Where the Heart Is. Annie Groves

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СКАЧАТЬ husband had been unfaithful to her from the day they had married, and the truth was that she’d been glad to leave him behind in Liverpool.

      The trouble was that she hadn’t really thought through just how her knitting Wilhelm those socks might look. All she’d thought of was his poor cold feet in those thin Wellington boots he always wore. It hadn’t been until she mentioned after church on Sunday about knitting the socks, and Biddy Evans, who was related to old Mrs Evans and her daughter, Brenda, who ran the local post office, had given a little tinkling laugh and said so loudly that everyone around them must have heard her, ‘Knitting socks for a POW! Well, I never. You’ll have him thinking you’re sweet on him next,’ that Emily had realised just what kind of interpretation others, including Wilhelm himself, might put on her gift.

      Thankfully her kind neighbour Ivy Wilson had immediately said that Biddy was talking nonsense and that Emily was to be applauded for her charitable act, but of course the damage had been done by then and Emily had hardly dared look at anyone since when she went shopping, she felt so uncomfortable and self-conscious about what Biddy had said.

      She was glad that it was still winter and the days short. That way Tommy wasn’t going to start asking when he came in from school why Wilhelm hadn’t been round. Proper fond of Wilhelm, Tommy was. It did a boy good to have a decent hard-working man around, not like that feckless husband of hers. Not that he had approved of her taking Tommy in, not for one minute. But then it was her money they’d been living on and her house they’d been living in, and for the first time in her marriage Emily had stuck to her guns and told her husband that if it came to a choice between him and Tommy then she was choosing Tommy.

      Now that she had done exactly that she was happier than she had ever been in the whole of her life, or at least she had been until she had gone and made a fool of herself with those socks and frightened Wilhelm away.

      ‘What are you still doing here, Lena? Your shift finished half an hour ago. Gavin will have something to say to me, I’m sure, if he thinks I’m making his wife work longer than she should,’ Bella teased her billetee, before bending down to look into the pram where Lena’s nearly three-month-old baby daughter, Janette, named after Gavin’s mother, Janet, was smiling up at them both, her big brown eyes wide open, her soft dark curls escaping from under her white knitted bonnet, one fat little hand lying on top of the smart white coverlet embroidered with yellow daisies that had been made from an old dress of Bella’s.

      ‘And how is my precious, precious niece, the prettiest angel that ever was?’ Bella cooed at the baby, who immediately dimpled her a delighted smile.

      ‘Spoiled rotten by you and Gavin, and Gavin’s mum, and just about everyone else that she winds round her little finger, that’s how she is,’ Lena laughed, but it was plain that she adored her baby.

      Behind them the walls of the nursery, painted a bright sunny yellow by Lena’s husband, Gavin, gave the day room an air of warmth no matter what the weather was outside, the small tables and chairs spotlessly clean, just like the cots and small beds in the ‘sleeping room’ beyond the day room, where the children had their afternoon naps, in comfortable and safe surroundings, watched over by Bella’s carefully selected and trained nursery staff.

      ‘I was going,’ Lena continued, ‘but Mrs Lewis was late picking up her Cheryl, and so I hung on because I wanted to tell her about Cheryl being a bit off colour and not wanting her dinner.’

      Bella was very proud of the nursery in Wallasey, of which she was the manageress. All her girls were handpicked by Bella herself, but there was no doubt in Bella’s mind that Lena was the best of them all. Even so, she didn’t want Gavin thinking that she was taking advantage of Lena and expecting her to work longer than she should. Gavin and Lena were newly married, after all, and the last thing Bella wanted to do was to cause trouble between them.

      Lena loved Gavin, Bella knew that, but Lena also felt a strong sense of gratitude towards her. Such a strong sense of gratitude, in fact, that Bella felt she had to be especially careful never to do or say anything that would in any way hurt Lena.

      It had been totally out of character for her to take Lena under her wing, Bella would have been the first to admit. Before knowing Lena, she had been selfish and uncaring. But the war and the problems it had brought her, along with the responsibility she felt towards Lena, had changed her, and now Bella knew that she was a very different person from the Bella she had been in 1939 on the eve of her own marriage.

      That Bella seemed so alien to her now.

      It had taken betrayal by her husband, widowhood, falling in love with the wrong man, having to cope with her father’s desertion of her mother, and her brother’s abandonment of Lena, the girl he had so carelessly impregnated before marrying someone else, to change her into the Bella she was now: a Bella who truly knew the value of friendship and kindness and doing one’s bit for others and a Bella who had suffered the pain of forbidden love and the sacrifice that had entailed for the sake of others. A Bella who no longer felt the need constantly to scheme to make sure that she was considered the prettiest and most sought-after girl in the area, and a Bella who longed only to be the very best person she could be. The Bella who was truly worthy of the love of the man who could never be hers, but who she knew she would love for ever – Jan Polanski, the Polish Air Force pilot, whose mother and sister had been billeted with Bella at one time, and whose marriage to the daughter of a close family friend meant that no matter how much he and Bella loved one another, they could never be together.

      ‘Well, you must go now,’ Bella warned Lena, ‘otherwise there will be no dinner on the table for Gavin when he comes home from working on the river.’

      Gavin was a junior river boat pilot – one of the men who brought safely into dock the convoys of ships that crossed the Atlantic in such dangerous conditions to bring much-needed supplies into the country.

      ‘However, before you do go, there’s something I want to say to you. It’s about the house.’

      Immediately Lena gave Bella an anxious look. Lena and Gavin were now living with Bella in the house Bella’s father had given Bella and her husband when they had first married, and which now belonged to Bella. Guessing what Lena was thinking, Bella gave a quick shake of her head.

      ‘No, it isn’t anything for you to worry about. It’s my mother, Lena. I don’t have to tell you the situation.’

      Lena knew that Bella’s mother, Vi, who had been living on her own since, shockingly, her husband, Edwin, had left her to live with his secretary, had been very badly affected by her husband’s departure.

      ‘It’s ever such a shame that she’s taken your dad going off the way he did like she has, and I know how much it upsets you, her drinking like she does, and showing herself up in front of her neighbours. Oh …’ Lena paced her hand over her mouth and looked guilty. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Bella. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean to speak out of turn.’

      As though Janette had sensed her mother’s concern she gave a small cry. Bella smiled down at her whilst Lena rocked the pram soothingly.

      One of the things Bella insisted on was that no baby in her nursery was ever left to cry.

      ‘You could never do that, Lena. I don’t have any secrets from you,’ Bella assured her younger friend. ‘It’s true that Mummy is causing both herself and me embarrassment with her drinking, and it’s not good for her health either. Her doctor has told me that. When I called round the other day the cooker was left on. Lord knows what might have happened if I hadn’t decided to go and see her. That was the last straw really, Lena.’ Bella closed her eyes for a moment, remembering what a terrible fright СКАЧАТЬ