The Weston Girls Page 5

  “Was she? Pots of money, that one, I suppose she has to spend it somehow!” She frowned, remembering. “The Jenkinses? I remember Edward, wasn’t he a tennis player or something, Jack?”

  After a brief discussion, Gladys wrote the name on her list with a star beside it. The Jenkins family had been rather grand at one time, but perhaps they might consider an invitation to her party now they had come down in the world.

  Jack stood to leave and others followed suit but Arfon raised his hand and settled into the stance for speech-making.

  “There’s something I want to say while we’re all here together. I know your grandmother doesn’t want to talk about it, but our financial problems won’t magically go away. I want you to promise me that you will look after each other, support each other if the worst happens and we lose the business. Viv Lewis is doing a remarkable job.” He glared at Ryan and Islwyn as if daring them to disagree. “But we’re balancing precariously and it only needs a slight change in fortune and down we go. In an attempt to lessen that chance, I have to sell this house.”

  There were embarrassed murmurs and Gladys wiped away a tear.

  “This house is in the hands of the estate agent and he thinks it will be sold within the month as he already has two couples interested in buying it. Now, wherever we live, your mother and me, it will be the family home and I want you to make up your mind to that and not start weeping about losing anything. It’s a change of address, that’s all, something we should have done years ago if your mother hadn’t been so sentimental about this place, where she came as a bride.”

  “Pity you didn’t move to one of the houses near the park, Grandmother,” Joan said. “It would have been worth several hundred more.”

  “We’ve been happy here. I’ve never wanted to move to somewhere grander,” Gladys said firmly.

  The reason Gladys had never moved from the large old-fashioned house overlooking the docks was that here she stood out from her neighbours and was a person of importance. The local people looked up to her and it made her feel good. Up among the really wealthy, either around the beach or alongside the park she would have been struggling to keep up.

  “I wouldn’t mind living over the island, as long as it’s not too near the Pleasure Beach,” she mused. “Perhaps near the Jenkins. If it’s good enough for them, with all those houses clustered around them, we should be able to find something acceptable.”

  “A house in that area is out of the question, dear,” Arfon said, holding back increasing irritability. “Why won’t she face facts, just this once?” he muttered to Jack.

  “Something small of course,” Gladys went on. “But with a view across the sea.”

  The Island was not an island but a spit of land on which the popular Pleasure Beach was situated. Pendragon Island, the town was called, even though the place had been joined to the mainland for centuries.

  “Yes,” Gladys said. “I think a small house over the Island would be rather nice, don’t you, Arfon, dear?” She glared around at her family and added firmly, “We are considering moving simply because we are getting older and no longer need this large house, the court case is not the reason, I hope you will make that known.”

  Having to leave the house was distressing but she tried to hide it from the others. It wouldn’t help Arfon if she were to get weepy. Yet it was breaking her heart to think of moving. This house was the story of their marriage, filled with memories. Every room and every corner of the garden echoed with children’s laughter.

  It had seen her carried in as a bride, had seen their daughters born and watched them grow. The scars of their activities were clearly seen on the walls and the furniture; scratches on the woodwork from their tricycles, a worn part of the bedroom linoleum where the old rocking horse had taken them on rides of fantasy, the apple tree on which they had all scratched their shins.

  She gathered up the teacups and forced a smile. “Yes, Arfon, dear, I think we will start looking for a house over the Island. But—” she paused and looked slowly around the room, “—but what on earth will we do with all this furniture? Now if you two girls were courting, planning to be married, how convenient that would be. I could give each of you enough to make a start and we wouldn’t have to part with a thing.”

  * * *

  Islwyn didn’t join in the general conversation when Gladys left the room, pushing the trolley into the kitchen for Mair to deal with in the morning. He stood up and looked out of the window across at the docks which were barely visible in the darkness. Only lights on the ships and along the edges of the water gave outline to the scene. A mist had reduced some isolated lamps to pale lollypops. A ship’s hooter made a mournful sound. The view and the melancholy sounds matched his mood.

