HELEN FORRESTER
MOURNING DOVES

Dedication

To Stephen and Lauren, with love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue: 11 November 1995

Chapter One: March 1920

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Epilogue

Acknowledgment

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue 11 NOVEMBER 1995

The cenotaph stood on its great concrete plinth at the top of Grange Hill. To reach it meant a long climb for aged veterans and decrepit widows. Nevertheless, in this fiftieth anniversary year, a larger number than usual had turned out for the Remembrance Day service. Now the last wreath had been laid, and the parade had been formed up and was marching slowly down to the village.

As the voices faded away, Celia sat in her wheelchair, waiting with Rosemary, her West Indian carer, and her godson, Flight Lieutenant Timothy George Woodcock, DFC, until the narrow path down to the road was clear of people, and the wheelchair could be manoeuvred down.

Coming straight off the distant snow-topped mountains of North Wales and the estuary of the River Dee, the wind was cold, and, despite the blanket Rosemary had tucked round her, Celia was shivering.

She did not weep. Crying never helped anybody, she would say tartly. She had, however, a keen sense of inward loneliness, and she remembered suddenly her sister, Edna, friend and partner in so much of her life – ever since 1920.

What a year that had been. A year of final realisation that the men killed in the First World War would never come back, and neither would the safe, predictable life of 1914. Millions of ignorant, untrained women had had to remake their lives and find work to maintain themselves. I was one of them, considered Celia, as she sat patiently in her wheelchair and looked out across the misty landscape of the Wirral. And I suppose that, in some ways, I was lucky.

She was, she knew, the oldest person to attend the service, one hundred years next week; and she was probably the only person in the district with truly clear memories of the First World War, of life before it began and of its aftermath.

Her luck had not held. The names of five members of her family were listed on the cenotaph, and every year she made the effort to come to lay a family wreath, gorgeous with huge plastic poppies and black satin ribbons, at the foot of the memorial. From the wreath dangled an old-fashioned black-edged card, which said,

IN TENDER MEMORY OF MY SONS, PETER, PAUL AND BERTRAM TREMAINE, KILLED IN ACTION IN WORLD WAR II, AND OF MY GRANDSONS, MICHAEL AND DAVID TREMAINE, LIKEWISE KILLED IN ACTION IN THE FALKLANDS WAR. NEVER FORGOTTEN.

As they waited, Timothy George also felt the cold and longed for a warm fire and a whisky and soda. A pity Bertram’s wife could not be here, he thought; but, after her sons, Michael and David, had been killed, there was nothing to keep her in the Wirral, and she had gone south to live with her own mother in Devon.

Celia had remained, alone, in the red-brick Edwardian house which she and Alec had bought on their marriage.

It was strange to realise, Timothy ruminated, that, to most of the parishioners, both the First and the Second World Wars were forgotten wars, forgotten sacrifices. Except in special anniversary years such as this one, the crowds around the cenotaph grew smaller each year.

The flight lieutenant sighed. He supposed that Celia and he were, by now, simply walking history, not that Celia could walk very far; she was quite frail. This would probably be the last Poppy Day for her – and probably the last for many of the men like himself, some in uniform and some in shabby macintoshes, all with glittering collections of medals pinned to their breasts – and for the pitiful little bunch of widows and elderly spinsters, each with a red poppy in her buttonhole.

As he had glanced at the huddled old women, he had felt uneasily that even today there were some elderly women who were still not very good at managing life alone.

Their husbands, sons and lovers had died in the Second World War. Theirs was the second generation of women to be widowed by war or left without hope of marriage.

His own brother’s name and also the names of Celia’s brothers were on the Roll of Honour in the glass case on the cenotaph in Liverpool Cathedral. His brother, Eric, had been shot down by a sniper in Normandy during the Second World War, leaving a pregnant wife. His little nephew, he considered, had been fortunate to have been brought up by a kindly stepfather, considerably younger than his mother.

The wars had created a dreadful double generation gap, he thought grimly, and judging by the mismanagement in the country, the gap had not yet been closed.

He had for years held the notion that nobody had been able to fill the empty spaces left by the fathers and grandfathers who had died – or had been so wounded or exhausted that they were too weary to do anything much, once they had returned to civilian life. He remembered how tired he had been himself; it had been an enormous effort to start again after he had been demobbed.

Rosemary shook his arm, and said, ‘I think we can go down now.’

He jumped, and then grinned agreement. In the comparative silence now surrounding them, the cold wind whined and the artificial foliage of the wreaths rustled faintly in reply, like distant voices calling.

Before they moved her, Celia turned to glance once more at the wreaths and then upwards to the bronze soldier in battledress who stared out over the sands of the estuary.

She remembered three little boys who had built a sand castle on the seashore, and how they had squabbled about who should place a paper Union Jack on its summit. She felt a sudden terrible pain go through her. Years later, they had followed that Union Jack and had gone gaily off to war and never come back. And in the Falklands War her two grandsons had done the same, for reasons that she could never understand.

‘Goodbye, my dears,’ she whispered, as the wheelchair began to move. ‘See you soon.’

She took out a paper handkerchief and firmly blew her nose. One must never give in. Edna and I certainly never did.

Chapter One MARCH 1920

Was it really as small as that? Had that weed-covered quarter-acre ever held a formal flower garden, a lawn at the side of the house and a vegetable garden?

Louise Gilmore glanced up in despair at the house itself, one of a semi-detached pair. Sharp shards of glass stood upright in the frame of the broken hall bedroom window. She remembered how Gracie, her father’s housemaid, used to shake her dust mop out of that window – regardless of who might be standing below on the front step. When the family came to spend their holidays in the house, one of the maids had always come with them; it was usually Gracie, who hated the isolation of the place, the steady boom of waves on the sea wall, and the sand which constantly sifted in from the surrounding dunes.

Now, Louise noted hopelessly, damp brick beneath the windowsill indicated that rain had soaked into the wall. The front sitting-room window had had a piece of board nailed over it, and the front door had lost most of its shiny black enamel; what remained was bubbled from the heat of many summers.

There was no garden gate. Only the wooden gateposts remained, and the encroaching front hedge had nearly obliterated them, too.

As a result of the death of her husband the previous Saturday, Louise had been terrified by the dire warnings of his executor, Cousin Albert, and of his lawyer, Mr Barnett. She had, they said, been left almost destitute and must, in order to raise some money on which to live, sell their beautiful Liverpool mansion immediately.

It was essential that she find speedily some other place to live in, so she had, that morning – only the day after her husband’s funeral – dragged herself out of her bed and, with her younger daughter, Celia, made the tiring journey by train out to Meols, a small village on the Wirral Peninsula.

They had come to inspect a small – small from her perspective – summer cottage which had been in the family for years and had been rented out for most of the time. Cousin Albert had suggested that it would make a suitable retirement home for her, into which she could move almost at once.

She lifted her mourning veil from her face and flung it back over her black bonnet, then stepped on to the path leading to the front of the house. One of its dull red tiles had heaved and she tripped on it and nearly fell. She shivered, her breath coming in sobbing gulps.

‘Be careful, Mother!’ admonished her twenty-four-year-old spinster daughter, Celia, who was following closely behind her. ‘Hold your dress up. You’ll get it all muddy round the hem.’

Equally as scared as her mother, Celia was more snappish than usual. She herself was clutching her wide-brimmed black hat with one hand and holding down her own ankle-length skirt against the buffeting sea wind. She had sand in one eye and it was running tearfully from the painful irritation. She looked worn out.

Louise’s lips tightened. She did not reply to Celia, as she lifted her black satin dress and petticoat an inch so that they did not draggle in the damp puddles on the dirty path.

Sometimes Celia could be very trying. Wasn’t it enough that, only yesterday, they had stood by the grave of dear Timothy, her husband, who had shared her bed for thirty years? What was a bit of mud on the hem of one’s skirt compared to losing him?

To add to her misery, Cousin Albert Gilmore, sole executor of her husband’s will, had told her, upon his arrival, that Timothy had left heavy business debts, an announcement which had sent a frightening chill down her back. He had said that to keep up her fashionable home in the village of West Derby on the outskirts of Liverpool on what remained of her dowry would be impossible.

Cousin Albert had been completely heartless, she felt, not to give her some time to mourn, before unloading such cruel facts upon her.

Cousin Albert himself had, at first, not known what to do. He had, on Sunday, been telephoned by Mr Barnett, and he had arrived from his home in Nottingham on Monday. He had gone straight from Lime Street Station to see Mr Barnett in his office, and, warned by him, had gone on to Timothy’s office to interview his chief clerk and to look at his files and account books.

What he had found was a financial disaster, which would, he thought in quiet rage, take him weeks to sort out. He berated himself for ever agreeing to be his cousin’s trustee. He was, therefore, not in a very good temper and, when he arrived at Louise’s house, he was, in addition, rumpled and hungry from his journey.

He had paid off the taxi at the driveway entrance and, carrying his suitcase, had puffed his way up a slight slope round a fine bed of laurel bushes to the imposing front steps. He pulled a huge brass bell handle and fidgeted fretfully until the door was opened by a frightened-looking parlourmaid.

Close behind the maid came Celia, wringing her hands helplessly, and whispering, ‘Oh, Cousin Albert, I’m so glad you’ve come!’

‘Yes, yes, my dear, I’ve come.’

He plonked down his small suitcase, and took off his black bowler hat to reveal a tumble of snow-white curls. He handed the hat to the maid and then peeled off his heavy black overcoat and pushed that on to her, too. He gave Celia a light peck on one cheek, and asked abruptly, ‘Where’s Louise?’

‘In bed.’

‘And your father?’

‘He’s laid out in the downstairs front sitting room.’ Her voice quivered, and she added with evident anxiety, as she pointed to a closed, white-enamelled door, ‘Mother wanted him buried from home, so I sent for the undertaker in West Derby. The undertaker thought that that room would be most convenient for visitors to come into, so I agreed.’

‘Quite right, child. Quite right. When’s the funeral?’

He looked around the hall. Seeing a door open, he remembered the family breakfast room and made straight for it, hoping to find a fire where he could warm himself. Celia fluttered after him.

‘Tomorrow – at ten o’clock,’ she told him, as he thankfully turned his back to a good coal fire and let the heat flood over him.

He had no feelings about the loss of his cousin, only a sense of irritation. He knew that it would be his duty to deal quickly with the affairs of a pair of tear-sodden women, who must change their way of life immediately. He also knew that he must make sure that grasping creditors could not lay hold on Louise’s own modest assets. Timothy’s clerk had assured him that she had not jointly signed with Timothy anything in connection with the business, which was a relief. At least she had, according to what Timothy had once told him, her dowry in the shape of the rents from six working-class houses in Birkenhead, for what little they were worth, and, in addition, this very fine house.

But he had been a lawyer himself, and he knew from bitter experience that moneylenders could be quite ruthless and, occasionally, dishonest in their seizing of assets. Like any good Victorian gentleman, he was aware of his duty to any of his family, and nobody was going to strip his cousin’s widow of her assets, if he had anything to do with it.

This rectitude did not prevent his being judged by Celia and her mother as inhumanly abrupt and callous with them, when, the next morning, Louise was persuaded to get up very early and get dressed in order that she might receive the many callers who would come to pay their respects to the dead before the funeral.

On the day of his arrival, since he felt that time was of the essence, she had also had to face, after a late lunch, the sad truths discovered earlier by her husband’s trustee.

‘You will need money from somewhere on which to live,’ he had announced baldly. ‘You will certainly have to sell this Liverpool house, and do it very quickly.’ He sighed when he saw her shocked expression, but went on firmly, ‘Whatever you get for it can be invested in an annuity to give you a modest income on which to live.’

Albert had gazed reflectively at the lovely embossed ceiling of her large upstairs drawing room, normally used only for big parties, and added, ‘It’s a valuable property in a good district – so close to the countryside – so it should fetch a good price.’

In his opinion, it was little less than a miracle that Timothy had long ago had enough sense to put the house in her name, so that it could never be seized to settle his business debts. Timothy had always taken the most appalling financial chances, he reflected. Of course, he had made a lot of money, though his luck, it seemed, was running out just before he died.

Albert had, therefore, very early the next morning, while Louise dealt with her visitors, been to see an estate agent and arranged for the house to be put on the market immediately; because she owned it, there was no need to wait for Timothy’s will to be probated before doing this. With the money it fetched, he had decided, he would buy the annuity for her from a reputable insurance company, which should just produce enough to keep her and young Celia in genteel poverty. In the meantime, they would just have to manage on the rental money from her Birkenhead houses – or take a small loan from the bank, which could be repaid from the money received for her home. Though he was not her trustee, he assumed that Louise would expect him, as the only man in the family, to undertake these financial arrangements on her behalf. Women were, in his opinion, quite helpless; he would present his very sensible plans for her future to her and, undoubtedly, she would accept them.

Before Timothy’s sad demise, Louise had had no idea that she bore the burden of owning the Liverpool house, and the information had increased her bewilderment and her terror of being left alone. Timothy had always done everything, as a good husband should; all she had had to do was balance the housekeeping accounts, entertain his guests charmingly and be kind to him in bed.

It had been scant comfort to her when Cousin Albert, when talking to her on his arrival, had warned, ‘My dear, you will probably have to manage without a servant. However, since there will be only you and Celia, a very small house will be quite appropriate, and I am sure you are an excellent housekeeper.’ He had smiled at her with as much benignity as he could muster.

Louise moaned into her black handkerchief. Did he not realise that he was tearing her whole life apart? It was too much to endure.

He had watched her weep for a few moments, and then had leaned forward to pat her hand and remind her, as Mr Barnett, the solicitor, had earlier reminded him, that she also owned a little house, really a cottage, on the other side of the Mersey River. ‘Your father’s summer home – by the sea – in Meols, near Hoylake,’ he had encouraged. ‘When your sister Felicity died, she left it to you. Remember?

‘Mr Barnett tells me that he recollects that it was let for years. I understand, however, from the agent, Mr Billings, whom I phoned today from Mr Barnett’s office, that there is no one living in it at present.’

He heard Celia take a quick intake of breath, and he glanced over to her. Pale-blue eyes stared back at him from a dead-white face. She looked scared to death.

He continued in a more cheerful tone of voice, addressing himself partly towards her. ‘After being let for so long, it will almost certainly require renovation – but that is soon arranged. You’ve probably seen it, Celia?’

‘No, I haven’t,’ she muttered.

He stopped, wishing heartily that he had not been left the unpleasant task of telling these stupid women what they must do; he felt too old and tired to be bothered with them. He went on heavily, ‘When Mr Barnett told me about it, I had thought of selling the cottage on your behalf, instead of this house. But it would not fetch much – I hope, however, that it won’t need too much to make it a very comfortable home for you – and you must have an income from somewhere to live on, which only funds from this big house can provide.’ He reminded himself that, after the funeral the following morning, he should make a quick trip out to Meols to check that the cottage was indeed habitable.

Louise had temporarily forgotten the cottage; she had not seen it since Felicity had died ten years before. Though the day-to-day care of her property was done through Mr Billings, dear Timothy had always kept an eye on it for her, including that which had been settled on her by her father at the signing of her marriage contract. The thought made her weep ever more heavily into her black handkerchief.

Now, as she looked at the cottage, she despaired. What would happen to her in this awful place? How could she bear it? And to add to her distress, her scandalous elder sister, Felicity, did not seem to have done much to keep the building up during her ownership of it. She remembered that, when the property had passed to her, Timothy had insisted on letting it, because, he said, it was too shabby for family use. Perhaps it was the tenants who had left it in such a mess.

