With a chuckle: “Yes, Mother. You are exactly one-hundred-percent right.”
“Here come Molly and Maggie. And Jane isn’t with them. So they are merely late. Hurry off now, or you’ll all be even later than you already are and have that demanding Miss Colthurst in a ridiculous dither.”
“Sometimes, Mother, you’re as awful as Mrs. Littlejohn the way you talk about people.”
Carrie bounced up from her seat and pecked her mother on the cheek. Mrs. Hale reciprocated. Then she pulled back and pointed. “There’s a smudge.”
“I’ll wear it as a beauty mark. Good-bye, Mother.”
“Good-bye, darling.”
Mrs. Hale watched her daughter dash across the front lawn to join her friends on their delayed morning march to Sister Lydia’s Tabernacle of the Sanctified Spirit. Maggie and Molly greeted Carrie’s mother with a wave. Mrs. Hale waved back.
As the three friends moved at a quick clip down the sidewalk, Molly apologized for their tardiness. “Maggie was late and then it got even later when I didn’t go down right away, because apparently this particular morning was one in which she just wasn’t coming up to get me.”
“Perhaps you don’t remember, Molly,” said Maggie, bridling, “that there was a snoring hobo blocking the stairs, and frankly, I didn’t care to wake him. You should have been on the lookout for me.”
“Can we please not hash this all out again?” said Molly. “It’s such a beautiful day. Why ruin it?”
“As it so happens, Molly, it’s already ruined.” Pause. Importantly: “And it was your father who did it.”
“Well, well, well! Now you’ve come out with it. And I should say it’s about time.”
Carrie looked puzzled. “Come out with what?”
Molly answered for both Maggie and herself. “My father has asked Maggie’s mother to marry him. Maggie is opposed.”
Carrie nodded contemplatively. “Well, Maggie, aren’t you generally opposed to pretty much everything?”
Maggie stopped in her tracks and seized her hips with both hands. “I may be crabby from time to time, Carrie, but at least I don’t go through life in an absolute drowse the way you do.”
Carrie glowered. Then she took a deep breath and announced, “I have just the thing to wake us all up. Do either of you have plans for Friday night? Well, of course you don’t. Now here it is…”
Chapter Four
London, England, October 1940
(from
Songs and Sirens,
by Daphne Rourke)
Jane, keeping one eye on the shop window, beheld her brother lying splayed out on the couch with the torn upholstery, which mouldered in a neglected corner of the showroom. It was the couch he was supposed to have slip-covered a month ago, but had not. A few hours earlier, Lyle Higgins had collapsed in a drunken stupor not upon his own bed in the back rooms, but upon this very piece of furniture, which was merchandise, which some future customer would sit upon and expect not to be assaulted by the stench of alcohol or old sick. Jane thought about waking him and sending him to the relative comfort of his bed, but why bother? No matter where he dormez-voused, he’d still fail to open the shop at nine. She didn’t know why he even pretended to have an interest in continuing to run the family business when it was all too obvious that all he really wanted to do was drink and play cards and sometimes carouse with members of the opposite sex, though it took a little effort on his part to be halfway charming to a lady and Jane knew he was averse to doing anything that required the expense of much effort. Why else had she spent all of the previous afternoon gathering up everything in the shop comprised of the least bit of aluminium for the scrap-metal campaign whilst he slumbered the day away like some hibernating creature in a cave?
Nobody wanted Lyle Higgins. Not any of the women — mostly tarts — whom he happened to meet. Not any of his mates, who weren’t so much mates as opportunistic spongers pretending to be mates. Not the British Expeditionary Force, whose recruitment office physician said he’d seen few candidates for enlistment with so compromised a liver.
And most certainly not Jane, who had grown weary, since their father’s death, of carrying Lyle on the family dole when he could not or would not support himself (let alone his unmarried sister). The two would most surely have lost the shop, which they’d inherited from their dad, were it not for the war effort and its need for dedicated labourers — both men and women — in the aeroplane works and Royal Ordnance factories.
No, Jane didn’t want Lyle in her life at all. Yet a part of her suspected he could not help being shiftless and by all appearances bereft of any redeeming qualities whatsoever, for there seemed to be something missing from his brain from the start, and how could this be his fault? This was the charitable view that came to Jane every now and then (when she was feeling a little generous). Most days, however, she wanted to take a few of the cartridges she’d packed with gunpowder from the factory in which she worked on the outskirts of London (with her friends Maggie, Carrie, Ruth, and Molly), load them into a compatible machine-gun magazine, and then deliver them ratta-tat-tat into her brother in a way that would swiftly and conveniently end his life. Then one of the biggest worries of her life would be removed, evaporating in an effervescence of twinkling Walt Disney fairy dust.
Jane had always wanted to be a schoolteacher, but even before her father died, there wasn’t money to pay for her education. She loved children and thought she might like to work as an evacuation officer for the London County Council, which relocated East Enders (and their large broods) to less dangerous parts of the country. But before she went into the offices to interview, she had a nightmare in which, during one of her assigned excursions outside of London, her brother fell asleep with a lit fag between his fingers and burnt himself to a crisp. She would have to keep a hand in the running of the shop (and in the running of Lyle) is what she would have to do, and as luck would have it, when the window slammed shut on a position with the Council, the door to factory work swung wide open. It was her friend Ruth who made the case that We Five should assert their independence in service to their country by helping to defeat Hitler, and they could do this by making bullets and bombs.
Lyle might still some day or night fall asleep with a lit Player’s cig in hand and burn himself to a crisp, but at least now Jane could preserve what was left of her family’s reputation by saying it was a German incendiary bomb what done it.
The phone bell rang.
“Yes?”
“Jane, it’s Carrie. I’m at the call box in front of the Boots.”
“What are you doing there? It’s six fifteen. We’ll never make the factory bus in time.”
“That’s why I rang you. You should go on. Go meet Ruth at the stage so at least the two of you can catch the six-thirty. The rest of us will have to go out on the seven-thirty.”
“But you’ll lose an hour’s pay!”
“It won’t be the end of the world.”
“What’s happened? Is anything the matter?”
“I’ll tell you everything when I see you in assembly. In short: Molly’s father. Maggie’s mother. A marriage proposal. Everything hunky-dory except for Maggie, who has suddenly decided she’d rather be dead than have another soak for a father.”
Jane shook her head. “Ain’t that a bugger! And with the way things are right now… She really shouldn’t say such things.”