A Wartime Wish

by Elizabeth Gill

Genres: Family Life; Sagas; Historical Romance

Synopsis

As war fades, they must rebuild their lives. From the bestselling author of Miss Appleby's Academy comes a gritty family saga, perfect for fans of Catherine King and Nadine Dorries.

Returning to his home town from the Great War, Allan Jamieson is hailed as a hero. But inside he is a changed man, so affected by his experiences at the Front that he withdraws from his wife Kaye and their young son. Allan soon resumes his civilian career as a respected barrister, and takes on the defence of a beautiful young woman accused of killing her war-wounded husband. Alienated from his wife, it is not long before Allan and the woman have become recklessly involved. As war casts its long shadow over everyone's lives, the townspeople must learn to start again.

Release date: March 3, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 179

Sample

Heath Houses Colliery, Durham City, 1917

Erin looked across the small dark front room at her friend. It was almost impossible to know what to say. A telegram was the thing you most dreaded. She and her mam and dad had had such a thing six months before when their John was killed and she didn’t think they would ever get over it. Her mam cried all the time and her dad just kept on going to work every day and nobody said anything.

Now Lilian’s husband had died and she had had a nice letter from the officer, Major Armstrong, saying how valuable Norman had been, how missed by his friends, how brave. It had been three weeks since and Erin felt she should have known enough to give Lilian some comfort. Only she didn’t. She couldn’t think what to say that wouldn’t sound daft.

It was Saturday. On Saturdays in her house, just two down along the row, her mam would be in the kitchen making egg and chips for tea, which she always did, face red from turning the chips in their frying pan over the fire and the smell was wonderful.

Here was no activity of any kind, no fire, no noise. The door to the kitchen was closed, so presumably Mrs Coulthard, Norman’s mam, was next door but you couldn’t hear anything.

Lilian had had a baby just three weeks ago so Norman had never seen his little girl. Lilian looked awful. She had the baby in her arms and it had been screaming for the last hour. Finally it quietened.

‘His mam says I’ve got to get out,’ Lilian said.

‘What does she mean? Where could you go?’

‘I don’t know.’

Mrs Coulthard did not like her daughter-in-law, it was known. She had called her ‘that mucky black bitch’ to several people, according to Erin’s mother. Erin’s mam was always saying that Mrs Coulthard was a low, nasty woman and that she couldn’t understand how their Norman had turned out such a canny lad but Erin knew that from the minute Norman had taken Lilian home his mam had treated her badly.

Lilian wasn’t black but she was coloured, she had brown skin and black hair and black eyes. In some places she might have been thought beautiful but Erin couldn’t imagine how her mam would have reacted if their John had come home with a coloured girl and announced he was marrying her.

Worse still that he had to because she was in the family way. Uncharitable people said Lilian had done it on purpose because it was the only road she could follow to get a man but Erin thought she must have been desperate indeed to want to come to such a cheerless place as this tiny pit village on the edge of the city.

‘You could come and work at the factory with me and his mam could mind the bairn,’ she suggested. Erin made uniforms at the clothing factory down by the river in the town.

‘I said that but she wouldn’t have it.’

Erin was about to suggest that Lilian and the baby should come and stay with them but she knew it wasn’t possible. Her mam wouldn’t let anybody into their John’s bedroom. She kept the door closed and went in and did not come out for hours at a time. Her bedroom was tiny so Lilian couldn’t stop there and her mam and dad slept downstairs. There was no room for anybody.

She wanted to be able to offer Lilian money but she tipped up her wages to her mother and had nothing. Not that her mam kept her short. Considering they were in the middle of a war they did very well. It was just that her mother wouldn’t think she needed to have money of her own. She certainly wouldn’t be keen on the idea of Erin giving it away. John was dead and Dad was getting old. She would say they had to hang on to every penny.