How devout churchman Timothy had condemned Felicity’s way of life. He would not hear of Louise having anything more to do with her. All because Felicity had dared to live in the cottage with handsome Colonel Featherstone, a scarred veteran of the Matabele and Boer Wars – without marrying him. As a result, Timothy had always insisted that she might have a bad influence on the children. He had even frowned when Louise bestirred herself enough to say defiantly that she must occasionally write to her only sister, no matter what she had done. And Timothy must have known very well that, if she married a second husband, Felicity would automatically lose the army pension left her by her first husband, dear Angus, killed at Rorke’s Drift during the Zulu Wars. But Timothy had always insisted that shortage of money was no excuse for Sin.

Only her father had understood Felicity, she thought, as she sniffed into her handkerchief. Felicity had died childless, but, sometimes, when her own elder daughter, Edna, had grown up, she had seen in her some of Felicity’s sprightliness and brave defiance of convention.

She would have been glad to have Edna with her now, but the girl was married and far away in Brazil.

When, before setting out for the cottage, cold dread of a future without a father or brother or son to care for her had consumed her soul, Louise had at breakfast wept openly in front of fat, elderly Cousin Albert.

Harassed Celia, at twenty-four far too old for marriage, had pressed a glass of sherry on her. Mother was so set in her ways, so difficult to deal with if her normal routine was upset, that Celia knew that if any action had to be taken, it would be she who must, somehow, take it.

She felt despairingly that she had no idea of business matters; Papa had always kept such information in his own hands. In consequence, she had become numb with fear as Cousin Albert explained to her her late father’s financial circumstances.

The loss of her father, however unloving, had reopened her grief over the loss of her brothers, Tom and George, during the war, and her stomach muscles were clenched as she did her best to keep calm.

The more she considered her mother’s and her own circumstances, the more terrified of the future she became. With no male to protect them or earn a living for them, what would happen to them? And still worse, what would happen to her when her mother died? She had nothing of her own; she had been her mother’s obedient companion-help ever since she was fourteen. She was totally dependent upon her.

She also felt a profound unease about Cousin Albert himself. Was he altogether trustworthy? She did not know him well, but he struck her as a manipulative man, a man with little idea of kindness or humanity – though her father must have had some faith in him to make him his executor.

Immediately after the funeral was over, Albert had had a private discussion with Timothy’s solicitor and old friend, Mr Barnett of Barnett and Sons.

Elderly Mr Barnett was himself trembling with fatigue and grief, because the AND SONS of his practice no longer existed; one had died while a prisoner of war and the other had succumbed to trench fever in the horrors of 1916. With difficulty, the old man had single-handedly kept the practice going for his sons while they were at war. Now, he knew he would never enjoy a peaceful retirement; to keep himself, his wife and three daughters, he must continue his practice until he dropped. It was no wonder that he found it hard to concentrate on what the pompous Mr Albert Gilmore was saying, and that he agreed to everything suggested in connection with Mrs Louise Gilmore’s affairs.

After lunch, Albert took out his gold hunter watch and announced that he would go again to Timothy’s office to do some more work, would stay one more night and then, the next morning, catch an early train back to his Nottingham home. ‘Mr Barnett will have the will probated and will do a further check in case there are any, as yet, undiscovered assets,’ he told Celia.

‘My dear Louise,’ he continued paternalistically to the tear-soaked widow, ‘I shall be in constant touch with Mr Barnett – fortunately, I have a telephone – and, in a few days’ time, I’ll be in touch with you again by mail. In the meantime, you should go out to Meols – that is the nearest railway station – to look at your cottage there.’ He tucked his watch back into his waistcoat pocket. ‘Mr Barnett will oversee the paperwork regarding the house for you. An estate agent may come tomorrow to evaluate it.’

He carefully did not mention to her that, since her present home and its contents already belonged to her, she had the right to refuse to sell it. Nor did he tell her that that afternoon he would pay a quick visit to the cottage to check that it looked repairable. She must face reality herself, he felt defensively.

Albert did not want any argument about the sale either. He dreaded dealing with women – they were so volatile and so lacking in common sense, and physically they revolted him. Better by far to persuade Louise to sign a quick agreement with Mr Barnett that he should arrange paperwork of the sale.

That evening, after Cousin Albert and Mr Barnett had dined with her, she had signed the agreement to sell without even reading it.

It never occurred to her that she was signing away her own property, that she was free to make her own decisions. She was certain that men always knew best.

Terrified, white-faced Celia’s instinct that something was wrong was, therefore, correct. Albert Gilmore’s intentions were, however, of the best. He was simply convinced that women were totally incapable of running their own lives, a belief certainly shared by his late cousin, Timothy. With money coming in every month from an annuity and with Celia to care for her, he could comfortably forget Louise.

Now, buffeted by a brisk sea breeze, Celia and her mother stood in front of a dwelling which looked as shabby as a house could look without actually falling down.

‘Built in 1821,’ Celia said without hope. ‘See! There’s the date above the front door. No wonder it’s shabby – it will be a hundred years old next year.’

A wave of pure panic began to envelop the younger woman, as her mother sniffed into her handkerchief, and wailed, ‘What are we going to do, Celia? We can’t possibly live here. What is Albert thinking about, suggesting such a thing? Couldn’t we buy another house?’

Her daughter shivered, and tried to muster some common sense. She replied, ‘Well, probably this is the cheapest roof we’ll ever find, Mama, even if we have to have it repaired. Mostly, I suspect that Cousin Albert wants us resettled quickly, because he doesn’t want us to live with him.’

Her mother turned back towards her, and with a sigh, inquired, ‘What did you say, dear?’

Celia had bent down to pick up two hairpins which had fallen out of her untidy ash-blonde bun. Her voice was muffled, as she replied, ‘I think he may wish us to begin a new life together without delay. He may fear that we expect him to invite us to live with him – he has a big house – I remember our going to visit him once, when I was little.’ She straightened up and pushed the pins into her handbag. ‘But he hasn’t offered us a home, Mother – and I don’t think he should have to. It is not as if he were your brother – then he’d have a duty towards us.’

Her mother responded with unexpected acerbity. ‘Well, he is your father’s trustee until the estate is settled. He might at least have stayed long enough to help us, instead of leaving us in the hands of a solicitor – and an estate agent who has had the insensitivity to come in the day after the funeral, and run around our home – with a tape measure!’

‘The estate agent is concerned only with selling our house, Mother. He came to see it this morning only because Cousin Albert wants it sold quickly. He did apologise for intruding on us, remember. And the house is enormous, Mother, with seven bedrooms and three servants’ rooms. Too much for just two of us.’

Her mother’s puffed eyelids made her eyes look like slits in her plump face, as she replied pitifully, ‘I don’t want to sell it, Celia. It’s our home. And, what’s more, I don’t like the agent – so officious and totally lacking in delicacy or compassion.’

Celia wanted badly to cry herself, but she put her arm round her mother’s waist, and said gently, ‘Try not to grieve, Mama. This little house is yours, too, remember – you can do anything you like with it. We can probably make it very pretty.’

Celia gestured towards the shabby front door facing them. ‘I suppose Cousin Albert imagines we can arrange for the renovations ourselves?’ She paused, as she tried to think clearly.

Louise continued to cry. At Celia’s remarks, however, her petulant little mouth dropped open. She could do anything she liked with this miserable cottage? What rubbish! Men always looked after property.

‘How can I get it done up? I have no idea how to proceed, and where would we get the money to do it?’ she wailed.

Celia had to admit that she did not know either. She responded firmly, however, by saying, ‘Perhaps we can find someone in the village, a builder, who could at least advise us about what it would cost.’

Then another frightening thought struck her, and she asked, ‘Did Cousin Albert say what we were to do about money until the house is sold? We would have to pay workmen, wouldn’t we?’

Albert had not mentioned immediate financial needs, except to say that he had himself advanced the money for dear Timothy’s funeral.

Her mother closed her eyes. She had no idea what, if any, money she had to draw on for the time being. It was all too much. She was trembling with fatigue and bewilderment at the sudden upheaval in her life. She wished heartily that she could follow Timothy – and simply die.

It really was most inconvenient that Timothy should have a heart attack before he had even reached his fiftieth birthday – and die in his office. What a fuss that had caused!

As if she could bear anything more, when they had already lost both their sons, George – her baby – in the dreadful sinking of the Hampshire in 1916. Drowned with Lord Kitchener, she had been told; as if that made it any the less painful to her. And big, strong Tom, her eldest and the pride of her soul, killed on the Somme.

Her terrible frustration at their youthful deaths still haunted her. There was nothing she could do to express her love of them. She could not give them beautiful funerals to mark the family’s grief at their passing. They had left no wives or children to be comforted. They did not even have graves which she could tend in memory of them. All she could do was weep for them.

And her own two brothers, who could have been so much help to her in the present crisis? Both long dead, Peter from yellow fever while serving as an administrator on the Gold Coast, and Donald, a major in the 43rd, killed in a skirmish in the Khyber Pass just before the war broke out. The Empire had cost an awful lot of men, she thought, with sudden resentment against governments as well as against poor Timothy.

Celia patiently repeated her question about money, and her mother mopped her eyes and responded mechanically, ‘I suppose he thinks I’ll find it out of my own small income – my dot. There may be a little money in the bank which is mine, and I still have most of my March housekeeping.’

‘Do you have any idea how much is in your banking account?’ Celia knew that her grandfather had settled on her mother a dowry – a dot, as such a settlement was popularly called – of rental housing in Birkenhead. It was doubtful whether the income from their small rents would be enough to tide them over, never mind pay for extensive repairs to this dismal house.

‘I don’t know how much. I will have to ask the bank manager – and Mr Billings.’

‘The agent who collected the rent for this cottage and manages your Birkenhead property?’

‘Yes, dear. Cousin Albert says I am lucky that, when I married, your grandfather made quite sure that that property always remained mine.’

At the mention of Mr Billings, some of Celia’s fear receded. Mr Billings would surely know how to deal with house repairs. He might know how they could obtain credit so that they did not have to pay immediately.

As she searched in her leather handbag for the key to the house, handed to her by Cousin Albert, who had found it, neatly labelled, in Timothy’s key cupboard in his office, she said with false cheerfulness to her mother, ‘Let’s go inside. It may not be so dreadful as we think. Then, instead of going directly back home to Liverpool, we could pause long enough in Birkenhead to see Mr Billings; he’ll know something about house repairs, I’m sure. We can take a later train back to Liverpool.’

‘Well, I suppose,’ Louise whispered wearily, ‘since we are here, we might as well look at the inside.’

As Celia slowly turned the big iron key in the rusty lock, Louise paused to look round what had been the front garden, and sighed deeply at the sight of the foot-high weeds. She sobbed again into her large, black mourning handkerchief, one of the same set of handkerchiefs she had used when crying for her lost boys.

Celia’s hand was trembling as she put the big key back into her handbag, before pushing hard on the stiff door to open it. What will become of us? she fretted. What shall we do?

Nineteen twenty was supposed to be a year when, two years after the war, things would settle down and life return to normal. Mourning was supposed to be over, your black dresses put away. But you can’t bury grief as quickly as you can bury men, she thought bitterly.

At best, life was proving to be totally different from that of 1914, when during a gloriously hot August, Europe was plunged into war, and life’s main preoccupation became the casualty lists.

Added to the death of her sons, her poor mother now had this burden of comparatively early widowhood, a penurious one, and the loss of her superbly furnished home.

As she pushed hard at the reluctant door, she thought for a moment of herself, and she saw no hope of a decent future anywhere.

Chapter Two

As the door swung open to reveal a tiny vestibule, decayed autumn leaves rustled across a dusty tiled floor. Facing them was an inner door, its upper panels consisting of a stained-glass window with an elaborate pattern of morning glory flowers.

In an effort to cheer her mother up a little, Celia exclaimed, ‘Wouldn’t that be pretty if it were cleaned?’

‘Mother loved it,’ Louise said abruptly. Because her nose was so swollen from weeping, she sounded as if she had a heavy cold.

Using the same key, Celia unlocked the pretty door and hesitantly opened it. She had never been in the cottage before, and did not know exactly what to expect.

A very narrow, gloomy hall was revealed. It was poorly lit by a window at the top of a steep staircase to her right. To the left of her, two doors led off the hall. At the back was a third door. The lower half of all the walls was painted brown; the upper half looked as if it had once been cream. It was, however, very dirty; every corner was hung with cobwebs, and dust clung to them. Dust lay thickly on the wooden banister of the stairs, on the bare wooden treads, and on the ridges of the door panels. Under their feet fine sand, blown in from the dunes at the back of the house, crunched faintly on reddish tiles.

Celia quickly flung open the two doors and they glanced in at tiny rooms which looked equally dirty and depressing, their fireplaces choked with ashes, the bare wooden floors grimy and littered with bits of yellowed newspaper. The light from the windows, filtering through gaps in the boards hammered over their exterior, did little to lift the general air of dinginess.

Determined to be brave, Celia said to her mother, again steeped in melancholy, ‘They’ve both got fireplaces – and quite big windows.’

Louise did not reply. She was past caring.

She did, however, follow Celia, as the younger woman approached the door at the end of the hallway, which she presumed correctly would lead into some sort of a kitchen.

A very rusty range had been built into one wall. With a long-handled water pump at one end, a sandstone sink was set below a filthy casement window positioned high in the house’s end wall. Through the window Celia caught a glimpse of the straggling tops of hedges which she supposed marked the edge of the property.

Cautiously she pressed down the pump handle. It gave a fearsome squeak, but no water came out.

Her mother stared at it, and then said heavily, ‘It has to be primed and it’s probably rusted inside.’ After a pause while she dabbed at her reddened nose, she added, ‘There’s a well at the bottom of the garden.’

Celia was appalled. The kitchen was awful, filthy beyond anything she had ever seen before. How on earth could one ever get such a neglected house clean – without a couple of skilled charwomen? But Cousin Albert had said no servants.

She realised with real shock that, if they did come to live in it, she herself would have to clean it. Her mother would not dream of doing an unpleasant job while she had a daughter to push it on to, and Celia had no idea even how to start.

She swallowed, and opened another door. ‘This must be the pantry,’ she said. ‘Phew! How it smells!’

Because there was a sudden scuffle of tiny feet in its confined space, she hastily slammed the door shut again. ‘Ugh!’

‘Mice!’ her mother burst out. ‘Oh, Celia!’ She hastily gathered her skirts up to her knees, as if expecting an immediate invasion of her petticoats by the tiny intruders. Tears ran down her face.

‘It’s all right, Mother. It’s all right! I don’t think any came out.’ Celia turned back to the hallway, and suggested heavily, ‘We’d better have a look upstairs.’

There were three small bedrooms, and, in addition, a very tiny room at the front, over the hallway, which Louise said, with an effort, had been her elder sister’s bedroom when they were children. It was in the latter that the window had been broken. Rain had got in and damaged the plaster. Under their feet brown linoleum squelched as they trod on it, indicating that there was water under it.

‘Pooh!’ exclaimed Celia. ‘This room reeks of damp.’

Her mother blew her nose, and said very wearily, ‘The floorboards have probably rotted.’

Celia nodded. She wondered, with a shiver, if they would ever have enough money, never mind enough strength, to put this tiny house into some sort of order. Cousin Albert must believe that it was possible, she decided.

