A Family Affair Read online

  It was Heather, who had been helping with the move.

  ‘I’m going now, Jen.’ She looked around the room. ‘Gosh, you’ve been busy!’

  ‘It looks nice, doesn’t it?’ Jenny said with pride.

  ‘Pretty good, yeah.’

  ‘My own room,’ Jenny said, trying out the magic words yet again.

  Heather nodded. ‘You’re really growing up, Jenny.’ Her voice cracked momentarily. ‘I’m going to miss you, kid.’

  ‘I’m going to miss you too,’ Jenny said, catching the mood.

  Heather gave a forced little laugh. ‘No you won’t! And you certainly won’t miss all my clutter!’

  ‘I will!’ Jenny said loyally. ‘I will miss it, Heather.’ She ran to her sister, hugging her. ‘Do you remember when I was little and I had bad dreams? You’d let me get in bed with you and you’d sing me to sleep.’

  Heather didn’t answer, just hugged her back.

  ‘I’ll miss that too,’ Jenny said, overwhelmed suddenly by nostalgia.

  ‘You don’t get bad dreams any more,’ Heather said.

  ‘I do!’

  ‘Not bad enough to have to come in bed with me. Not for ages. It’s like I said, Jenny, you’re growing up.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to grow up,’ Jenny said.

  For a few moments longer they stood there, hugging one another, then Heather moved away almost abruptly.

  ‘I’ve got to go, kid. And you’ve got to finish your unpacking.’

  She kissed the top of Jenny’s head and clattered off back down the stairs calling her goodbyes to her mother and father. Jenny stood at the landing window to watch her go.

  The boys on the green had given up playing football now and were fighting instead, a heap of thrashing bodies and a circle of cheering onlookers, but Jenny, who would normally have been fascinated by such unruly behaviour, scarcely spared them a glance.

  Her eyes were on Heather, clacking down the path between the clay-red mud patches that would one day be lawn on the high heels she wore almost all the time, even with slacks, which she was wearing today. As Heather turned out of the gateway, Jenny tapped on the window. Heather waved, then started off along the pavement.

  Suddenly Jenny was overwhelmed by unbearable sadness, the thrill of the new house receding to be swallowed up by an enormous aching. She couldn’t really understand why she should feel this way – after all, Heather would still be living less than a mile away and she would see her every day, almost as much as she did now. But knowing that did nothing to lift the sadness.

  To Jenny, it felt like the end of an era.

  And in a way it was, for that momentous year had not yet finished with them. At the beginning of September, Heather told them she was going to be married.

  She arrived unexpectedly in Alder Road around seven o’clock one evening. Jenny, who was in her room struggling to learn her very first Latin homework – ‘amo, amas, amat …’ – heard her voice and rushed downstairs to greet her still clutching the almost brand-new exercise book in which she had written the conjugation of the verb ‘to love’.

  ‘Heather!’

  ‘Hello, Jenny. How are you doing?’

  She looked, and sounded, a little strained and tired, Jenny thought.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘At school, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I know. It’s all right.’ Actually it wasn’t, not completely. A week into her first term and Jenny still felt completely lost in the rambling red-brick building. Everything was so strange – teachers wearing flowing black gowns, timetables she could scarcely make head or tail of, a terrifying gymnasium with wall bars and ropes and vaulting horses, the strictest of rules and regulations, and she a very small fish adrift in a very large pond where everyone was bigger or older or more important or more self-confident than she was.

  ‘What are you doing here, Heather?’ Carrie asked. Not a very nice question, Jenny thought, since Carrie was Heather’s mother too, and her home, therefore, should also be Heather’s home.

  And then Heather dropped her bombshell.

  ‘I came to tell you that Steve and me are going to get married.’

  Carrie’s jaw dropped. ‘You what?’

  ‘We’re getting married.’

  ‘Yes, I heard you the first time,’ Carrie said. ‘I just couldn’t believe my ears, that’s all. You’ve only known him five minutes.’