‘Do you not have any family?’ It was the first time she had said such a thing to Lilian since they had first met down the back lane five months ago when the baby was only just beginning to show. Lilian gave a grim laugh. Her white teeth flashed for a second before she recovered her composure. She shook her head.

‘Do you think I would have come here if I’d had somewhere else to go?’ she said.

‘Where do you come from?’

‘North Shields. I lived there with my mam until she died.’

‘And your dad?’

‘Didn’t know him.’

What she meant was that her dad was likely some foreign sailor or the sort and her mam had got mixed up with him and they were probably not married. The story got worse and worse, Erin decided, but that was what people said.

‘I wish I could help,’ she said.

Lilian looked surprised. And that, Erin thought later, was the worst part of the whole thing.

‘Oh, Erin, I didn’t expect you to,’ she said and she sounded so grateful.

When Erin went down the back lane and up her own yard she explained to her mother what had happened but all her mother said was, ‘She should never have got herself into that sort of predicament in the first place,’ and sniffed.

Why was it always the woman to blame? Erin wondered. She thought if such a thing had happened to their John her mother would have blamed the girl.

‘I’d like to help,’ she insisted. ‘She has no family, nowhere to go.’

‘Erin, you would believe anybody.’

‘She hasn’t,’ Erin said. ‘Can I give her some of my wage?’

She spent the entire evening trying to talk her mother into it so it was late and dark when she finally managed to prise a whole pound out of her mother. She ran down the back yard, clashing the gate, stumbled over a big stone and then up the yard of the Coulthard house. She hammered on the back door for a long time in the cold until finally she heard the bolts go back and the key turn. There stood Mrs Coulthard, pale eyes hostile.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

‘I want to see Lilian.’

‘Well, you can’t. She isn’t here any more,’ Mrs Coulthard said and closed the door.

Steffie Coulthard heard the girl run down the yard and only then did she let go of her breath. Norman was dead. Norman’s dad was dead and the girl was finally gone. She would have the peace, the silence. It was the only thing that was left. She tried to think of good times, of her mother calling her ‘Stephanie’, of her dad throwing her up to the ceiling and catching her when she came down but it was all too long ago. She could hardly remember the sound of their voices, could not envisage their faces.

She could not bear the shame which her son had brought her. Anybody would have done except that girl. She closed her eyes and listened. The fire crackled and in the back room she thought there was an inch of sherry left over from Christmas. She would have that. It would comfort her.

Allan Jamieson had spent all afternoon in the arboretum at his home, Hedleyhope House, where his godmother’s parents and their parents before them had planted hundreds of trees. It wasn’t that he wanted to be there, it was just that he didn’t want to be anywhere else. The day had not really grown light, the only brightness was the sleet. It was as though it couldn’t decide whether to turn to rain or to snow and fell wet and heavy into the thick January earth.

Oak leaves were brown upon the paths, and beechnut kernels. A squirrel ran up a sweet chestnut and there were variegated ivies everywhere. Further over was the monkey puzzle, so tall that you had to stand way back to see the top, and on the ground beneath it the cones lay long and thick like lambs’ tails.

He walked past the Himalayan birch trees with their smooth white bark, pieces of black showing through where the outside had been lost. The stone steps were narrow down to the grove where bamboo flourished eight feet high with tiny leaves. The noise of them was like a whisper in the cold wind, their green and white a relief in the gathering dusk, their stems bushy.

On the birch trees parasites called witches’ brooms seemed almost menacing with their tiny intricate twigs in a bundle and then as he walked back up towards the house lavender bloomed and rosemary in thick full green, and pansies, yellow, black, purple, violet, white, damson-coloured and pale cream with yellow middles.

He stood back slightly and thought how much he loved Hedleyhope House, which his godmother had left him when she died. It was red-brick, with bay windows on the ground and first floors, and little dormer windows in black and white above on the top storey, with its own woods which went on for several acres to the south side of the small city.