In fact, Albert Gilmore had not thought the matter through very well. His main goal was to avoid having to take the two bereaved women into his own home in Nottingham, where he dwelled very happily with an obliging manservant. He did not want them there even temporarily – they might be hard to dislodge.

He hoped that they would agree to settle in the cottage, or, alternatively, go to live with Louise’s elder, married daughter, Edna, and her husband, Paul Fellowes, something he had not yet suggested to either lady – he felt that the latter idea must come from Paul and Edna, and was, in his opinion, a decision of last resort. In the meantime, he had pressed on Louise the idea of the cottage as a suitable home.

Paul was an electrical engineer, a director in his family firm which had grown hugely during the war, because of the international reputation of its engineers and their innovative approach to new problems. He had just completed managing a lucrative seven-year contract for the wiring of an entire city in Brazil. He and Edna would, according to Louise, sail for home this month. Once he was resettled in England, considered Cousin Albert, Paul Fellowes would certainly be able to afford to take in a couple of women, who would probably make themselves useful in his house, as such women always did.

On the other hand, he pondered, if they would agree to live in the cottage and were very careful, they should be able to manage on the rents from Louise’s six houses in Birkenhead. The rents, in addition to the annuity which he proposed to buy for them from the proceeds of the sale of the West Derby house, should be enough for two women to live on.

He knew from his talks with Mr Barnett and with Timothy’s chief clerk that there would, almost certainly, be nothing left of Timothy’s estate. The man owed money everywhere, probably because much of his basic income had come from investment in railways, which, now that the war was over, were not doing very well. Had he lived, he might have been able to pull through a difficult period, but now there was no hope. His few assets must be liquidated to meet his debts.

He trusted that Paul Fellowes would, when he returned to England, help him with the paperwork necessary to wind everything up. Paul should soon receive his letter, sent to Salvador, Brazil, informing him of his father-in-law’s death and asking him to break the news to his wife.

It was possible that the couple had already sailed for England before the letter’s arrival. In that case they would receive the news from a telegram, which he had dispatched to Paul’s father at their company head office in Southampton. Edna’s last letter to her mother had mentioned that they expected to dock in Southampton and spend a few days with Paul’s parents before coming north to visit her own parents.

As Louise and Celia struggled round the overgrown garden of the cottage by the sand dunes, Louise mentioned how relieved she would be to see Paul and Edna.

Celia agreed. She had almost forgotten what the couple looked like. She had never had a great deal to do with her elder sister, and she had met Paul only three times, so she was not particularly hopeful of being comforted. Their presence would, however, add a sense of stability to Louise in her shattered state, for which she would be grateful.

If Paul returned quickly enough, thought Celia, he would, at least, be someone to consult about the cottage – if he had any time; she had always understood from her father that businessmen never did have much time to spare for the affairs of women.

Standing in the cottage garden after the stuffiness of the house, it was a relief to Celia to breathe clean, salt-laden air, and, despite its total neglect, there was a healthy smell of damp earth and growing things.

At the bottom of the garden, they inspected an earth lavatory.

‘It’s utterly disgusting!’ Celia exclaimed. ‘Did you really use it?’

‘Yes,’ Louise admitted. ‘It wasn’t something we looked forward to. It was your father’s main objection to continuing to come here for holidays.’ She began to whimper, as she recalled with anguish the handsome water closet which Timothy had had installed in their West Derby home.

‘Perhaps we could get a proper bathroom put in here,’ Celia suggested doubtfully, as she shut the door firmly on the obnoxious little hut. Though she had long since learned that, to survive, she must bow her head and do whatever her parents decided, even her broken spirit had, on inspecting such primitive sanitary arrangements, begun to feel a sense of revolt.

After several days of being confined indoors, the fresh air was reviving Louise, and she looked around her, and sighed. She replied quite coherently, ‘I don’t think we could put in a water closet, without piped water and drains.’ Then she exclaimed with something of her normal impatience, ‘What a mess! I can’t imagine what kind of a tenant must’ve been living here. Mr Billings must have been very careless about his selection of one.’

Celia contemplated the jungle of weeds and sprawling bushes round her. ‘Did he pay the rent? The tenant, I mean,’ she asked practically.

Her mother shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Your father took care of these things.’

Celia turned to stare at the back of the house. The roof looked all right, no slate tiles missing and the chimneys were all intact, as far as she could judge. Her eyes followed the ridge of the roof, and she remembered suddenly that there was another house attached to theirs.

‘Do you own the house next door, Mother? I can see that the other side of the hedge has been trimmed, and there are curtains in the bedroom windows – and smoke is coming from the chimney. Someone must live there.’

Her mother looked up. ‘No, I don’t own it. My father bought this house simply as a summer cottage, rather than as an investment, and when he died he left it to your Aunt Felicity.’

Anxious to encourage her mother to take an interest in anything, Celia asked, ‘Who does own it?’

‘A Mr and Mrs Lytham bought the other side. I used to play with their children.’ Louise’s expression softened, and she added wistfully, ‘We had some lovely times, playing in the sand dunes and paddling in the sea. I wonder what happened to them?’

Celia forced a smile. ‘How nice that must have been.’ Then she looked at her brooch watch. ‘Perhaps we had better lock up, Mother, and go to have a talk with Mr Billings. He could advise us about repairs.’

Her mother nodded and they retraced their steps to the house, ruefully brushing down their long skirts. Even Celia’s ankle-length, tailored skirt had caught in the undergrowth and had burrs and bits of leaves and seeds clinging to it.

Celia locked the back door and they walked slowly and dismally through the house, leaving muddy tracks behind them.

While Celia turned to secure the inner front door, Louise proceeded slowly down the front steps. She suddenly let out a frightened little cry, ‘Oh!’

Celia spun round.

Standing in the middle of the red-tiled path was a tall thin man. As the women stared at him, he raised his cap and bowed. ‘Good afternoon,’ he greeted them politely.

Chapter Three

Confronted by a man, both women were suddenly acutely aware of how isolated the cottage was.

Walking down the lane to it, they had passed only one other cottage, a squat little dwelling with a thatched roof. It had, Louise told Celia, been lived in for centuries by a family of fishermen. Now, they stared uneasily at someone who seemed to have sprung from nowhere.

‘Good afternoon,’ responded Celia nervously, while her mother stiffened, as she catalogued the man as no gentleman, despite his courteous greeting. The lanky man’s grey hair was roughly cut and framed a lined, weather-beaten face. He wore a striped union shirt without a collar; a red and white cotton handkerchief was tied round his neck. His wrinkled, old-fashioned moleskin trousers, held up by a worn leather belt, were stained with dried mud.

As he looked down at her, Louise’s silence did not seem to disconcert him in the least. His faded blue eyes held the hint of a smile, as he said, ‘You must be Mrs Gilmore. The gentleman as was here to take a quick look at the cottage for you said as you would be coming. He come out late Tuesday. Nearly dark, it was.’

A quiet rage against Cousin Albert rose in Louise, blotting out all sense of fear or grief. So, during his stay with her, he had not spent all his time in Timothy’s office checking over with the clerk just exactly what the financial situation was; he had also been out here, planning to condemn her to live in this awful place. He knew precisely what it was like.

With sudden understanding she realised how she had been manipulated. Albert and Mr Barnett had made her sign away her present home.

It was so unfair. They should have explained to her what she was about to do. Consulted her. The fact that the outcome would probably have been the same did not make any difference. She had not been asked what she felt about moving out here.

Could she not have sold this horrible cottage and bought another tiny house in a decent, civilised Liverpool street?

No time had been allowed her to recover from her bereavement, she raged; there had been no understanding that she was distraught with grief.

She was healthily furious, not only with Albert and Mr Barnett, but also with Timothy.

Timothy might have had enough sense to tell her that she owned their home, when he had originally transferred it.

Unless he had not trusted her? What a dreadful thought!

That was it. He must have felt, like Cousin Albert, that she was not capable of dealing with the ownership of such a valuable property; in transferring the ownership to her he must simply have been ensuring that no creditor of his could ever seize his home.

Men were like that, she felt with sudden, bitter understanding of the helplessness imposed on women.

She drew herself up to her full height, and replied frigidly to the stranger. ‘Yes, I am Mrs Timothy Gilmore.’

‘And the young lady?’

‘My daughter, Miss Celia Gilmore.’

The man smiled down at the tiny younger woman. Framed by untidy blonde hair, her face had the whiteness of skin never exposed to sunlight. Her loose, black-belted jacket and full skirt were relieved only by a white blouse. A tiny gold cross and chain glittered on a blue-white throat. A wide-brimmed black hat, worn squarely on her head, did nothing to improve her looks. A proper little mouse, her mam’s companion-help, he judged her, but probably amiable enough to be a good neighbour. ‘Nice to know yez, luv,’ he said warmly.

Celia smiled nervously in return. She sensed that the old man approved of her. It felt nice; she rarely got approval from anybody. As her mother’s patient shadow, she was usually barely noticed.

Their visitor pointed an arthritic finger at the house next door, and, as if taking it for granted that the ladies would be moving into the cottage they had just inspected, he said, ‘I’m your neighbour. Me name’s Eddie Fairbanks. Was head gardener to the earl till he sold the family home to be a nursing home for wounded soldiers. Proper kind to me, he was. Served him forty years I did, ever since I were a lad of ten, so I was close to retirement, anyway. He give me the cottage rent free for me lifetime and me wife’s lifetime – ’cos, he said, I designed one of the best rose gardens in the north for him, and he loved roses. He hoped the servicemen would enjoy the garden. He lives in London now.’ He paused to take a breath, while the two women stared at him. Since they did not say anything, he went on, ‘My Alice passed away six years ago, so I manage by meself.’ He paused again, as if expecting some response from Louise, but when there was none, he asked, ‘Would you like a cuppa tea? The kettle’s already hot. That house must’ve been cold when you went in – with the wind, and all.’

‘No, thank you,’ Louise replied stiffly. Tea with a gardener? What was she coming to?

Celia, however, caught her arm and, smiling unexpectedly prettily at the old man, she said, ‘Mother! It would be so nice to get acquainted with Mr Fairbanks. He might be able to tell us more than Mr Billings would.’

‘Ha! Old Billings?’ interjected Mr Fairbanks. ‘In Birkenhead, eh? He hasn’t taken much care of the place for you, has he?’

Celia replied ruefully, ‘No, not by the look of it.’ She turned her head to smile up at her mother. ‘A cup of tea would be lovely, Mother.’ She gave Louise’s arm a warning little tug. In their desperate situation, a male neighbour could be very helpful.

Louise was still inwardly steaming with rage, but out of courtesy she reluctantly agreed. She said to Mr Fairbanks, ‘Very well. It is very kind of you.’

She made herself smile at the man, and he said, obviously pleased, ‘That’s better, Ma’am. This way, if you please.’

He led them down the path and round the wild, ragged front hedge. At the halfway mark, it suddenly became a neatly trimmed privet, and he led them into a front garden boasting a few daffodils and other small spring blooms. Near the house wall, sheltered from the cold wind, a blaze of red tulips stood tall and straight as an honour guard. The front window was neatly draped with lace curtains, and the front door stood open, giving a glimpse of a flowered stair carpet.

They entered through a lobby similar to the other one next door, though it lacked the stained-glass window in the inner door and the tiles were covered by a large doormat.

They carefully wiped their feet as they went in, and looked down the passageway with some curiosity.

It had the same brown paint with cream upperworks as the house they had just been in. It was, however, spotlessly clean, and the hall runner was thick cream wool with a lively Turkish pattern in dark reds and greens. Celia looked at it and hesitated to step on it.

‘My shoes must still be muddy from the garden,’ she said doubtfully to the old man.

‘Don’t worry, luv. The carpet cleans up fairly easy.’ He smiled at her and at her mother behind her, and gestured towards the colourful stair carpet. ‘Alice and me, we hooked all the carpets in the house. Pure wool, they are. They sponge clean something wonderful.’

Murmuring polite amazement at such industry, the ladies were ushered into the back room, where a good coal fire glowed. ‘Come in, come in and warm yourselves.’

He eased a rather bewildered Louise into a battered rocking chair, and told Celia to take the chair opposite, which was a low nursing chair with a padded seat and back, its velveteen worn with age.

As she sat down, she wondered how many babies Alice had fed while seated in the armless chair. She spread her skirt comfortably round her, and, a little sadly, thought how good it must feel to have a baby at the breast and be cosy with it by the fire. Then, as Mr Fairbanks hurried to get his best, flowered cups and saucers out of a corner cupboard and set them on a table in the centre of the little room, she almost blushed at her wickedness at harbouring such an idea.

Her duty was to her mother; she had been taught that in childhood, and, anyway, at aged twenty-four she was on the shelf – too old to think of marriage and babies.

Edna had been the pretty one, who had been groomed for marriage and had gone triumphantly to the altar with Paul Fellowes, a good solid match. Her father had, however, been worried when a besotted Edna had insisted on following her husband out to Brazil, though she was pregnant with their first child. Her daughter had survived being born in a hot climate, only to die of dysentery at the age of two. There had been no other children, and Celia often wondered why. Her friend, Phyllis Woodcock, had told her ruefully that babies arrived every year.

Edna was lucky that Paul was still alive. Had it not been for the contract in Brazil, he would surely have volunteered for the army at the beginning of the war, and it would have been remarkable if he had managed to survive until the conflict ended. She wondered if he had felt any regret at not being able to come home and fight – or had he thankfully made the business contract with Brazil, an allied country, an excuse not to have to sacrifice himself for king and country?

The latter was such an ignoble thought that she immediately turned her attention back to her mother.

Louise was sitting silently, her eyes half-closed, as the fire warmed her frozen feet. Her sudden spate of rage was draining away, and she felt dreadfully tired. She longed to lie down in the cosseting safety of her own bed.

After a few minutes, she roused herself sufficiently to take off her gloves and allow the heat to warm her hands. While Mr Fairbanks bustled into the kitchen to fill the kettle, Celia whispered to her, ‘When do you think Paul and Edna will dock?’

Before replying, Louise waited for Mr Fairbanks to push between them to place the kettle on the hob, and turn it over the fire. It soon began to sing, and Mr Fairbanks said cheerfully, ‘It won’t be long, Ma’am.’

Louise acknowledged his remark with a condescending nod, and then, as he vanished in search of milk and sugar, replied to Celia, ‘I really don’t know. Albert thought it would be within two weeks. He thought it very likely that they had sailed a day or two before … before …’ Her lower lip began to tremble.

Celia’s voice was very gentle, as she suggested, ‘So that it is possible that they will not receive his letter – or your letter to Edna?’

‘Yes, dear.’

‘That’s what he said to me. In any case, once they get word in Southampton, I am sure they will take the first train up here.’

‘Yes, dear.’

It was Celia’s turn to sigh. ‘I wish they were here. Paul would know what to do about everything.’ She felt like adding, ‘And he would know how to deal with Cousin Albert, so that at least we would know more exactly what our financial situation really is.’ She restrained herself, however, because she could see that her mother was crying silently to herself.

Louise’s tears had not gone unnoticed by Mr Fairbanks. It was clear that Albert had told him the reason for Louise’s coming to the cottage, because he said soothingly to her, as he rescued the puffing kettle and took it over to the table to fill the large earthenware teapot, ‘Don’t grieve, Ma’am. A good cup of tea’ll set you up.’

He stirred the pot briskly, put an ancient knitted tea cosy over it, and asked, ‘How much sugar, Ma’am?’

‘Two, please.’

‘And you, Miss Celia?’