  ‘It’s nearly a year now,’ Heather protested.

  ‘All the same – it’s not as if he’s – well – like us, is it?’

  ‘Of course he is,’ Heather said. ‘He’s Polish, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. He’s a foreigner. If it hadn’t been for the Poles, we wouldn’t have had the last war, would we?’

  ‘Oh, Mum, that’s rubbish and you know it.’

  ‘Well, he’s still a foreigner. Their ways are different to ours …’

  ‘I think it’s lovely, Heather!’ Jenny said, daring for once to interrupt her mother, disagree with her even. ‘I think Steven is lovely. Can I be a bridesmaid? I’ve always wanted to be a bridesmaid …’ Her voice tailed away as she saw Heather become vaguely uncomfortable.

  ‘I’m … not sure, Jen.’

  ‘Why not!’

  ‘Because … well … it might not be that sort of wedding.’

  ‘Heather!’ Carrie said, her voice like thunder. ‘You’re not … ?’

  ‘We’d have got married anyway,’ Heather said defensively.

  ‘Oh, Heather! I should have thought you’d have had more sense! After …’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Jenny asked, puzzled. ‘Why are you so cross, Mum?’

  ‘I think you’d better tell her, Heather, don’t you?’ Carrie had stuck her hands in the pockets of her overall and her chin had come up as it did when she was angry, jutting and pugnacious.

  ‘Mum, please …’ Heather said, distressed now.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to!’ Carrie said. ‘If you will get yourself into these … situations … you’re the one who’s going to have to do the explaining.’

  The first niggle of suspicion worried at Jenny. She pushed it away. She couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t believe it, wouldn’t even think it.

  ‘Oh, Jenny,’ Heather said. And to Carrie: ‘You’re really not being fair to me, Mum.’

  Carrie spluttered, an explosion of scorn. ‘Go on. Tell her.’

  Heather turned to Jenny. She looked close to tears.

  ‘Jenny … I don’t want you to make the same mistake Mum’s making. I want you to understand – Steve and me are going to get married because we love one another.’

  ‘Of course you are!’ Jenny said.

  ‘But there’s a reason why it’s going to be sooner rather than later. A reason why it might be … well, a quiet wedding … I’m going to have a baby. I know we should have waited until we were married, but really, in the long run it doesn’t make any difference. We’d have got married anyway. It’s just that – well, we really have to get on with it.’

  Jenny felt sick. Heather – going to have a baby – Heather, who wasn’t married. How could she?

  ‘How could you?’ she said aloud.

  Heather recoiled as if Jenny had struck her.

  ‘How could you? How could you do that?’

  ‘You see?’ Carrie said. Her tone was not angry any more but bitter, which somehow made it worse. ‘I don’t know, Heather. I should have thought you’d have learned your lesson, but it seems you haven’t. You’re no better than the girls from Batch Row! Having to get married! The shame of it!’

  ‘I haven’t got to get married,’ Heather said.

  ‘What else do you call it then?’

  ‘I already said – we’d have got married anyway.’

  ‘How do you know that? How does anybody know? You know what people will say.’

  ‘I don’t care what people will say!’

  ‘Well I do!’

  ‘I know that! You’ve always cared abou
t that. It’s the only thing that matters to you, Mum – what people will say.’

  ‘Because I care about being decent!’

  ‘Yes. More than you care about us. Any of us. You measure us by what people will say. I can’t stand it, Mum. I can’t bear it any more. Jenny …’

  But Jenny had fled. If there was one thing she hated it was people shouting at one another. Particularly when those people were the two most important in her world. She ran back upstairs to her room twisting the exercise book between her hands.

  ‘Amo … amas … amat …’

  But the words meant nothing. They weren’t going in at all. Jenny threw herself down on her bed and burst into tears.

  As she walked away down Alder Road, Heather felt the tears pressing so hard at the back of her eyes she knew she could no longer control them. She could hear her mother’s angry voice, see the hurt in her father’s eyes when he had been called in from the garden where he was bedding out late cabbage plants, feel Jenny’s shock and disgust, and suddenly it was all too much to bear.

