I was listening to “The Brains Trust” after putting the rabbit stew on to simmer. Joad and Huxley were arguing about why you can tickle other people but not yourself, when Gloria popped her head around the door, Matthew right behind her. They were a bit early and Mother was still titivating herself in her bedroom.
Gloria’s golden hair, parted on the left, tumbled in long wreaths of sausage curls over her shoulders. She wore very little makeup, just a dab of face powder and a trace of lipstick. She was wearing a blue blouse with padded shoulders and puffed sleeves tucked into a simple black skirt with silver buttons down the side. I must admit that I was surprised at her restraint; I would have expected something far more garish from her. Even so, I felt dowdy in my plain old pinafore dress.
“Look what Gloria’s brought for us,” Matthew said, holding out a pint of milk and half a dozen eggs. I took them and thanked her. As soon as Mother saw the eggs, I knew, her eyes would light up. She would put them in water glass, the way she always did. Suspended in the clear jelly, they would last for months. Seeing them like that always made me uneasy; they looked sinister floating there in the transparent space, like wombs forever on the verge of giving birth, but never quite managing it, trapped there instead, frozen forever in stillborn becoming.
Sinister or not, though, the water glass meant we always had fresh eggs as well as the powdered stuff, which was only good for scrambling.
“Hello, Gwen,” Gloria said, “I should have known you’d be a ‘Brains Trust’ fan. Tell me, who’s your favorite? Joad or Campbell? Surely not Huxley?”
“Joad.”
“Why?”
“He’s the most intelligent, the best-read, the most eloquent.”
“Hmm. Probably,” said Gloria, sitting down on the sofa, carefully arranging her skirt as she crossed her legs. Matthew sat next to her looking like the proud new owner of… well, of something. “I like Campbell myself,” she said. “I think he’s far more entertaining.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you even listened to something like that,” I said, regretting my rudeness almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth. After all, this was the woman my beloved brother clearly adored.
Gloria just shrugged. “I’ve heard it once or twice.” Then her eyes lit up in that way they had. “But you’re right. If I had a wireless, I’d listen to nothing but music all day long.”
“You don’t have a wireless?” I couldn’t believe it. We might have been short of food, but surely everyone had a wireless?
“Mr. Kilnsey won’t have one in the house. He’s rather a strict sort of Methodist, you know. Thinks they’re the devil’s loudspeaker.”
I put my hand to my mouth and giggled, then blushed. “Oh dear. I am sorry.”
“It is rather funny, isn’t it? Anyway, I don’t mind that much. All I do is work and sleep there. It’s sad for Mrs. Kilnsey, though. I don’t think she’d mind a bit of music now and then to cheer her up, but, of course, if the wireless is the devil’s loudspeaker, then music is his voice at its most seductive.”
“Oh, good heavens,” said Matthew, shaking his head.
Gloria nudged him. “It’s true! He really talks like that.”
“I must go see to the food,” I said.
First I put the kettle on to make us all some tea, then I peeled a few potatoes and prepared the carrots and parsnips. If I say so myself, it was a good meal I put together that Sunday. Matthew had caught the rabbit in Rowan Woods on one of his weekend Home Guard exercises, and there was plenty of meat on it to feed the four of us. We also had some onions from the garden, and some rhubarb for a pie. Talk about Dig for Victory!
The kettle boiled. I made tea and carried it through, along with a plate of biscuits. With rationing, you had to be sparing, and the tea was a lot weaker than we were used to. With sugar rationed at only a pound a fortnight, and most of that in the rhubarb pie, the three of us had all stopped taking it. I didn’t know about Gloria, so I offered her some.
“I gave it up,” she said. “Actually, I’ve got a far better use for my sugar ration.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Yes.” She shook her curls. “If you mix it with warm water, you can use it as a setting lotion.”
That was something I had never thought about, my rather fine and mousy hair being short, in the pageboy style, at the time. “It must make your head feel terribly sticky,” I said.
She laughed. “Well, sometimes it’s hard to get my hat off, I can tell you. But that can be quite a blessing in the wind we get up at the farm some days.”
At that moment, Mother made her grand entrance. She walked slowly because of her arthritis and her stick tapped against the bare floorboards, so you could hear her coming long before you saw her. She was wearing one of her old flower-patterned frocks and had taken the trouble to curl her hair, though I doubt she had used sugar and warm water. Mother never wore makeup. She was a small, rather frail-looking figure, a little stooped, with a round, ruddy, pleasant face. It was a kind face, and she was a kind woman. Like me, though, she had a sharp way with words sometimes. Whatever the arthritis had done to the rest of her body, it hadn’t progressed as far as her tongue. I expected fireworks when she met Gloria for the first time, but then I had been wrong about a lot of things lately.
“What a lovely blouse, my dear,” Mother said after the introductions. “Did you make it yourself?”
I almost choked.
“Yes,” said Gloria. “I managed to scrounge a bit of parachute silk, then I dyed it. I’m glad you like it. I can make one for you, if you like. I’ve got a bit more put away up at the farm.”
Mother put her hand to her chest. “Good heavens, my dear, you don’t want to waste your time making fancy clothes for an old crippled woman like me. No, what I’ve got will do to see me out.” Typical Mother that, the world-weary tone, as if we might well “see her out” in the next few minutes.
“The Brains Trust” ended and a special about Jerome Kern came on. Gloria liked that better, all the songs she had heard in her beloved Hollywood musicals. She hummed along with “A Fine Romance,” “You Couldn’t Be Cuter” and “The Way You Look Tonight.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather when Mother and Gloria got talking about how they both loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time. It was time to serve tea and I was feeling really sick by then.
Jerome Kern finished and we turned the wireless off while we ate. “So, my dear,” said Mother when the stew was served, “tell us all about yourself.”
“There’s not much to tell, really,” Gloria said.
“Oh, come, come. Where are you from?”
“London.”
“Oh, you poor girl. What about your parents?”
“They were both killed in the bombing.”
“Oh dear, I’m so sorry.”
“A lot of people have died.”
“When was this?”
“Last year. September. I’m all alone now.”
“Nonsense, my dear,” said Mother. “You’ve got us.”
I almost choked on my rabbit. “It’s not as if we’re adopting her or anything, Mother,” I managed.
“Don’t be so rude, Gwen. It’s wartime, in case you hadn’t noticed. People have to pull together.”
“Anyway,” Matthew said, “Gloria’s away from all that now, aren’t you, darling?”
She looked at him with those big beautiful eyes of hers, adoration just dripping out of them like treacle. “Yes,” she said. “I am. And no matter what happens, I’m never going back.”