‘The same, please.’ Really, he was being immensely kind, Celia thought, just like a grandfather would be. Both sets of her grandparents had died when she was small, and she had little recollection of them, except of veined wrinkled hands producing bonbons and popping them into her mouth, and being hugged and kissed. Her mother might not be getting much comfort from their encounter with Mr Fairbanks, but she herself was.

Before giving them their tea, Mr Fairbanks went back to his corner cupboard and produced a largish bottle.

‘Would you be liking a drop of rum in your tea, Ma’am? It might help you a bit, like …’

Louise glanced up at him. For a moment she was shocked out of her misery. ‘Oh, no, thank you. I couldn’t possibly!’ A gentlewoman drinking rum like a common sailor’s wife? Brandy, perhaps, but not rum!

Celia, however, saw the sense of his suggestion, and she said, ‘Have a tiny bit, Mother. It would give you strength. And we have yet to get to Birkenhead, to see Mr Billings – and then go home – it will take all your strength.’

Louise faltered. The remaining part of the afternoon stretched before her like a long staircase hard to climb, and she was so tired, so dreadfully tired.

Mr Fairbanks smiled at her encouragingly, ‘It won’t do you no harm, Ma’am.’

She was persuaded, and she did cheer up, though she drank her two cups of tea with her nose wrinkling up in distaste at the odour of the rum.

Eddie Fairbanks did not offer rum to Celia. As a single lady she shouldn’t be drinking anything but wine, and he didn’t have anything like that in the house.

Warmed and comforted and a little drunk, Louise relaxed enough to ask the old man if he knew what had happened to her childhood playmates, the Lytham family, who used to live in his house.

He did not know where the family was, he said. He knew only that the leasehold of both cottages had run out, and that the Lythams had not renewed theirs, but that Celia’s grandfather had come to an agreement with the earl to renew his for another hundred years. ‘Because the houses are very well built, and your granddad probably wanted to keep his in the family for holidays.’

It was obvious from Louise’s expression that she had no idea what was meant by leasehold, so Celia asked, ‘What exactly does that mean? I’ve always wondered.’

Mr Fairbanks picked up his cup of tea, and took a sip. ‘Well, you see, luv, nobody round these parts owns much land. Nearly all of it has belonged to the earl since time began. If you want to build on land round here – or farm it – you can persuade the earl to give you a long lease on it – these cottages had one for fifty years – and then you can build on it. However, at the end of the lease, you have to pay the earl to renew it; otherwise the land – and the buildings that you have built on it – revert to him, and he can rent them to somebody or pull them down.’ He put his cup down neatly in its saucer, and then added, ‘And what’s more, you’ll probably find that Mr Billings ‘as been paying a ground rent to his lordship’s agent each year on your behalf.’

Louise asked, ‘Can we sell the cottage, if we want to?’

‘Oh, yes, Ma’am, if someone is prepared to buy the lease from you. But you’d have difficulty getting a good price for it – they’re a bit isolated – it’s a fair walk to Meols railway station, and your cottage has bin proper neglected, if I may say so. And in winter the wind comes in from the sea something awful. The gentleman that came to look at it brought Mr Parry, the estate agent from Hoylake, along with him – and that’s what he said. Neither house is worth a great deal.’

Louise felt a little comforted. At least Albert had considered selling the cottage, before he had condemned her to it.

For her part, Celia swallowed hard. Pay an earl for the right to live in a house that belonged to you, but you probably could not sell? What other money problems that they knew nothing about lurked amid the present turmoil of their lives? What other financial demands could they expect? She felt faint with fear, unreasonable fear that Cousin Albert might have deserted them, leaving them penniless. He had made it clear that the price of their Liverpool home would be used as the foundation of their income, and certainly not to buy another house. Once he had sold it for them, would he be honest and hand over the money? Celia felt sick with apprehension.

Her mother must have had similar vague fears, because she said rather desperately to her daughter, ‘Perhaps we should go to see Mr Billings now, Celia.’ She rose carefully, to hand her cup to their host, and thank him quite sweetly for his hospitality. He was a mere working man – but he was male and he knew things that she did not. Like Celia, Louise began to view him as a possible pillar of support, like a good butler would have been, had she been fortunate enough to have one in her employ, instead of a giggling fool of a parlourmaid.

Chapter Four

Eddie Fairbanks insisted on walking with the ladies down the sandy lane to Meols Station, and waiting with them until the steam train chugged in. He recommended that, instead of changing to the electric train at Birkenhead Park Station, they should get a cab from that station to Mr Billings’ office. ‘Being as it’s getting late, and his office is nearer to Park than it is to Birkenhead Central.’

They took his advice, and were fortunate in catching small, rotund Mr Billings just as he was putting on his overcoat ready to go home.

As the ladies were ushered in, after being announced by his fourteen-year-old office boy, he resignedly took off his bowler hat again and hung it on the coat stand, then went to sit at his desk. As the women entered, he half rose in his chair and smiled politely at them.

The office boy sullenly pulled out chairs for the forlorn couple. Because of their late arrival, he would be late home and his mother would scold him. He returned to the outer office to sit on his high stool and depressedly contemplate the beckoning spring sunshine which lit the untidy builder’s yard outside.

Louise had retired behind her mourning veil, and Mr Billings eyed her with some trepidation: widows could be very tiresome, particularly a real lady like this Gilmore woman; they never understood what you told them. Since she showed no indication of an ability to speak, he turned his eyes upon her companion, a thin sickly-looking woman, dressed in mourning black. She must be the daughter. He smiled again.

‘Good afternoon, ladies. How can I help you?’ he inquired politely of Celia. Then, before Celia could respond, he added, ‘May I express my condolences at your sad loss. Very sad, indeed.’

There was a murmur of thanks from behind Louise’s veil, and Celia blinked back tears. They were not only tears because of the loss of her autocratic father, but tears for herself because she had little idea of how to deal with business matters – and Mr Billings represented a solid weight of them.

With what patience he could muster after a long, trying day, Mr Billings waited for one of them to speak, and, after a few moments, Celia nervously wetted her lips, and explained about the need to get the cottage at Meols into liveable shape.

While he considered this, Mr Billings brushed his moustache with one stout red finger and then twisted the waxed points at each end of it. He said slowly, ‘Oh, aye, it needs a bit of doing up if you’re going to live in it yourselves. It was rented for a good many years to a Miss Hornby after your auntie died; she was crippled and she never did aught about aught. When she died, Mr Gilmore saw no point in doing repairs on a place he didn’t use – and the rent wasn’t much. So I had the ground-floor windows boarded up – they being expensive to replace if they were broken by vandals. And that’s how it’s been for a couple of years now.’

He clasped his hands over his waistcoat and leaned back in his chair.

Celia told him about the broken bedroom window and asked if he could recommend a builder who could repair it quickly, and anything else that needed doing, like new floorboards in the hall bedroom.

He immediately wrote out on the back of one of his business cards the name and address of a Hoylake man, Ben Aspen, who, he assured Celia, was as honest as the day. ‘I’ll get my own man to put a new windowpane in for you tomorrow – I got a handyman I keep to do small repairs. Later on, you can tell Ben Aspen what else you want doing.’

She was greatly relieved and thanked him, as she carefully put the card into her handbag.

‘Don’t mention it, Miss,’ he replied, as he turned to her mother, to address the daunting veil. ‘Seeing as how you’re here, Ma’am, I’d like to speak to you about your property in Birkenhead.’

Louise sniffed back her tears and lifted her veil sufficiently to apply a black handkerchief to mop up under it. ‘Yes?’ she fluttered nervously.

She jumped as Mr Billings shouted to his young clerk, still fidgeting in the outer office, ‘George, bring the Gilmore file.’

Muttering maledictions under his breath, the youngster got down the file and brought it in and laid it in front of Mr Billings. When he was dismissed he bowed obsequiously to the ladies as he passed them.

They ignored him.

‘Now, let me see.’ Mr Billings rustled through an inordinate number of pieces of paper, while Celia watched anxiously.

‘Humph.’ He leaned back in his chair again, and addressed Louise. ‘Now, yesterday afternoon a Mr Albert Gilmore come in. Said he was your trustee – when he said it, I thought for a second that you was passed on as well as Mr Gilmore. Anyway, he says that I’m to send the cheque for your rents to him, like I always sent them to Mr Timothy Gilmore – prompt each quarter day.’

Celia drew in her breath sharply, and opened her mouth to protest, but, seeing her expression, Mr Billings continued, ‘Yes, Miss. That was my reaction, too. Them houses belong to you, Mrs Gilmore – according to my notes, they’re your dowry, and, therefore, they aren’t part of Mr Gilmore’s estate; and so I tell him – and he was really put out. But I said to him as it is one thing to send the rents to your hubby, Ma’am, for which I have had your written permission these many years – in fact, my father had it before me – but another to hand them over to a stranger I don’t know.’

He straightened up and looked at Louise, rightly proud of his personal rectitude.

Both Louise and Celia gasped at this information, and Celia felt sick, because it tended to confirm her poor opinion of Cousin Albert. It did not occur to her that Albert merely wanted to check that Mr Billings handed over the correct sum each month.

Louise was so shaken that she actually threw back her veil, to reveal a plump, blotched face, which might have still been pretty in happier circumstances. ‘But he has no right,’ she faltered.

‘Precisely, Ma’am.’

Mr Billings smiled knowingly at her. ‘But it so happened, Ma’am, that I was a trifle late making up me books this quarter and didn’t do your account till this morning. One tenant, Mrs Halloran, being late with her rent – she owed five shillings – I held back to give her a chance to get up to date before I reported to Mr Gilmore that she was in arrears. I read your sad news in the obituary column, Ma’am – and I’m proper sorry about it, Ma’am – so I held the cheque back until I heard from you. I’d have written to you in a few days, if you hadn’t come in.’

He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and brought out a key ring. Then, selecting a key, he got up and went to a small safe at the back of the room. He took out an envelope and handed it to Louise.

‘There you are, Ma’am. A cheque for three months’ rents in total. Mrs H. paid up, and there was no repairs this quarter – it’s less me commission, of course. All rents up to and including last Saturday, payable to you today, Lady Day, as per usual, Ma’am.’

Louise looked up at him with real gratitude. She was not sure how to cash a cheque, but she did know that it represented welcome money. In her cash box at home, she had a month’s housekeeping in five-pound notes, which Timothy had given her, as he usually did on the first of each month; beyond that she had no idea what she was supposed to do about money. Behind her expressions of woe a deeper fear of destitution had haunted her as well as Celia.

Her thanks were echoed by Celia, who hastily added that they would, as soon as the cottage was habitable, be leaving their home in West Derby, Liverpool – it was already up for sale – and that she or her mother would let him know, before the next quarter day, which would be Midsummer’s Day, exactly where he should send the next cheque.

He was a kindly man, and, as he gently clasped Louise’s hand when they took their departure, he felt some pity for her. Women were so helpless without menfolk – and there were so many of them bereaved by the war. They had the brains of chickens – and it appeared to him that these two already might have a fox in the coop.

He said impulsively, ‘If I can be of help, dear ladies, don’t hesitate to call on me.’

Though Louise only nodded acceptance of this offer, Celia, whose stomach had been clenched with fear ever since her father’s clerk had come running up the front steps with the terrible news of Timothy’s sudden death, felt herself relax a little. She longed to put her head on the little man’s stout shoulder and weep out her terror at being so alone. Instead, she held out her hand a little primly to have it shaken by him and apologised for keeping him late at his office.

Exactly how does one cash a cheque, she worried inwardly, and she wished passionately that Paul and Edna were in England to advise her.

Chapter Five

They were exhausted by the time they returned home, and were further alarmed by the notice hooked on to their front gate. It announced that This Desirable Property was For Sale. The estate agent, in response to Cousin Albert’s instructions that he wanted a quick sale, had not wasted any time.

Louise immediately broke into loud cries of distress, and it was with difficulty that Celia and Dorothy, the house-parlourmaid, got her into the sitting room. The pretty, formal room, ordinarily used for teas and at homes, still smelled faintly of hyacinths and lilies, despite having been carefully aired after the funeral, and Celia felt slightly sick from it.

While Dorothy fled upstairs to her mistress’s bedroom to get a fresh container of smelling salts, Celia laid Louise on the settee. She carefully removed her bonnet and put cushions under her head.

Then she kneeled down by her and curved her arm round her. ‘Try not to cry, Mother. Everything will be all right in the end. Please, Mother.’

Louise shrieked at her, ‘Nothing’s going to bring your father back – or my boys! Nothing! Nothing!’ She turned her back on Celia, and continued to wail loudly. ‘My boys! My boys!’

‘She’d be better in bed, Miss.’

Startled, Celia looked up. Winnie, the cook, had heard the impassioned cries, and had run up from her basement kitchen to see what was happening. Now, she leaned over the two women, her pasty face full of compassion.

‘This isn’t the right room to have her in, Miss. What with the Master having been laid out here, like.’

Celia herself, frightened by the faint odour of death, would have been thankful to run upstairs to her own bedroom, shut herself in and have a good cry. Instead, she rose heavily to her feet.

‘You’re quite right, Winnie. Will you help me get her upstairs?’

‘For sure, Miss.’ She turned towards a breathless Dorothy, who dumbly held out the smelling salts to her.

Winnie took the salts and said above the sound of Louise’s cries, ‘Now, our Dorothy, you go and fill a hot water bottle and put it in the Mistress’s bed. And put her nightgown on top of it to warm.’

Dorothy’s face looked almost rabbitlike as her nose quivered with apprehension. She turned to obey the instructions, but paused when the cook said sharply, ‘And you’d better put a fire up there. It’s chilly. You can take a shovelful of hot coals from me kitchen fire to get it started quick.’

The maid nodded, took a big breath as if she were about to run a marathon, and shot away down the stairs to fetch the hot water bottle and the coals.

As Celia and Winnie half carried Louise up the wide staircase with its newel post crowned by a finely carved hawk, the widow’s cries became heavy, heart-rending sobs.

‘She’ll feel better after this,’ Winnie assured Celia. ‘A good cry gets it out of you.’

Dorothy stood at the bottom of the staircase, hot water bottle under one arm, in her hands a big shovel full of glowing coals, and waited for the other women to reach the top. The shovel was heavy and she dreaded setting the stair carpet alight by dropping a burning coal on it.

Have a good cry? And what had she in her fancy house to cry about? Her old man had probably left her thousands, and not much love lost between them. And here she was howling her head off and the house up for sale, and never a word to her maids as to what was happening. Proper cruel, she was.

Would she turn Winnie and Ethel and herself off as soon as the house was sold? And, if not, where would they be going to live?

As her coals cooled, Dorothy’s temper grew. She plodded up the stairs after the other women, handed the hot water bottle to Winnie, and then skilfully built the bedroom fire, while Winnie and Celia partially undressed the sobbing Louise, removed her corsets and eased her huge Victorian nightgown over her head.

Behind the blank expression on Dorothy’s pinched, thin face, anger seethed. Winnie must ask the Mistress what was to happen to them. She must! If they had to find new situations, they should start now. Although there was a demand for good domestic help, the big mansions in the country were being closed down in favour of London apartments, and their domestic staffs dismissed; in consequence, a lot of competition faced a middle-aged house-parlourmaid like herself. And it was always difficult to find a considerate employer. She sighed. She had not felt that Timothy and Louise were particularly considerate, but she had become accustomed to them. Ethel, the maid-of-all-work, was young enough to try for a factory job, but she herself was in her forties – getting really old – and Winnie must be nearing fifty – it would be hard for her to get another job of any kind.