  A party! he thought irritably. How ridiculous. And how could they even think of inviting Viv Lewis, whose lack of loyalty had put them in this mess? He walked through the hallway and gathering his overcoat, stepped out into the dark night. He didn’t tell his wife he was leaving, or call goodnight to the rest. At the gate he stopped. Someone was coming and he didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even to exchange a polite greeting as they passed. For no particular reason he went around the house and into the garden where the apple tree stretched up like the ghostly hand of a giant, bare of leaves and lit by the glow from the house.

  Through the window he saw the family beginning to rise. The ‘royal audience’ was over, he thought sneeringly. Arfon handed out coats and, in pairs, the party left the room, pausing at the doorway to kiss Gladys. Childishly, Islwyn stood out of sight behind a straggly forsythia and listened to the snatches of conversation.

  “Poor Grandmother, she’s so brave but she doesn’t want to move.”

  “Perhaps they won’t,” Sally said. “Perhaps the house is advertised for sale but they won’t actually sell.”

  “They’ll have to,” he heard Jack said firmly. “There are still debts to pay and money is needed to build up the business again. The house will have to go so they can use what little they gain to help the business. It’s their only chance of keeping it, according to Grandfather and Viv.”

  “I hope Daddy will cope with it all, he looks so tired,” his mother sighed.

  The mutterings faded as the group reached the pavement and went their separate ways.

  “No one wondered where I went,” Islwyn muttered. “Persona non grata, that’s me.”

  He didn’t follow Sian, and their son Jack, instead he wandered around the lanes and roads until he found himself outside the Lewises’ house in Sophie Street. Two bicycles were in the front garden. One a woman’s, obviously Dora’s. The other must belong to Viv. He picked it up and rode it through the docks’ entrance and along the narrow road beside the still, dark water, where the huge bulk of ships occasionally darkened his route with their shadows. When he reached a disused dock, where experiments for the beginnings of the wartime Mulberry Harbour had been built, he pushed the bike into the water. The resulting splash wasn’t loud but very satisfying.

  * * *

  In their bedroom in Glebe Lane, Joan and Megan were discussing their family’s problems.

  “Perhaps we should get a job?” Megan suggested.

  “That’s ridiculous!” Joan retorted. “That would make Grandmother feel a real failure if we had to go out and earn a weekly wage.”

  “Things have changed, we aren’t the wealthy Weston Girls who shock with their fashions and lead with their ideas and extravagances. We probably won’t have an allowance for much longer. We have to do something, Joan.”

  “I’ve agreed to help Viv with the book-keeping, just for an hour or two on Saturdays, so I am helping, aren’t I?”

  “What can I do?”

  “Get married.”

  “Chance would be a fine thing! It’s ages since we were invited out.”

  “That’s what this party’s all about, isn’t it? We’re twenty-one, Grandmother and our mother were married and settled by our age. They’re making a desperate att
empt to create a marriage market, with us as the top offers!”

  “In that case, I’m not going!” Megan said firmly.

  Joan laughed. “Why not? If the Griffithses really do come it should be entertaining. There’s sure to be a fight!”

  “Poor Grandmother.” Megan began to read her current library book but looked up in surprise when she saw Joan taking her winter coat out of the wardrobe. “Joan? You aren’t going out?”

  “It’s only just after nine, you’ll cover for me won’t you? Go down and make two cups of cocoa and tell Mummy we’re having an early night. Please, Megan.”

  Hurrying through the darkness, she was afraid Viv would have given up and gone home and she needed to talk to him about the situation in the shop. Grandfather must be exaggerating. Things were never that bad. Viv would tell her the truth.

  Although the area was pitch black, she took a short cut through the empty space where Philips Street had once been and down Goldings Street. A sound split the silence and halted her, made her press herself against the side wall of the house she was passing. The house was one of three of which the middle one was occupied by Victoria Jones’s family, her grandmother’s ex-maid. It was from there that the sound came. The sound of a woman crying and wailing, eerie on the night air.

  Cautiously she stepped back onto the pavement and walked past the houses. The door of the middle one opened as she passed and a woman stepped out. Her clothes were torn and ragged, and her face looked like somebody’s nightmare. Joan felt the urge to run, and to add her screams to those of the woman who blocked her way.

  Then she heard a calm voice say, “It’s all right, Miss Fowler-Weston. It’s me, Victoria. My mother’s had an accident. Fell she did. I’m just taking her to the hospital.”