There were conservatories with cacti, tall and thin, and some big with round spiky leaves like frying pans, ponds with goldfish and brightly coloured other fish and more ponds outside and little wooden bridges. Long white grasses with big feathered tops to them swayed in the stiff wind.

The lights were on in the house now and the summer houses in the comers of the garden showed as nothing but shadow as he came back up the hill. Even then he lingered. Only when it was completely dark did he go around to the back of the house, take off his muddy shoes and venture into the main hall.

His wife, Kaye, must have heard him, because she came into the hall. Every time he saw Kaye – and they had been apart so much these past three years – he wondered at her beauty. She was pale, accentuating her startling blue eyes, her skin ivory against her neat black dress.

‘Wasn’t it awful?’ she said. She meant the funeral of her cousin Jake’s wife, Madeline.

The funeral had taken most of the day and even though Allan had known lots of soldiers in France who had died you never got used to it, he thought, it never ceased to be shocking and it never should and somehow it was the more shocking that Jake’s young wife had died in childbirth while he was not there. When a young woman died like that and her husband was away from home and the baby did not survive … What could be worse?

But it was worse somehow because Kaye had never liked Madeline. Kaye, he had thought lately, came from a class of women who wanted everybody to be like she was, she resented Madeline, even though on the surface Madeline was just like everybody else.

She disliked Madeline because she was clever instead of beautiful and yet had managed to marry one of the brightest men in the area. Madeline must therefore, it was reasoned, have employed some wiles which beautiful women did not, something which was not allowed. It upset the order of things. For most women their beauty was all they had. Madeline had somehow broken the rules.

Allan understood Kaye’s dilemma. Kaye’s parents had died when she was very young and she was always afraid everything would be taken away from her and she believed, though Allan had told her differently hundreds of times, that all she had was her beauty so for other women to win by other ways was somehow a cheat.

Madeline’s appeal had nothing whatsoever to do with conventional beauty though to him she had had the most wonderful grey eyes, it was the way that she laughed, the way that she understood immediately what you were saying to her, her enthusiasm for every scheme you had thought up in boyhood and other things, since they had known her all their lives. Madeline was part of it.

Now she was dead, put into the cold earth with her stillborn child and Kaye was awkward because you won so completely when the person you had disliked died. For years she and her aunt and their friends had said they had no idea why Jake should have married such a woman. Now he was horribly tragically free and Kaye was feeling guilty as well as sorrowful.

Allan followed his wife into the drawing room and she poured tea. Then she looked at him.

‘What are we to do?’

‘I thought I would go over later and take him out for a drink.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ Kaye said and then she began to cry, which she hadn’t that day.

‘Oh, don’t,’ he said.

‘Jake looked like the world was coming to an end.’

Kaye was fond of Jake, rather like Allan had been of Madeline except even more so since he was her cousin. She and her brother, Reginald, had been brought up by Jake’s mother and father, their mothers having been sisters.

The family had been so very proud of Jake’s exceptional abilities, expected him to marry well, instead of which he had come home with a plain stick of a person who taught primary-school children and came from the kind of background where her father was a clerk in an office and they lived in a very ordinary terraced house.

Worse still Madeline seemed not to notice either that she was socially beneath him or that Jake was considered the cream of the family. She treated him with irreverence, calling him ‘idiot face!’ when she was angry with him, not knowing or caring that other people were there. She was just as likely to kiss him in public and perhaps it was only in Allan’s mind that Madeline had held Jake’s head and told him how much she loved him on more than one occasion.

It was one of her most attractive traits, Allan thought, that she cared nothing for money or that Jake was a prosecuting barrister. They had set up home by the river in Durham, in a house which Allan had grown to love, full of books and Madeline’s magical presence. She would greet people at the door, make you feel like you were the only person in the world who mattered and pour tea, sit you by the fire, listen entranced to all you had to tell her and be funny.

She made you laugh. He had always been glad to be there, sorry to leave. During the past three years he and Jake had been in France and Madeline’s sunny side had suffered from their absence and her worry that Jake should be killed and then she was pregnant and everything was all right, only it wasn’t.