She took fresh lumps of coal from the fireside coal hod and laid them on top of those she had brought up. She ensured that they had caught and that the fire was beginning to blaze and then swept the hearth. Then she got slowly to her feet, and picked up the shovel.

As she contemplated her future, she began to feel sick. She berated herself that she had not saved some of the good wages she had earned in an ordnance factory during the war years. She had spent like a king until the factory closed down at the end of the war, and then she had come to work as a house-parlourmaid for the Gilmores, because domestic work was all she was skilled at.

She turned from the fireplace and paused to stare at the scene before her.

Seated on the side of the bed beside her mother, Celia held a small glass of brandy to Louise’s lips and encouraged her to sip it between sobs. Winnie had folded back the bedclothes ready for the sufferer to lie down.

Nice woman, Miss Celia – but that useless, you’d never believe it. No spirit. Never had any fun, the Master being so difficult to please, especially so, Winnie said, since he lost his son with that Lord Kitchener, and then Mr Tom in France, poor lad.

Her own father had been a bit of a cross, she remembered, and not past beating her if she did something he didn’t like – but when he had work, even if he was fair wore out by the end of the day, he could make the family laugh and they’d have a neighbour or two in and do some singing, with a drop of ale to drink by the fire. Old Gilmore had done nothing but complain, complain – and order you around as if you were muck.

She wondered if Celia’s sister, Edna, was like her. She had never seen her, but she had heard she was a real beauty, and at least, it seemed, she had had enough sense to get out from under her old man by getting married.

Winnie impatiently glanced back over her shoulder and said, ‘Get downstairs, Dot, and look to the soup for me. Give it a stir. I’ll be down in a minute.’

Dorothy nodded, and went sulkily down to the basement kitchen, carrying her shovel carefully so that she did not drop a bit of ash on the stair carpet, which, every morning, she had to brush, from cellar to attic.

Louise finally cried herself to sleep, and an exhausted Celia was persuaded by Winnie to put her feet up on the old chaise longue in the breakfast room at the back of the house, while the cook put together a dinner tray for her.

‘The Mistress didn’t tell me what to make for dinner, so I made this nice thick soup, but I’ve got some cold beef, if you feel like something more. And the bread come out of the oven only a couple of hours ago.’

Celia nodded wearily, and said that the soup sounded lovely. When it was brought to her, she drank it slowly while Winnie stood and watched her anxiously.

When Celia’s bowl was finally empty, Winnie removed it, and then hesitantly inquired if Celia could tell her what was going to happen to them all. ‘Seeing the For Sale sign was a proper shock, Miss,’ she explained. ‘And Dorothy and Ethel is all upset. They’re asking me what they should do.’

‘You should all start looking for new situations,’ Celia answered her frankly, though she did her best to hide her own sense of despair. ‘I know Mother will be glad to keep all of you on for a week or two, while we sort out the house, and decide what to take with us – we are going to live in a cottage in Meols, which Mother owns.’ She paused, and then said rather helplessly, ‘We have no choice but to sell this place quickly, Winnie. And we shan’t be able to afford servants.’ She looked up at the shocked elder woman. ‘I shall, personally, miss you terribly, Winnie, after all the years you’ve been with us, especially through the war.’

Winnie took a big breath, as she tried to control her own sense of panic. She inquired, ‘Things must be very bad, Miss?’

‘In a way they are, Winnie, though not as bad as they might be. Mother’s lucky that my Aunt Felicity left her this cottage by the sea.’ She sighed and fiddled with the fringe of the woollen shawl that Winnie had put across her legs to keep them warm. Then she said in explanation, ‘Father had heavy business debts. We can’t afford a servant – I’m hoping that we shall be able to have a daily cleaning woman – because I don’t think I shall be very good at keeping house!’

She smiled faintly at the stricken cook, who, despite her own sense of despair, noted that poor Miss Celia was taking it for granted that she would have to run the house – and she probably would have to. And she so small and sickly-looking.

‘How long do you think we’ve got, Miss?’

‘Well, I haven’t consulted Mother yet. Mr Albert Gilmore, who was here for the funeral, told us that the estate agent felt he would have no trouble selling this house. When it is sold, I suppose that we shall have to set a final date when we have to leave it – to suit the new owner. But we will have to let you go very soon.’ She looked up imploringly at her old friend, as if to ask forgiveness.

Winnie’s stout chest heaved, but she replied woodenly, ‘I understand, Miss.’

‘The other house has to have a few essential repairs done – and we have to get it cleaned – it’s filthy at present.’ She bit her lower lip, and then added quickly, ‘I think that Mother can pay you all for this week – and, I hope, for another week. Tomorrow I’ll talk to her, and we’ll try to make a timetable of some sort, to help you.’

‘It’s good of you to be so honest with me, Miss. Can I tell the others?’

‘Of course. There is so little time. You should all start looking for other situations immediately.’ She stopped to consider the appalling upheaval facing her, and then added heavily, ‘I’ll ask Mother to write references for you tomorrow – and if one of you wants to go for an interview on a day other than your half-day, will you arrange it as best you can between yourselves?’

‘We will, Miss. Thank you, Miss.’

Winnie bent and picked up the tray.

To Celia, her perceptions heightened by her own fears, the cook looked suddenly old as she turned slowly and went out of the room. She watched Winnie quietly close the door after her, and then she began to shake helplessly.

She clasped her arms tightly round her breast, and rolled herself over, so that her face was buried in the feather cushions which had propped her up. She began to sweat and her teeth chattered uncontrollably, as her fear of the scary world she was having to face and her sense of having betrayed an old friend overwhelmed her.

‘Oh, God,’ she whispered in desperation. ‘What’s going to happen to us? Heaven help us.’

She rolled again, to curl herself up in sheer terror into a tight foetal ball.

With what was left of her sanity she begged to die.

But she knew from experience of these attacks of panic that death did not oblige so easily. So in the unnatural silence of the home she was about to lose, she lay as still as she could, and prayed incoherently for release from the blind fear that engulfed her.

After a little while, her breathing became more normal, and she began to mutter very slowly, as she always did, ‘ “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.”’ She hoped that, if she could concentrate well enough to recite the psalm right through to the end and was comforted by King David’s immortal words, the seizure would ease.

It had always worked before when she was terrified, even when she was a child and had first realised that she was being brought up differently from her sister.

Because of her parents’ special interest in Edna’s well-being, she had always believed that their neglect of herself indicated that there must be something wrong with her. Had she some deficiency in her which they were hiding from her? Something weird which would one day spring out and send her mad – or, at least, make her a useless invalid, like a neighbour’s daughter who had been confined for years to a wheelchair by an attack of infantile paralysis?

This childhood dread, implanted by careless, selfish parents, had fed upon itself until, in her confused, early teenage years, it became an overwhelming terror, which periodically swept over her like some mighty wave whenever she felt threatened.

Frightened themselves by these seizures, her parents had firmly put them down to that popular female complaint, hysteria. It was the height of vulgarity, an effort to draw attention to herself, they said. They had slapped and beaten her at such times, then locked her in her bedroom, until she saw sense, as they put it.

The panic would eventually wear itself out, and, exhausted, she would drag herself out of her bed and knock on her bedroom door to plead tearfully to be let out. She invariably promised that it would not happen again, but, sooner or later, it invariably did.

Now, in adulthood, she had slowly realised that she was probably quite normal. But Church and custom reinforced her parents’ declaration that it was her duty as a good churchwoman and devoted daughter to care for them when they grew old. They had often made it clear to her that she was too stupid to be capable of doing anything else.

Sundry aged aunts and cousins at various times nodded their grey heads sadly over her and agreed that, since she was so plain and lacking in vivacity, she could not hope to marry. It was better she be the companion of her own dear mother than be faced with the horrors of having to earn a living at something dreadful, like being a companion-help in a strange household.

She had been devastated as it slowly dawned on her that she had simply been kept single and poorly educated for Timothy’s and Louise’s own convenience, not because they loved her and wanted to keep her by them. Her plaintive request during the war that, like many other women, she be allowed to nurse was met by a threat from Timothy to leave her penniless; nurses didn’t earn anything, he assured her. With two servants deserting the family in favour of working in ordnance factories, Timothy was not about to allow a useful daughter to desert as well. Such was the class distinction that it never once occurred to Celia that she could do precisely what the servants were doing – earn in a war factory.

Though hopelessly cowed by her parents, she carried under her subservience a terrible bitterness. This week it had been added to by the realisation that, at his death, her father had indeed left her nothing. She was now entirely dependent upon her mother’s whims.

Once she had understood that she was sane and not particularly unhealthy, she had not had a terror attack again. Like many other middle-class women, she sadly accepted that there was no escape from home. As a result of the war, marriage must now, in any case, be discounted – there were barely any men left for pretty girls to marry, never mind plain ones; they had died, like George and Tom, for the sake of their country; their names would be inscribed on one of the new war memorials going up all over a country which was already finding the wounded survivors an expensive nuisance.

‘You can’t marry a name on a war memorial,’ she had complained pitifully to her only woman friend, Phyllis Woodcock, whose husband had proved to be too delicate for call-up.

Phyllis, who was not very enamoured of the married state, muttered agreement. Like Celia, she had been warned in her youth that, for a single woman who left home, there was no way for her to earn a living except by being a governess or, if one was uneducated, face a fate worse than death by joining the crowds of ladies of the evening all over the city. These sinful hussies were there for even the most innocent, honest women to observe, and it was whispered that they died of horrifying diseases. Just what ladies of the evening did to come to such untimely ends, neither Celia nor Phyllis were quite certain, but both of them were sufficiently scared not to want to try it.

Once when he came home on leave, George had told her cheerfully that someone had to keep the home fires burning while the men were away, and this had been a small comfort. The walls of the West Derby house became to her at least some sort of defence against the unknown.

She bowed her head and, with her mother and a group of elderly females, rolled bandages and knitted socks and Balaclava helmets for the troops. Her mother did a lot of organising of sales of work and big balls at the Adelphi Hotel to raise money for the Red Cross, which, for Celia, meant endless writing of letters and running hither and yon on small errands for her mother. She became accustomed to the invisible walls of her prison and to being her mother’s obedient shadow.

Now, however, the sudden crumbling of the relative safety of her imprisoning walls had frightened her so much that panic had set in again; that open gates might lead to greater freedom for her to do something for herself did not occur to her; long-term prisoners do not always try to escape when the opportunity offers – and Celia was no exception.

‘“… and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”’

The muttering ceased, and she lay still. If she remained very quiet, she comforted herself, God would give her strength. He had to, because there was nobody but herself to look after Mother until Paul and Edna arrived to help her.

Chapter Six

Soon after six o’clock the next morning, young Ethel, sleepy and irritable, clumped into the breakfast room. She swung a heavy coal scuttle into the hearth and followed it with a clanking empty bucket in which to carry downstairs yesterday’s cold ashes from the fireplace. The room was dark, except for a faint glimmer of dawn through a crack between the heavy window curtains.

Suddenly awakened, a bewildered Celia sat up on the chaise longue.

At the sight of her, Ethel screamed and clutched her breast dramatically. ‘Oh, Miss! You give me a proper fright! Haven’t you been to bed?’

Celia swallowed, and pushed back her long tangled fair hair, from which all the hairpins seemed to be missing. She laughed weakly as she swung her feet to the floor. ‘No,’ she told the little fifteen-year-old. ‘I was so tired that I fell asleep here on the sofa.’

Rubbing her hands on her sackcloth apron, Ethel came over to stare at her. She thanked goodness that it was only Miss Celia there, not the Missus. She had not bothered to put on her morning mobcap to cover her own untidy locks, and the Missus would have been furious to see her without a cap.

‘Are you all right, Miss?’

‘Yes, thank you, Ethel. Would you light one of the gaslights? I think it will still be too dark to draw back the curtains.’

‘I were just about to do it, Miss, when I seen you.’ Ethel drew a box of matches out of her pocket, and went to the fireplace. After striking a match, she stood on tiptoe to turn on one of the gaslights above the mahogany mantelpiece.

There was a plop as the gas ignited and the room was flooded with clear white light. Dead match in hand, Ethel turned, for a moment, to stare at her young mistress, before beginning to clear out the ashes. In her opinion, Miss Celia was taking her father’s death proper hard and looked real ill with it.

She began to hurry her cleaning, so that she could return to the kitchen to gossip with Dorothy about it.

Celia sat on the edge of the chaise longue, absently poking around the cushions in search of some of her hairpins, while her eyes adjusted to the bright light.

As she rose unsteadily to her feet, she noticed the silver card plate from the hall lying on the table in the centre of the room. It held a number of visiting cards. Dorothy must have brought it in the previous evening, and it had lain neglected because of Louise’s collapse. Now Celia quickly sifted through the cards.

They indicated that the vicar’s wife and two of Louise’s women friends had called. In addition, there was a card left by her own friend, Phyllis Woodcock, who had been too far advanced in her fourth pregnancy to come to the funeral. She had scribbled a note to Celia on the back of her card to say that she would try to visit again tomorrow, after the midwife had been to check on her state of health.

Dear Phyllis! Childhood playmate and still her friend, despite her brood of awful children and her whining husband.

Tomorrow is today, thought Celia. God, I must hurry. See to poor Mother, talk some sense into her – about the maids, about the cottage, about what furniture we should take with us, what we should sell. How did one sell superfluous pieces of furniture? Go to Hoylake to see Ben Aspen, the builder recommended by Mr Billings – would he need money down or would he send a bill later on? Go to see Mr Carruthers, the bank manager, about what one did to cash the cheque from Mr Billings. Did Mother know how to cash a cheque?

After she had done all that, Celia remembered, there was the enormous task of writing letters of thanks for masses of flowers and in response to black-edged missives of condolence. Her father had been a well-known businessman and churchman, but, nevertheless, the interest engendered by his unexpected death had amazed Celia.

‘He must have known everyone in the city!’ Celia had exclaimed to her exhausted mother, who, on the day before the funeral, sat with that morning’s mail, still unopened, in her lap, while Dorothy added yet another floral tribute to the pile surrounding her father’s body in the sitting room, and Cousin Albert greeted the vicar and his wife at the door.

Louise responded wearily, ‘He did. We did a lot of entertaining.’

‘We did,’ Celia agreed, remembering the long and boring dinners, which involved so much work. She herself often helped Winnie and Dorothy on such occasions, by doing the complicated laying of the table and overseeing, from the kitchen, that the right dishes for each course were lined up, ready for Dorothy to carry upstairs. She herself rarely appeared at the parties.

Now, with her father safely in his grave and Cousin Albert back at his own home, she stood, for a moment, balancing herself against the table and looked shakily at the visiting cards. Through her tired mind rolled unusual words, like dowry, annuity, bankruptcy, land ownership. How could she deal coolly and calmly with visitors, when her tiny world was in such chaos?

Paul! Edna! Please, dears – please come soon, she prayed. She feared she might sink again into her panic of the previous night.

But Ethel was making a great dust as she cleared the ashes from the fireplace, and Dorothy was pushing the door open with her backside, as she carried in her box of brushes and dusters and her Bissell carpet sweeper. ‘Mornin’, Miss,’ she said mechanically, as she saw Celia.

To calm herself, Celia took in a big breath of dusty air and replied gravely, ‘Good morning, Dorothy.’

She went slowly out of the room and up the stairs. Her legs dragged, and she could not make herself hurry. Better leave Mother to sleep and then give her breakfast in bed, she considered. Before she wakes, I could make a list of things we must do, and, after breakfast, get her going on the more urgent ones – like seeing the bank manager.