  The boys were playing football on the Green, and she held herself in a grip of steel until she was past them, past the long rank of four-bedroomed houses and the units – a row of strangely modern-looking semis that was still being built – and into the lane that ran steeply down to the main road. Then the tears came, first a hiccupping gulp, a hot welling in her eyes, then a flood that she could not stop.

  Terrified someone might drive up the lane and see her crying, knowing she was certainly not ready to walk down the main road and into Glad’s house, she ran to a gateway overlooking the fields which sloped gently down to one of Hillsbridge’s valleys, leaned on the gate and covered her face with her hands while her body shook with sobs.

  Why did her mother have to be like that – so cold, so unforgiving? The same woman who could almost suffocate you with her warmth and loving and caring? But she knew, of course. She’d let them down. Negated all Carrie had done for her. Brought shame on a family to whom respectability meant so much. Everything she had said was true. She loved Steven and he loved her. He would have married her anyway … wouldn’t he? The first seed of doubt entered her mind and started a fresh wave of tears.

  Why had she done it? Why had she let him? She knew that too and it was more than just simply because she loved him, more than the desire he quickened in her until the wanting was almost unbearable. She could have withstood the temptation if it had been just that. She had made up her mind that never again would she do anything that would place her in such a position of vulnerability and she would have stuck to it if … if …

  If, at a time when she was feeling so low, so totally bereft, so much in need of comfort, she hadn’t learned his secrets – the secrets she had known from the very beginning he kept – discovered that his need for comfort and reassurance and love was as great as her own. Perhaps greater.

  She thought now of the night it had happened, the night when, she was almost sure, she had conceived the child she was carrying. There had been other times since then, of course there had – once the rubicon had been crossed there could be no going back. But on those other occasions they had been more careful, more aware of where their actions could lead them. That first time it hadn’t been so. They had given themselves to one another without restraint and the only thought in her mind had been washing him clean of his memories, giving him respite from the demons that tortured him.

  He had been more silent than usual that night, she remembered, more morose than she had ever seen him. She had been talking about her own sadness, her hurt at being left behind when the rest of the family had moved to the new house, the fact that although her head told her it was the most sensible arrangement, that she and they would be more comfortable, that her grandparents needed her there and she needed her freedom – her heart had not been able to accept it.

  ‘They just don’t want me around Jenny,’ she said. ‘I’m a bad influence.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I am sure that is not true.’ He smiled at her, that slow smile she loved so much.

  ‘It is true.’

  ‘Oh, Heather … Heather …’ He pulled her close so that her head was against his chest, her face buried in the soap-scented sweater he was wearing because the weather – particularly in the evenings – was still cold for the time of year.

  ‘I know I’m being pathetic,’ she said after a moment. ‘It’s just … well, it’s not very nice, knowing your family …’ She broke off again, unable to finish, and into the silence he said:

  ‘At least you still have your family.’

  She looked up at him.

  ‘What do you mean? Because your family are still in Poland?’

  ‘I have no family,’ he said. ‘Not any more.’

  And then he told her. He told her in a long monologue, his voice breaking, of what had happened to them when Hitler had invaded. He told her of the killing and the looting and the burning, of his village in flames and his mother and sister dead in the wreckage of their home. He told her of his father and brother, killed in the last cavalry charge, and of how he had escaped and continued to fight until the end of the war with the Polish Free Army, when he had come to Hillsbridge, as a miner, to try to make a new life.

  He told her all this, all the things he had never been able to bring himself to speak about before, and once he began, he was unable to stop until he had relived it all, purged himself of the horror of his memories and the loneliness and grief which had followed. When he finished he was crying, strong Steven, Steven the rock, who never showed any emotion beyond a tenderness that was surprising in such a big, masculine man. The tears rolled down his face and she kissed them away, ashamed that she could have been so selfishly concerned with her own troubles which seemed petty now in the face of what he had been through. And his anguish was a sharp chord within her, a desperate need to somehow make amends, help him to overcome the darkness in his soul.