Recalled from France, Jake arrived to find his young wife dead. He had not even been able to say goodbye. Allan could not think of anything which would help now.

Jake heard his mother come into the room but he didn’t turn back from the big window which looked down the gardens from his parents’ house and over to the cathedral. From there it was ten minutes’ walk across Framwellgate Bridge, up Silver Street, through the Market Place and up Claypath bank to the house where he had left his wife those few short months ago. It felt like so much further now as though it had almost ceased to exist, the pretty house with the weeping willows when she had been pregnant with their first child and he had had to go away to war and leave her.

‘Would you – would you like some tea, darling?’

He was about to refuse but her voice was so tentative, so nervous, almost breaking. It seemed to him that it had been on the point of breaking all day but had not done so. He made himself turn around and smile. His mother was dark and pretty, even through the anxiety.

‘That would be lovely,’ he said.

She nodded and hurried out. Encouraged, his father, short, bearded, face grey with concern, ventured into the room, walking about by the fireplace. The mourners were gone and the house seemed strangely empty. The noise of their talk, however subdued, had kept the loneliness, the emptiness and the silence at bay. Now it was as though there was nothing between it and him. Jake took to staring down the garden again. He couldn’t bear his father’s kind blue eyes.

‘Do you have to go back tomorrow?’

Jake managed a smile.

‘It’s a war, you know, Dad. They don’t stop it just because I’m not there.’

‘Then they should be able to manage without you for a while longer.’

Jake didn’t like to say that he wanted to go, that he felt there was nothing left, that in France he might even sometimes be able to pretend to himself that Madeline was still waiting for him in Durham.

‘Is there anything you would like me to do?’ his father asked.

Jake shook his head.

‘I haven’t said much to you, Jake, but I am so very sorry. Madeline was a wonderful girl and we are devastated because of the loss of our grandchild. We will do everything we can to help you.’

It was not true, of course, they had never liked her, but it was safe to speak well of her because she was dead. Jake turned around.

‘Thank you. You always do,’ he said. He would be glad to back to war. There was nothing left here but his parents, so sad for him and they had each other. His mother came back with a tray, carrying it herself. They had help but he thought she did not want anybody intruding upon their grief, as though Milly or Mrs Gainsborough would have been intrusive.

They had both been there for years. Most of the other servants had got caught up in the war, as they had no doubt thought they should, as he had thought he should, the women into the munitions factories, the men in France, but the servants left in his parents’ house were too old for any of these things.

His mother set down the silver tray upon the low table by the fire and offered cake which he refused. He would have choked.

Then she said to him, ‘You must come back and live at home.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Where else would you go?’

‘You’ve had enough to cope with already.’

‘Stay with us,’ she urged him, ‘at least until the war is over.’

Jake was beginning to think it would never be over but he didn’t say this.

After tea what he really wanted to do was to go out and get very, very drunk but he couldn’t because he knew they would worry. He could not help being grateful when in the early evening Allan arrived and offered to go for a drink with him.

The weather had got worse. Jake was only glad for the inside of the pub. Here he could pretend that he was going back home to Madeline, that his last sight had not been her waving him away on the train four months earlier, that he would see her again, take her into his arms, feel her, speak to her.

‘How was Kaye?’ he asked.

Allan and Kaye had managed a row before he left. Funny how funerals made you turn on one another. People got drunk and shouted. People stayed sober and shouted. It was nothing to do with the funeral, of course, it was to do with Laurie going away to school.

‘We put his name down when he was a few months old,’ Kaye said, clearly not understanding at all.

‘Things were different then,’ Allan said and wanted to groan. Why did he have to explain this? Why didn’t Kaye know?

‘You went there and so did Jake and so did your father and …’ Allan didn’t say anything. ‘You agreed to this, Allan.’

Allan looked at her. She was glaring at him.

‘Everything’s chan. . .