Upstairs, she shivered as she stripped off her clothes still damp from the perspiration of the previous night. She hung up her black skirt to air, and left the rest in a pile on her undisturbed bed for Dorothy to take away to be washed.

Looking down at the smelly garments, she realised dully that she did not know how to wash clothes properly, and she wondered if they would be able to employ a washerwoman. Even during the war, when they had had to manage the house with only Winnie living in, they had been able to find women to do the washing and clean the house; they were usually army privates’ wives, living on very small army pay, who had children whom they did not want to leave alone for long. They had been thankful to come in by the day to earn an extra few shillings.

As she washed herself in the sink of the jewel of her mother’s house, the bathroom, which glittered with white porcelain and highly polished mahogany, she remembered the earth lavatory of the cottage. Such primitive sanitary arrangements meant that they must take with them the old-fashioned washstands with their attendant china basins, jugs, buckets and chamber pots; she recollected that three rooms in their present home were still equipped with these pieces of furniture. And there was a tin bath in the cellar – they would need that, with all the work that it implied – heating and carrying jugs of hot water upstairs to a bedroom, and afterwards bringing down the dirty water, not to speak of the dragging up and down of the bath itself, all chores that she herself would probably have to attend to.

While she brushed her hair and then tied it into a neat knot to be pinned at the back of her neck, she wondered resentfully whether, in addition to all the usual jobs her mother expected her to do, she was going to spend her whole future trying to deal with the domestic problems of the cottage.

Later, when she was dressed, the last button of a clean black blouse done up and a black bow tied under her chin, she paused to look at herself in the mirror, and made a wry face. She looked pinched and old. She was drained by the fears besetting her, acutely aware of her own ignorance. Even Ethel, struggling to make the fire go in the breakfast room, was not as helpless as she was. At least Ethel could make a fire and could probably cook a meal on it if she had to.

Why haven’t I learned to cook? she asked herself dully. Or even watched Mrs Walls, when she comes in on Mondays to do the washing? Or looked to see in what order Dorothy does the rooms, so that she doesn’t redistribute the dust? And as for making the cottage garden look decent, I don’t know how to begin.

The answer was clear to her. As a single, upper middle-class lady, she was not expected to know. Her job was to run after her mother, be her patient companion, carry her parcels, find her glasses, help her choose library books in the Argosy Library, make a fourth player at cards if no one else was available, write invitations and thank-you notes – and be careful always to be pleasant and never give offence to men, particularly to her father. And when her parents were gone, she would probably do the same for Edna – tolerated in her brother-in-law’s house, either because Edna had begged a roof for her or, on Paul’s part, from a faint sense of duty to a penniless woman.

‘I wish I were dead,’ she hissed tearfully at the reflection in the wardrobe mirror, and went down to the breakfast room to find a pencil and make a list.

Chapter Seven

While Dorothy and Ethel finished cleaning the breakfast room, Celia, list in hand, went down to the basement to talk to Winnie.

On seeing her young mistress, the cook hastily rose from eating her own breakfast at the kitchen table. With the corner of her white apron, she surreptitiously dabbed the corners of her mouth.

‘Don’t get up, Winnie. Finish your breakfast. I just thought I’d have a word with you, before Mother rings for her tray.’

Winnie sank slowly back into her chair and picked up her fork again. She looked cautiously at Celia, who had walked over to the kitchen dresser and taken down a cup and saucer. The girl looked as if she were on the point of collapse.

‘Would you be liking a cup of tea, Miss?’

Celia laid the cup and saucer down in front of the cook, and then pulled out another kitchen chair to sit down on. ‘Yes, please, if you can spare it from your pot.’

‘To be sure, Miss.’

While Celia slowly sipped a very strong cup of tea and Winnie finished up her egg and fried bread, both women basked in the warmth of the big fire in the kitchen range. Ethel had made it ready in anticipation of Winnie’s beginning the serious cooking of the day as soon as she had finished her own meal.

The heat was very comforting, and some of Celia’s jitteriness left her. ‘I was wondering, Winnie,’ she began, ‘if one of you could come out to the Meols cottage with me and help me clean it. I think it will take more than one day. Could two of you manage, here, to look after Mother? I think I may have to be quick about making arrangements, and we can’t move anything from this house until the other one is clean. Mr Billings, the agent, will be going out there today to make sure it is watertight.’

At the reminder of the impending demise of the household, poor Winnie’s breast heaved under her blue and white striped dress. Her response, however, showed no resentment. She said helpfully, ‘Oh, aye, Miss. Our Dorothy would be the best one to take – and you’d need to get the chimneys swept, no doubt.’ She paused and ran her tongue round her teeth, to rid them of bits of egg, while she considered the situation. ‘Anybody living nearby will put you on to a sweep, I’m sure. And you’d have to take brooms and brushes – and dusters and polish with you, wouldn’t you?’

In twenty minutes, Winnie had a cleaning campaign worked out. She inquired whether the water in the house was turned on.

Feeling a little ashamed at how low they had sunk, Celia admitted that there was only a pump that did not work and a well of uncertain cleanliness. She said hopefully, ‘I think Mr Fairbanks from next door would let us take water from his pump for a day or two. He’s very nice.’

‘Would he? That would be proper kind. A friendly neighbour’s worth a lot.’ Winnie heaved herself out of her chair and began to clear the table. ‘You’d better get a plumber to fix the pump, hadn’t you? You could ask him what to do about the well. He’ll know – and I’ll put together some lunch for you.’

Celia began to feel that her life was regaining some sense of order, and she looked gratefully at the cook. ‘You’re wonderful, Winnie,’ she said with feeling, as she took her empty teacup to the kitchen sink ready for Ethel when she came down to the basement kitchen to do the washing up.

At that moment, Dorothy, carrying her brooms, bucket, dustpan and brush, and carpet sweeper, pushed open the kitchen door. She was bent on snatching her breakfast before she had to serve Louise and Celia their meal. Winnie told her immediately that she would be spending the next day in Meols, cleaning Miss Celia’s new home.

Dorothy opened her mouth to protest, and then decided that it might be a bit of a change. She nodded assent, and said, ‘Yes, Miss,’ to Celia very primly, as if being whisked out to Meols was something that happened regularly to her. Then she hung up her dustpan and brush in a cupboard, and picked up the carpet sweeper again to take it outside to empty it into the dustbin. She unlocked the heavy back door and trotted into the brick-lined area outside.

As she opened the flaps of the carpet sweeper and shook out the dust, she could hear, very distantly, Ethel singing ‘The Roses of Picardy’, as she scrubbed the front steps, and she began to regret her agreement to go out to Meols. Out there, it would likely be scrubbing, scrubbing all the way, she considered sourly, as she clicked the sweeper shut. Why hadn’t she suggested that Miss should take Ethel instead?

Before leaving the kitchen, Celia turned and gave the cook a quick hug. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do without you,’ she said.

Winnie forced a smile, and wondered what she was going to do without the Gilmore family, whom she had served for over fifteen years. All through the war, I stayed with them, she considered dolefully, when I could have earned much more in a munitions factory – I was proper stupid. I could have saved something to help me now.

A bell in the corner of the kitchen rang, and she turned to see which one it was. ‘Your mam’s awake,’ she shouted after Celia, who was running up the kitchen stairs. ‘Will you tell me when she’s ready for her breakfast?’

‘I will.’

As Celia went up the second staircase to her mother’s bedroom, she smiled slightly. Things were already changing. Winnie would never have referred to her mother as ‘your mam’ if her father had been alive; and, at the sound of the bell, Dorothy would have had to climb the two staircases to inquire directly what it was that Madam required.

Considering her flood of tears the previous night, Louise managed a remarkably solid breakfast. Celia, who did not want any, sat on the bed beside her, patiently wondering how to discuss their problems with her without causing yet another collapse into tears.

Finally, Louise laid her empty cup down on its saucer, and sighed. ‘Put the tray on the side table for me, dear,’ she ordered.

Celia did as she was bidden, while Louise crossed her hands over her stomach and stared disconsolately out of the window at a fine March day. She took no notice when Celia pulled out of her skirt pocket the list she had made earlier.

‘Mother,’ she said tentatively, ‘because Cousin Albert thinks we may have to move quickly from here, I’ve made a rough list of what I think we must do at once.’

Her mother turned to look at her, her pale, slightly protruding blue eyes showing no sign of tears. There was, however, a total absence of expression in them, and Celia wondered if her mother was feeling the same sense of unreality that she was, as if she were a long way off from what was happening, that this wasn’t her life at all; she was merely watching a play.

‘Yes, dear?’ Louise’s voice was quite calm, though she sounded weary.

Celia gathered her wandering thoughts, and began by saying, ‘I thought we’d better see, first, how much money we have access to.’ She paused, feeling that it was vulgar to consider money when they had just been bereaved. But they had to live until the house was sold, so she added firmly, ‘I suppose that dear Papa gave you the housekeeping at the beginning of the month?’

Louise gave a sobbing sigh, and said, ‘Yes, dear. I hope I can make it last through the first week in April.’

‘Then there’s the cheque Mr Billings gave you yesterday. How do we get money for it? Do you know?’

‘Your dear father always paid it into my bank account, and when I wanted to pay for a special dress, or something, for either you or me – or gifts – personal things, I wrote a cheque. I’m sure Mr Carruthers would show us how to put Mr Billings’ cheque into my account.’

‘Is there anything in the account at present?’

‘I don’t think so, dear. Your dear father got me to write a cheque on it for him about three months ago. It was a loan.’

Celia felt an uncomfortable qualm in her stomach at this disclosure. She wondered what else her father might have done, which would further imperil their limited finances. She suggested that if Louise felt strong enough they should pay a call on the bank that afternoon, to which Louise agreed.

‘Did Papa have a solicitor for his affairs, Mama?’

‘Well, he had Mr Barnett, of course, who came to the funeral, dear. As far as I know, he did any legal work in connection with your father’s business. He’s supposed to be supervising the sale of this house, remember?’ Louise moved restlessly in her bed. ‘But Father didn’t use his services very much, because he was expensive. He even wrote his will himself; but Cousin Albert says that it is perfectly valid. He said it was witnessed by Andy McDougall and his chief clerk.’

Celia knew of old Mr McDougall. When he had attended the funeral, he had looked as ferocious as his reputation held him to be, and with him there had been another old gentleman, who could well have been his chief clerk. She recollected vaguely that he was a corn merchant and had a small office, similar to her father’s, in the same building. She had noticed Cousin Albert talking with them after the funeral, probably because, as Albert had told her, he needed, first, to satisfy himself of the authenticity of the witnesses’ signatures to the will.

‘Do we need a solicitor, Celia?’ The question held a hint of anxiety in it.

Celia chewed her lower lip. ‘I don’t really know, Mama,’ she confessed. ‘But this house belongs to you – and it’s a handsome house – it must be worth quite a lot.’ How could she say that she did not trust her father’s cousin very much – she had no real reason to feel like this, except that he was being very domineering and he had apparently tried to collect the rents which Mr Billings had refused to hand over to him.

She said slowly, ‘I think that you should have a legal man to make sure that you receive what is yours.’

Her mother gave a small shocked gasp, and Celia hastily added, ‘Well, laws are funny things, and it is difficult for us to know what we are signing – we can read it – but understanding is something different. Did you understand the papers that you signed for Mr Barnett and the estate agent the other day?’

Louise was frightened. ‘Not really; they both said they gave them permission to sell the house and for the agent to charge me a commission for doing it. Should I have had a solicitor of my own? Albert said I should sign – and he was once a solicitor himself.’ She looked helplessly up at Celia.

‘Try not to worry, Mama. The papers probably are all right.’ How could she say to her mother that it was Albert Gilmore himself about whom she felt doubtful? She finally replied carefully, ‘I know he was a solicitor. But he’s looking after the will – which is Father’s affair. You don’t have anybody. Perhaps there should be someone who is interested only in your affairs.’

‘Yes, dear. I see.’ Louise was trembling with apprehension as she began slowly to get out of bed. Her huge, lace-trimmed cotton nightgown caught in the bedclothes, and momentarily a fine pair of snow-white legs were exposed to the spring sunlight pouring through the windows.

She hastily hitched her gown more modestly round her, but not before Celia had the sudden realisation that, though her mother always appeared old to her and her face petulant, she was extremely well preserved, with a perfect skin and luxuriant hair.

She might marry again. And, if she did, where would I be? she asked herself fearfully.

She swallowed hard. She had enough to worry about without anything else.

She said carefully, as she moved out of Louise’s way, ‘Perhaps Mr Carruthers at the bank could recommend a solicitor to us. We could ask him.’

As Louise nodded agreement, they both heard the front door bell faintly tinkling in the kitchen.

‘I think that will be Phyllis. She left her card yesterday when we were out, and said she would come again today. There are some cards on the tray for you, too. Will you be all right, Mother, if I go down? We could walk round to the bank this afternoon. Phyllis won’t stay long.’

Louise was already on her way to the bathroom and in the distance they could hear Dorothy running across the hall to answer the front door. Over her shoulder, Louise agreed resignedly, and then said in a more normal voice, ‘Really, Phyllis should not be walking out in her condition.’

‘Times have changed, Mother. Ladies-in-waiting go about a lot more than they used to do.’

‘A true gentlewoman would not!’ The remark sounded so much more like her mother’s usual disapproval of Phyllis that Celia was quite relieved. Louise had disapproved of Phyllis ever since she had first appeared at the front door, when she was nine years old, to ask if Celia could come out to play hopscotch. In Louise’s opinion, the daughter of a carriage builder – a tradesman – was no companion for the granddaughter of a baronet and daughter of a prominent businessman in commerce. The girls had, however, clung to each other. Both were lonely and shy, great bookworms, and were over-protected – Phyllis because she was a precious only child and Celia because she was to be kept at home as a companion-help. Neither was allowed to mix very much with other children.

Celia let her mother cross the passage to the bathroom, and then ran lightly down the stairs, to be enveloped – as far as was possible – in her friend’s arms.

Chapter Eight

With a toddler clinging to her hand, Phyllis greeted her friend tenderly. ‘I’m so sad for you and for Mrs Gilmore. It must be terrible for you.’

‘Thank you, dear. How are you?’

The inquiry did not need a reply. Phyllis was her usual untidy self. Her hair below her wide-brimmed beige hat was threatening to fall down her back at any minute, and her face was drained of colour, except for black rings round her tired eyes. Her long black skirt, which had dog hairs on it, half-covered her swollen ankles. To disguise her pregnancy, she wore an out-of-fashion cheviot cape of her mother’s which barely met across her swollen stomach.

Phyllis simply grimaced in response to Celia’s mechanical inquiry, and then shrugged as if to convey that her well-being was of no consequence.

Celia went down on her knees to ask the toddler, ‘And how’s little Eric today?’

Eric turned away from her and buried his grubby, marmalade-smeared face in his mother’s skirt. Celia smiled and patted his flaxen head as she got up again.

‘Come into the breakfast room. There’s a good fire there. Dorothy hasn’t done the sitting room yet.’

Phyllis sighed with relief as she sank into Louise’s favourite chair. It was upholstered in faded green velveteen and was armless, which allowed space for the stout or pregnant to spread their skirts comfortably around them. She remarked with feeling, ‘I shall be thankful when my little burden arrives.’