  She held him and kissed him and stroked his hair as if he were a child, and after a while, when the loving and the giving and receiving of comfort became passion, there was no way – no way at all – for holding back.

  And I’m not sorry! She thought fiercely now as her own tears dried on her face. I’m sorry I’ve upset Mum and Dad and Jenny, but I’m not sorry I gave myself to Steven and I’m not sorry I’m carrying his child.

  A warm evening breeze blew across the valley, bringing on it the scent of grasses and baled hay, of mud where the cows had trampled and evacuated, of a couch fire somewhere in the distance; warm, evocative, natural smells that had been part of her life for as long as she could remember and always would be. Smells that had been the same for generations of people living their little lives, procreating and dying, and the sense of continuity was comforting, a world that would be here long after she was gone and her problems and heartaches nothing but dust in the wind.

  She placed her hands on her belly, imagining the life beginning there which would link her for ever to those days yet to come, and felt humble and overawed. Then she set off once more down the lane, leaving her past behind, striding purposefully towards her future.

  The wedding took place three weeks later, and Jenny was a bridesmaid as she had wanted to be. She wore a dress of stiff organdie with three rows of frills around the hemline that Carrie had made for her, sitting up late at night over her Singer sewing machine, and a matching coronet of pink silky stuff in her hair instead of the usual ribbon bow, and a pair of silver sandals. She stood behind Heather in the Catholic church, feeling immensely proud in spite of the fact that Heather was wearing a frock with a loose-fitting coat over instead of the ivory dress Jenny had always imagined she would wear and holding Heather’s trailing bouquet of roses, stephanotis and maidenhair fern while she and Steven made their vows.

  Outside the church the whole family posed for photographs. The menfolk were in their Sunday suits with white carnations in the buttonholes – Jenny thought how handsome David looked and was proud all over
again that he was her brother. Glad looked more suitably dressed for a funeral than a wedding in her black silk coat, black button shoes and stockings and her best black straw hat trimmed with a big rosette of silk flowers, but in order to enter into the spirit of an occasion of celebration she had a corsage of pink carnations pinned to her shoulder. Carrie, too, wore a corsage, and a costume in what she called Marina blue – after the Duchess of Kent, she explained to anyone who asked. Though she was tightly corseted, the skirt pulled a little across her stomach and she thought ruefully that for all that she never seemed to stop running about she had still managed to put on weight since she last wore it.

  No-one looking at her would have guessed she was anything but delighted that her elder daughter had become Steven’s wife and, indeed, she had mellowed towards the idea in the three weeks since Heather’s shock announcement. She still wished Steven wasn’t foreign, she still wished Heather had gone to the altar under different circumstances, but at least she was safely married now, she would have no more worries on that score. Steven hadn’t left her in the lurch as some might do, he had stood by her and although there might be a certain amount of counting of months when the baby was born it would soon be forgotten – a nine days’wonder. She wouldn’t have to endure the shame of this grandchild being born out of wedlock. Now all she had to do was make sure Jenny didn’t get herself into trouble and she could hold her head up high and know the respectability that was so important to her had been preserved. And it would be a long time yet, hopefully, before she had to start worrying about that. Jenny was young for her age and as yet, thank goodness, had not shown the slightest interest in boys.

  Carrie stole a proud sideways glance at her, at her round smiling face and plump body encased in pink organdie. Could she detect the first hint of development beneath the tightly fitting bodice? She rather thought she could. But Jenny didn’t look like Heather in any respect, except for her eyes, and Carrie was glad. She couldn’t have gone through all that again, the boys standing in line, the fearful realisation of the temptations she would face, the constant watchfulness combined ultimately with the knowledge that in the last resort she couldn’t be there all the time, couldn’t know what her children were up to every minute of the day. And Jenny wasn’t like Heather in her ways, either. She had none of Heather’s wilfulness. She was a good girl. Carrie only hoped she would stay that way.