘Marzipan'. Marzipan and the owner of the Alba obviously had some kind of arrangement for when he'd first arrived in Scotland he'd been condemned to spend a week in the fleabag hotel before they'd shipped him out to the bunker in the disused aerodrome near Paisley.

He stood in the bay window looking down on the streets where his old man had run wild as a kid. You didn't have to be a genius to see why the Clyde was an important waterway. Try as they might, German U-boat captains had failed to penetrate its boom defences, even on explicit orders from Hitler, a guy, so Christy'd heard, who got seasick just crossing the Rhine. There's sweet irony for you, Marzipan had said, if you happen to be a
Bootsmann
lying on the seabed in a punctured tin fish, gasping for air. Christy didn't want to think about anyone drowning, even a German. He hated the sea. He hated Europe and longed to be back in Manhattan with his fellow photo creatures.