‘It can’t be long now, can it?’ Celia asked. Though Phyllis had explained to her how dreadfully vulgar were the things a husband did to you which led to having a baby, Celia had never liked to inquire how long it took the baby to grow.

‘Any time now, the midwife thinks. This morning she advised that I should stay close to home.’ She shifted uneasily in her chair, and then went on, ‘You always get hours of warning, though, so I thought I should squeeze in a visit to you. You and Mrs Gilmore must be absolutely devastated.’

Celia nodded. She did not know how to explain what she was feeling, because after her little talk with Winnie in the basement kitchen she had sensed in herself a stirring of relief.

She had realised suddenly that she was not grieving for her father so much as she was upset at her own lack of competence in dealing with the disarray he had left behind him. He had been very hard to live with; and she had to admit that she had not, in the past week, missed his hectoring voice criticising some alleged fault in her behaviour.

To cover her confusion at Phyllis’s remark, she glanced round to check on little Eric.

She saw that he had discovered one of the household cats asleep on what had been Timothy Gilmore’s chair. He was nuzzling into the animal’s long black fur. It seemed to be tolerating him quite well, so she asked Phyllis if she was comfortable in the chair in which she was sitting. Having been assured ruefully that she was – as far as it was possible to be comfortable in her situation – Celia asked, ‘How many babies do you want to have, Phyllis?’

Phyllis laughed. She said cynically. ‘I don’t have any say in the matter. They simply come.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yes – and it makes you so tired afterwards and you want to cry a lot. And husbands don’t like that, of course.’ Phyllis winced under her breath and straightened her back.

Celia drew a stool towards the fire, so that she could sit close to her friend. ‘Perhaps, when Mr Woodcock progresses in his career, you will be able to have a nanny as well as your maid?’ she suggested. She leaned forward to tug at the bell pull hanging beside the fireplace, to call Dorothy and ask her to bring some coffee.

Phyllis slowly drew off her black gloves, as she replied, ‘I hope so.’

Long ago, she had, when Celia had asked her, told her frankly the basic facts of sexual intercourse and that it was a right of a man to demand it of his wife. Poor Phyllis had gone into her marriage totally ignorant of what it implied, and had been so shocked and her husband so clumsy that she had never enjoyed it. She endured it as best she could – and the babies came, and her husband grew ever more irritable and hard to live with. Neither she nor Celia, therefore, had any idea that intercourse could be pleasurable. It was popular to coo over babies and forget what went beforehand.

Celia did not know the details of Phyllis’s marriage, but she did understand that her friend was worn out and unhappy, and she had long since begun to think that marriage was not quite the happy state that girls were told it was.

If one had an income of one’s own, she had considered, it would be pleasanter to remain single – except that one could not have a baby, and she herself would love to have just one, like little Eric.

Phyllis returned to the reason for her visit. ‘How is Mrs Gilmore?’ she asked.

‘She seems more herself this morning, a little less exhausted.’

‘I was horrified to see the For Sale notice on your gate. Does Mrs Gilmore really want to move?’

Even to Phyllis, Celia did not feel able to talk of financial problems; it was not the thing. So she said abruptly that the house was far too big and that they were going to renovate a summer cottage that they owned, in Meols. ‘The sea air, you know – Mother thinks it will be good for both of us. My Aunt Felicity left the place to Mother. Father didn’t like it, so it has been let for a number of years. It’s vacant now.’

Phyllis’s dejected expression lifted a little. ‘How lovely to be able to live by the sea,’ she responded longingly.

‘You’ll have to bring the family to visit us, once we’re settled in,’ Celia replied with a sudden glint of enthusiasm. ‘Sea air would do you a world of good.’ She suddenly saw an advantage to living in Meols. She could really give some relief to Phyllis by inviting her out for the day, with the children.

A sullen Dorothy arrived in response to the bell, and Celia told her to bring a pot of coffee and some biscuits and a glass of milk for Eric.

Celia’s ring had interrupted an anxious conning by Winnie and Dorothy of the Situations Vacant column in The Lady, a magazine devoted to the interests of middle-class families, which included a constant search for competent, cheap domestics.

Back in the kitchen, while she assembled the tray, Winnie glumly closed the magazine. ‘All the best jobs is in the south. Nothin’ up in the north here at all. We’d better look in the evening paper when it comes.’

‘Oh, aye,’ Dorothy agreed, as she quickly measured coffee beans into the grinder and turned the handle vigorously. ‘I were thinking I might try for a waitress’s job. You get tips then.’

‘That’s all right if you’ve got a home to go to. If you haven’t, you’ve got to find a room somewhere – and that’ll cost you.’

‘I suppose.’ Dorothy whisked the ground coffee into a pot and poured boiling water over it from the kettle kept simmering on the hob. She stirred the coffee and clapped the lid on the pot. Then, as she paused to let the grounds settle, she asked, ‘Do you know where the Missus is? I want to do her bedroom.’

‘Lying in her nice warm bath, I’ll be bound – and no hot water left for washing the tiles in the hall. You take the tray up, and I’ll put the big kettle on the fire again.’

‘Ta ever so.’

As Dorothy moved a small side table closer to Celia and then set the tray down on it, she took a quick look at Phyllis’s face. Very close to her time, she reckoned knowingly, and this was confirmed by Phyllis’s face suddenly puckering up as the ache in her back became sharper.

If I were her, Dorothy thought, I wouldn’t be sitting here drinking coffee; I’d be on my way home, I would. It was not her business, however, so she withdrew discreetly, to descend again to the kitchen and share her thoughts with Winnie.

Chapter Nine

As Ethel clumped through the hall on her way to the kitchen to get a bucket of clean hot water with which to wash the tiles of the front hall, she heard a high shriek from the breakfast room, followed by the sound of someone bursting into tears. She paused uncertainly, wondering if the Missus and Miss Celia were having a row. Then she remembered that Mrs Woodcock had come on a visit while she had been wiping down the front railings and she wondered if the lady had, perhaps, fallen over the Old Fella’s footstool – and her expecting.

She put down her bucket, wiped her hands on her sackcloth apron and ran across to the breakfast-room door. Clearly through it, she heard Miss Celia’s agitated voice say, ‘You mean it’s coming?’

Mrs Woodcock replied tearfully, ‘Yes, dear. The water’s broken. Could you ask Mrs Gilmore to come – quickly? Please!’

In response to this urgent request, the bell in the kitchen jangled distantly. Ethel tentatively opened the door, to peep round it.

Mrs Woodcock was writhing and whimpering in the Mistress’s chair. She was gasping, ‘I’m so sorry, Celia. I’m so sorry.’

In order to remove her visitor’s wide-brimmed hat, Miss Celia was trying to take out Mrs Woodcock’s hatpins, which were pulling at the poor lady’s hair as she turned and twisted.

Thumb in mouth, Eric was staring at his mother. Then he let out a frightened yell and ran to her, to clutch at her skirt and try to climb on to her knee.

Dorothy came running through the green baize door at the back of the hall. She inquired of Ethel in a low voice, ‘What’s up?’ She crowded close to the little kitchen maid, her nose twitching nervously as she peered at the breakfast-room door.

Ethel stepped back from the door and turned to her eagerly. ‘I think Mrs Woodcock’s baby’s coming,’ she replied in an excited whisper. ‘Shall I run up and tell the Mistress?’

Dorothy paused for a moment, her hand on the brass doorknob.

‘Holy Mary! Are you sure?’

‘Sounds like it.’ Ethel pointed a thumb at the half-open door. They could both hear Phyllis’s frightened little gasps and Miss Celia’s ineffectual reassurances.

‘Oh, aye. Go and tell the Mistress – quick.’ Dorothy pushed the girl aside and, feeling a little scared, entered the room. She nearly tripped over a cat which shot out and across the hall.

Celia was bent over her friend. She looked up and exclaimed through white lips, ‘Oh, Dorothy! Thank goodness you’re here. Ask the Mistress to come down. Mrs Woodcock is in great distress.’

Eric, pushed away by his mother, was sitting on the hearth rug. At the sight of another strange woman, he began to shriek in good earnest.

Over his noisy protest, Dorothy replied calmly, ‘Ethel’s gone for her, Miss. Here, let me take the little boy.’ She bent down and swept the child up into her arms. ‘’Ere, now. You just be quiet – and your mam’ll be fine.’ She spun round and picked up a Marie biscuit from the coffee tray, then walked him over to the window. She pointed out a couple of pigeons roosting on the back wall and gave him the biscuit to eat. In thirty seconds, she had reduced his howls to small sobs.

She wiped away his tears with her apron and told him he was a good, brave little boy, and, in a minute or two, his Auntie Dorothy would take him down to see the tom cat in the kitchen.

Over her struggling friend’s head, Celia looked at Dorothy with amazement; she had never seen her before as anything but an automaton who cleaned rooms and waited at table, and said dully and mechanically, ‘Yes, Miss,’ or ‘No, Miss,’ in response to whatever was said to her.

Wrapped in a camelhair dressing gown, knitted slippers on her feet, Louise came running into the room, twisting her wet hair into a knot as she came. ‘That fool of a girl said …’ Then, as she saw the little tableau by the fireplace, she realised that the message Ethel had blurted out was true.

She had been feeling helpless and deserted as she lay crying in the cooling water of her bath. But when Ethel had knocked frantically at the bathroom door and poured out her message, she had instinctively responded to the call for help.

Now, faced with Phyllis’s obvious desperate need and the necessity of saving her fine old Turkish hearth rug from being ruined by having a baby born on it, she entirely forgot her grief.

She said calmly to Celia, ‘Find Ethel and send her for Dr Hollis.’

Celia fled.

Phyllis lifted a woebegone face, flushed with shame, to Louise. ‘I’m so sorry – oh – I’ve ruined your chair – the water’s broken.’ She gave another little moan. ‘I’m having a midwife, Mrs Fox from Green Lane – if I could get home, I could send for her.’

There was a tartness in Louise’s voice, as she responded, ‘I don’t have a carriage to send you home in, my dear. Timothy would never have a carriage – said they were more nuisance than help.’ As she spoke, she was pulling back the stool on which Celia had been seated, to clear a path to the door, so that they could move Phyllis upstairs.

‘To order a cab would take precious time,’ she went on. ‘I don’t think we should chance it. But don’t worry.’

The tearing, familiar ache which enclasped Phyllis’s waist eased for the moment and she protested quite coherently, ‘The pains don’t seem to be coming very fast yet. Surely I could reach home all right, couldn’t I?’

For reasons which Louise could not analyse herself, she was reluctant to let Phyllis go.

The sudden crisis had jolted her out of her own grief, diverted her mind. She was loath to face again a long day which, she knew, would otherwise become filled with problems which she did not know how to deal with. Childbirth was familiar – at least she knew from experience how to deal with that, she told herself.

With a sense of power and new-found energy, she said gently, ‘Don’t chance it, Phyllis. The baby might be damaged, if you gave birth in a cab. We’ll try to get you upstairs and on to a bed.’

With all her normal authority, she turned to Dorothy, who was jigging round and round to make the child in her arms laugh and was having some success with him. ‘Take the little boy down to the kitchen – Eric, is it? And ask Winnie to come up, please.’

Making a great game of Eric riding a horse, Dorothy galloped out of the room. Before Louise turned back to her stricken guest, she actually smiled briefly at such an amusing display from her parlourmaid.

Celia had already found Ethel in the kitchen, placidly emptying more hot water from the kettle into her bucket. She hastily instructed the young girl to take off her apron and run – run – for Dr Hollis. Then, a little breathlessly, she explained to a startled Winnie what was happening.

‘Well, I never!’ Winnie exclaimed with interest. She wiped her hands on the towel tucked into her waistband, and then stood with arms akimbo, as she considered the situation. ‘Do you think it’ll be born here?’

‘I don’t know, Winnie – I don’t know much about these things. Mrs Woodcock seems in great pain.’

‘Well, of course, you don’t know, Miss Celia. You being a single lady, like. I’ll put the kettle on in case.’ She seized her largest kettle and went to the sink to fill it.

‘Mrs Woodcock is all wet, Winnie – and the hearth rug and the chair are soaked.’

‘Oh, dear.’ The cook looked knowingly at her young mistress, as she hung the kettle on a hook over the roaring fire. She was about to say something more, when Dorothy clattered down the stairs, with a giggling Eric bumping on her shoulder.

‘Missus wants you – now. There’s a right to-do up there.’ She jerked her head towards the staircase. ‘And this young man wants to see Tommy Atkins, don’t you, pet?’

Tommy Atkins, long, thin and black, was curled up on Winnie’s rocking chair. At the sound of his name, he pricked up one ear and half opened a green eye, perhaps suspicious that he was about to be dumped in the cellars to deal with a mouse.

Winnie was already taking off her blue and white striped kitchen apron, to reveal a spotlessly white one underneath. She looked a little grim, as she said, ‘Oh, aye. Miss Celia just told me.’

Feeling that Eric was better left with Dorothy, who had obviously captivated him, she said to Celia, ‘If you don’t mind, Miss, you’d better come up as well. If we got to move Mrs Woodcock, like …’ She stumped up the stairs and Celia followed her, her thin white hands folded tightly against her stomach, as she tried to quell the panic within her. She dreaded to think what might be happening to Phyllis – and yet the situation held a morbid fascination for her. Could a baby really arrive like Phyllis had told her they did?

When they hurried into the breakfast room, Phyllis was still sitting in the ruined chair. To Celia’s relief, she did not appear to be in pain.

Louise was patting the pregnant woman’s shoulder comfortingly, as she said briskly to Winnie, ‘Celia will have told you of Mrs Woodcock’s condition. Do you have an old oilcloth tablecloth downstairs?’

To Celia’s surprise, Winnie did not seem particularly mystified by the question. ‘Er … Yes, Ma’am. There’s one on the table I keep the bread bin on. I could wipe it down for you.’

‘Good. Open up the spare room bed and lay it on the mattress. Then get some of the old sheets from the sewing room and put them over it – in a pad, if you understand what I mean. Tuck them in well.’

Winnie smiled widely, showing a gap where a front tooth was missing. ‘Yes, Ma’am. We’ll have Mrs Woodcock comfortable in no time.’

‘There’s one basin on the washstand – better get a couple of tin ones from the kitchen as well. And tell Ethel or Dorothy to make a fire in the bedroom – it’ll be too cold for a newborn baby.’

Showing a surprising turn of speed, Winnie went to do as she was told, while Phyllis wailed, ‘I’m putting you to so much trouble!’

‘No, no, my dear. You can’t help it.’ Louise sounded calmer than she had at any time since her husband’s demise, and Celia realised with astonishment that all the women were thrilled with what was happening, including the usually lethargic Ethel, who had not even stopped to take off her sackcloth apron before sprinting off to get the doctor.

With infuriating leisureliness, the doctor’s wife received Ethel’s breathless message, panted out in her dark hallway.

‘Doctor’s still doing his morning surgery,’ she told the little maid, and, as if to confirm her words, an elderly lady accompanied by a young girl came out of a back room, followed by the cheerful voice of Dr Hollis. ‘Now, remember, three times a day – and plenty of rest.’

The old lady smiled faintly, but did not respond, and Ethel and Mrs Hollis made space for her to get to the front door. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Formby,’ Mrs Hollis said courteously to the patient, as she closed the front door after her.

She turned back to a fidgeting Ethel. ‘Do you know how fast Mrs Woodcock’s pains are coming?’ she inquired, and before Ethel could reply, she continued, ‘I don’t think Mrs Woodcock is one of our patients, is she?’

Ethel was sharp enough to realise the inference of the last remark. It meant, who will pay the doctor’s fee? She liked Mrs Woodcock, who was always polite to her, so she answered stoutly, ‘I don’t know about the pains, Ma’am. But she’s a real friend of Miss Celia, and it were Mrs Gilmore herself what sent me here.’

‘I see.’ The reply appeared acceptable, because Mrs Hollis said she would ask the doctor to step round immediately surgery was over. In about an hour, he should be there.

‘Thank you, Ma’am.’

Full of excitement, her need to find another job completely forgotten, Ethel opened the doctor’s front door and sped down the steps.

Chapter Ten

Immediately upon her return, Ethel was entrusted with the job of taking Eric home. At first, Eric objected strongly to being taken from Dorothy and the comfortable security of the Gilmore basement kitchen. He remembered that his mother was upstairs and he shrieked that he wanted her. Fortunately, from the distant confines of the spare bedroom Phyllis could not hear him. If she thought about him at all, it was with the confident expectation that he would be properly cared for in her friend’s house, and would soon be delivered safely back to Lily.

Ethel carried with her a note from Louise to Lily, Phyllis’s cook-general, explaining what was happening, and asking her to feed the children their lunch and tea, and to make sure that Mr Woodcock’s dinner was ready for him when he came home from work. It was possible, Louise advised her, that Mrs Woodcock would not be home for a couple of days. She added that she would arrange for Mr Woodcock to be informed, at his office, of his wife’s predicament.

While Louise hastily scribbled a note to Arthur Woodcock, Phyllis sat on the edge of the wooden chair in the spare bedroom. Winnie helped to divest her of her sodden clothes and then slipped one of Celia’s huge cotton nightgowns over the young mother’s head.

‘Arthur’s going to be awfully cross,’ Phyllis whimpered to Celia. She gave a small shivering sigh, and then winced as a roll of pain commenced.

Startled, Celia looked up at her. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘It’s his baby, too!’ She had been inspecting the soft pad of old sheets Winnie had contrived in the middle of the bed, and now she shook out and spread over it another clean sheet and a light blanket to keep her friend warm. She was surprised at Phyllis’s remark; it contradicted all that she had learned from the many romances she had read. Didn’t men love their wives for producing their children?

Phyllis gritted her teeth and waited for a spasm to pass before she said hopelessly, ‘Oh, he’ll be cross about everything. For my being such an idiot as to get caught like this – and having to help Lily care for the other little ones. He always gets angry if his routine is upset, and Lily will have her work cut out with three children and the house to look after.’

Winnie interrupted the exchange, to get Phyllis into bed before the pain increased. She smiled benignly down. ‘Don’t you worry about your hubby, Ma’am. You just concentrate on the baby, and relax as much as you can between your pains. You’d be surprised how men can manage, if they have to.’

But Phyllis knew her husband too well to hope for anything other than constant complaints and weak bursts of sudden rage, and she closed her eyes to try to stop the tears rolling down her cheeks.

Celia gently folded the bedclothes over her friend, and bent to kiss her. When she saw that Phyllis was crying, she took her handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped the tears away. Then she hesitantly kissed her again. Though she was quite frightened at being so close to a birthing mother, she said cheerfully, ‘Winnie’s right. Mother will talk to Arthur, I’m sure. She’s just gone downstairs to write a note to him – Ethel will take it to his office – and she can write today to your mother, if you’ll give her the address, to ask her to come like she did for the other children. If we post a letter soon, she’ll get it by tomorrow afternoon’s post.’

Phyllis conjured up a small smile. Her mother would certainly come and would run the family like a general conducting a battle – and Arthur would hate her more than ever. And take it out on Phyllis the day her mother left.

Winnie had gone to look at the old clock on the mantelpiece to check the timing of the recurrence of Phyllis’s pangs of pain. As Louise bustled back into the room after dispatching Ethel, Winnie said to her, ‘The baby will be a while yet, Ma’am. Shall I make some tea? Miss Celia could sit with Mrs Woodcock while I do it; and you could get dressed before the doctor comes.’

Louise had forgotten her own bedraggled state. She glanced down at her dressing gown, and laughed. ‘Yes, indeed, I must, mustn’t I?’ She hastened off to her own bedroom, saying to Phyllis as she went that she would send Ethel to Arthur’s office as soon as she returned from delivering Eric to Lily.

The laugh surprised and pleased Celia. Though childbirth was not a normal thing to her, it obviously was to her mother; and a sense of normality was what they all needed. As Winnie pushed the bedroom chair towards her, so that she could sit by the patient, she took Phyllis’s hand and squeezed it.

‘Is there anything I need to do for Mrs Woodcock?’ she asked Winnie, hoping that she herself would not faint if the baby came while the other two women were out of the room.

‘If the pains are sharp, you just hold Mrs Woodcock to comfort her until they pass. If they start to come close together, pull the bell immediately and I’ll run up. But she’ll know, won’t you, Ma’am?’

Phyllis nodded. She knew only too well from experience, and, in her despair, she wondered how she could endure being racked by childbirth almost every year of her life.

As it happened, Celia was not left alone with Phyllis, because Dorothy came up with buckets of coal and wood chips and yesterday’s newspaper tucked under her arm, to make a fire to warm the room for the arrival of the new infant. She had reluctantly relinquished Eric to a buoyant Ethel, who was undeterred by Eric’s howls and flying little fists. She picked him up and held him firmly against her shoulder, as she ran down the front steps.

As Dorothy expertly built the fire, she realised that she was enjoying the unusual morning. ‘Young Eric went off quite happy with Ethel, Ma’am,’ she told Phyllis. She paused while she screwed up the newspaper and laid loose balls of it in the fire grate. ‘She comes from a family of thirteen, so she’s fine with children. Lovely little fella, he is,’ she added.

Phyllis nodded, and then gave a long, slow moan. God help me if I have to go through this thirteen times, she thought.

Celia leaned over and put an arm round her. Phyllis’s face was contorted; then, to Celia’s relief, she relaxed, and said in her usual soft tones, ‘Thank you, Dorothy, for managing him so well.’

‘It were nothin’, Ma’am.’ Dorothy was acquainted with Mrs Woodcock’s Lily and knew all about Arthur Woodcock’s relations with his wife. Both maids had lost sweethearts in France and had little hope of marrying. They were agreed, however, that it was better to be single than have a nit-picking husband like him. She picked up a pair of bellows lying in the hearth and blew the struggling fire until the coals had caught thoroughly.

As she tidied up the hearth, and with a polite bob towards the bed, went slowly down the stairs to the kitchen, her mood changed. If her Andy had survived the second battle of the Marne and come home last year, she could have been hoping for a baby now, even though she was middle-aged. Andy would have made a great dad, like the old man who was his dad, she thought wistfully. Pity they’d waited so long, though seven years’ engagement wasn’t that long. After all, you were supposed to save before you could marry. Not that she had saved when she had been working in the ordnance factory. Easy come, easy go.

As she washed the coal dust off her hands in the pannikin in the kitchen sink, she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at the memory of the good times she and Andy had had when he had come home on leave.

Forget it, she told herself. You could have been stranded now, with a young baby to bring up alone. It was going to be hard enough to find a new, decent place without a child. With one, she wouldn’t have a hope.

A bell on its spring near the kitchen ceiling rang suddenly.

She grinned wryly to herself as she dried her hands on the kitchen roller towel. Miss Celia getting into a panic, no doubt.

Winnie was busy pouring hot water into a big breakfast teapot. As she laid the pot on the tray she had prepared, she chuckled. A similar thought had occurred to her. As Dorothy quickly took off her enshrouding sacking apron which she used for rough work, the cook said, ‘It won’t hurt Miss Celia to see a birth – it’s probably the only chance she’ll get! And any woman ought to know what to do. Here, take the tray up to them.’

Dorothy’s small mouth quirked into a smile of agreement. ‘Oh, aye, if she does, she’s going to be proper shocked. She don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. I’d bet on it.’

Years later, after another war, looking back on that day, Celia had smiled. She had been terrified. But in a few hours, she had learned so much about women, she considered; that they could organise in a crisis, work through it together, be brave under suffering. And, further, that you did not know what friendship meant until you had faced crises together.

It changed for ever her ideas of what women could do, without men to tell them what incompetent fools they were. They had, of course, sent for the doctor – male – but, unlike her father, he had actually approved of their efforts on Phyllis’s behalf.

Chapter Eleven

Because she had no idea at what point in the proceedings the baby would arrive, Celia had rung the bell when a much sharper pang had struck Phyllis; instead of a moan, she had suddenly cried out.

By the time Dorothy had navigated two flights of stairs with the tea tray, Phyllis was more relaxed and was whispering an apology to Celia for being such a coward.

Dorothy put down the tray on the dressing table, and inquired if Madam would like a cup of tea.

Facing for the moment only an awful ache round her waist, Madam said with a sigh that she would, so Celia propped her up a little with an extra pillow and held the cup while she sipped. Dorothy filled another cup and set it down on the bedside table near Celia.

Since Phyllis did not seem threatened by another immediate spasm and Celia’s face was an unearthly white, the maid tried to reassure Celia by saying, ‘Don’t fret, Miss. You drink your tea, too. It’ll be a bit yet afore the baby comes. The pains come quick when baby is actually on its way. Winnie’s got the kettle on for when the doctor comes, and she’s going to make a bit of lunch for everyone.’

The reminder that the doctor would be coming was a comfort, and Celia felt a little better. In fact, Louise had only just finished her toilet, when he arrived.

While Celia and her mother retired to a corner of the room, he did a quick examination of his patient, then pulled down her nightgown and neatly replaced the sheet and blanket over her. He assured the struggling mother that the baby appeared to be positioned correctly and that he did not expect the delivery to be difficult.

Phyllis told him that she had arranged for Mrs Fox, the midwife, to help with the delivery, but that she had been caught unexpectedly in dear Mrs Gilmore’s house, and that Mrs Gilmore had sent for him.

‘Excellent. Excellent woman, Mrs Fox,’ he said, as he picked up his hat. ‘She has a telephone by which she can be reached – the chemist next door to her is very obliging in this respect. I’ll phone her as soon as I get back to the surgery.’ He patted Phyllis’s hand, and when Louise came forward, he told her, ‘I doubt if Mrs Woodcock will need my services, but I expect you have someone you could send for me, if Mrs Fox feels it necessary?’

All the women were reassured by the doctor’s visit, and, when warm, friendly Mrs Fox rolled quietly into the bedroom, her tiny slippered feet making no sound on the carpet, despite her vast bulk, Phyllis greeted her with pleasure before suddenly arching her back and emitting a sharp scream.

Shocked, Celia spilled some of Phyllis’s second cup of tea as she hastily put the cup down on the bedside table. She looked imploringly at Mrs Fox as she straightened herself up. Phyllis’s eyes were closed, and she was taking small, quivering breaths.

‘Don’t leave me, Seelee,’ Phyllis breathed and sought for Celia’s hand, which she clutched tightly. Only Celia understood how fretful and awkward Arthur was. She would understand how Phyllis was dreading going home to face his constant nagging, when she would be at her weakest after the ordeal of childbirth; the presence of Celia in his home had never deterred Arthur from humiliating his wife by picking at her whenever he was annoyed. Even if Celia did not understand the root causes of it, her friend had seen enough to understand her terrible underlying unhappiness.

At the use of her childhood nickname, Celia was almost moved to tears. She gulped and said, ‘Of course, I won’t, dear.’

Mrs Fox approached the bed and glanced down at Celia’s left hand. No wedding ring. No wonder the woman was looking as scared as a mouse before a cat. Probably hadn’t got the faintest idea of what was happening. She leaned forward and wiped the thin perspiration off Phyllis’s forehead and her closed eyelids. The lids were not crunched tight with pain, so she said, ‘That’s right, Ma’am. Rest yourself in betweens. I’m just going to take a look to see how things are. Just lift your knees up and apart a bit.’

As the bedclothes were lifted back and Phyllis’s nightgown flipped up, Celia politely turned her eyes away and concentrated them on Phyllis’s face. Phyllis opened her eyes and smiled wryly up at her, while the midwife probed and pressed with her hands, and then carefully sponged her with surgical spirit. The midwife said quietly to Louise, ‘Her time’s too close to give her an enema to empty her bowels.’

‘Stay with me!’ Phyllis begged her friend again. ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds. I’ll make an awful noise, but if you’ll hold on to me, it’ll feel easier.’

With her face as white as a newly donkey-stoned doorstep, Celia assured her that she would never leave her.

Louise intervened with a protest that it was not suitable for a single woman to remain in a birthing room. ‘My dear Phyllis, it simply isn’t the thing at all.’

Phyllis looked at her with wide uncomprehending eyes, and Louise turned to her daughter. ‘Celia, you must leave!’

Winnie, peering over Louise’s shoulder, her expression genuinely concerned, added, ‘You may faint, luv – and we’ll be too busy to deal with you.’

Celia cringed, and then as Phyllis’s grasp of her hand tightened, she found the courage to say coldly, ‘I shall be quite all right, Mother – Mrs Fox.’

Mrs Fox did not rise to the appeal in Celia’s voice. It did not matter to her who was present, as long as they kept out of her way.

Celia faltered, and then, as Phyllis groaned, she said quietly, ‘No. I want to be with Phyllis.’

Louise’s voice was frigid, as she said sharply, ‘Celia. You are being most disobedient. Please, leave the room.’

Outraged at being ordered about like a child, in front of a servant and the midwife, Celia said, ‘I won’t.’ She loosened her friend’s hand, turned her back on Louise and very carefully slipped her arm under Phyllis’s shoulders. Phyllis put an arm round Celia’s neck and clung to her.

Louise was red with anger; Celia had never defied her like this; she would not have dared, if her father had been alive. She took a step forward, as if she might pull her daughter away, and Mrs Fox, for the sake of her patient, put a restraining hand on her arm. ‘Let them be, Ma’am. Let them be, if it helps Mrs Woodcock.’

Breathing hard, Louise stared at the midwife. ‘It’s most improper,’ she protested.

‘It may be, Ma’am, but this is not the moment to argue. Will you be so kind as to step back, so that I can deal with Mrs Woodcock.’

Rebuked, Louise stepped back, and Winnie persuaded her into an easy chair by the fire. ‘Best to leave it, Ma’am,’ she advised.

‘It’s scandalous, Winnie!’

‘Nobody will know, Ma’am, if you don’t say nothin’.’

Sitting rigidly in the chair, Louise closed her eyes. Suddenly she turned her head into the curve of the chair’s padded back and began to cry softly into her black handkerchief.

Frightened to death by what she had done, nevertheless Celia stood by her promise. She would not shift. Phyllis became rapidly far too absorbed in her own struggle to take much notice of any argument. With Celia, she concentrated on Mrs Fox’s instructions, both of them shifting position as needed.

With a groan so deep that Celia had never heard anything like it before, a tiny, perfect person was finally expelled and the cord was cut and tied. And, to Celia’s astonishment, the baby immediately cried out.

Phyllis relaxed in Celia’s arms. Her smile was so triumphant that it was as if she had not gone through what was, to Celia, an appalling operation.

The baby was quickly bundled up in a warm towel, while water to wash it was poured into a bowl by a smiling Winnie, and Celia glanced down to see what was happening.

Phyllis’s legs were still spread. Mrs Fox had pushed sheets of newspaper under her buttocks and, with a tin bowl in her hands, seemed to be waiting. In fact, except for hearty yells from the baby, everyone was very quiet.