  “Victoria?” Joan said in disbelief. “This is your mother?” The woman, covering half her face with a white towel looked more like a grandmother. She was small, and very thin, and her face was dark, almost skull-like. “Do – do you need any help?” she asked.

  “No, the children will be safe enough, locked in till we come back.”

  “No, you stay with your brothers and sisters, I’ll go to the hospital with your mother.”

  Frightened without really knowing why, Joan walked with the small woman back up to the main road and, when Mrs Jones refused to take either a bus or a taxi, continued through the back streets to the hospital.

  Once in the light she realised the darkness of her face was due to bruises. Her eye was partly closed and her nose looked a little out of true. There was blood on her scalp too and, shaking with distress and shock, the woman looked weak and dreadfully ill.

  It was apparent she had been there before as the nurse who met them took her away at once, calling her by name and soothing her with comforting words. Joan sat there in the coldly tiled area wondering what to do.

  “We’ll be keeping her in this time,” the nurse explained later. “Because of the baby you see.”

  “Oh, I’d better go and tell her husband—”

  “I doubt you’ll see him for a while! But yes, I think you need to let Victoria know her mother’s safe. Friend are you?” She looked at Joan curiously, taking in the expensive coat and shoes and the leather handbag.

  “No, I just happened to be passing,” Joan said, disapproval on her face at the suggestion she could be associated with the woman she had brought there.

  Victoria didn’t invite her inside, but accepted the message through a crack in the door and thanked her formally and with some embarrassment. Walking away from the tragic little house, Joan began to think more seriously of her grandfather’s attempts to revive the family business. The prospect of being poor after the comfortable way they had lived was terrifying. Surely he didn’t want Grandmother to live in a house like that one?

  She went home, sobered with the thought that whether they wanted to or not, she and Megan might be forced into looking for work. “We have to do something. Earning our crust is better than ending up in a place like Goldings Street,” she told her sister when they were settled in their warm, comfortable beds.

  * * *

  Enforced jollification was how Jack described Gladys’s search for a new home. Each one of them in turn had to go with her to look at the few houses available in the area she had chosen, and each place seemed sadder and more derelict than the last.

  “It’s no use, Grandmother,” Jack said on his third trek, this time to look at a terraced house that had promised a fascinating view and ample room for a family. “The only view is of the house across the street and the family would have to be mice!”

  “We can at least look while we’re here,” Gladys insisted. “At least the knocker has been polished. That’s always a good sign, dear.”

  To their surprise a maid wearing a black skirt and a crisp white apron opened the door and invited them to wait in the drawing room.

  The owner was an elderly man and from his clothes he hadn’t been shopping since before the war. A heavy tweed suit that looked several sizes too large had once fitted him, Gladys guessed, and his shirt, although clean, was in need of a trim around the collar and cuffs. The brogues on his feet had been repaired just once too often and the leather patches on his elbows were out of place revealing tattered holes.

  Thick eyebrows sprouted like wings above sharply intelligent blue eyes. A stained moustache, together with the ash on his waistcoat, revealed him to be a pipe smoker. Wealthy once but now finding times hard, was her whispered assessment.

  The house was far larger than they had imagined, it was on a corner and actually spread wider than three of the houses nearby. Previously hidden from their view was a walled garden and there was a garage that had once been home to horses and a carriage.

  Jack nodded encouragement as they were shown room after room. Four bedrooms, three reception and a scullery that was nothing more than a barn but which would make a nice kitchen. Above the bedrooms was an attic bedroom with a view that made truth of the description they had been given.

  A brief conversation revealed that the man was Mr Jenkins, the grandfather of Edward Jenkins and his sister Margaret of Montague Court. Immediately, Gladys wanted it.

  Jack was reminded of Terry Jenkins again. “You must be Terry’s grandfather,” he said. “I knew him for a while in the army.”

  “Oh, yes, Terrence,” the old man muttered without exploring the connection further.

  Three days later, an offer had been made on the Westons’ present home. Gladys took Arfon and her twin daughters to see the one she and Jack had found.

  “Gladys, dear,” Arfon said when they had been shown around once more, “you don’t understand. This one is as expensive as our own. We have to move to somewhere cheaper and use what money we can save to pay my debts and develop the business.”

  “In that case we aren’t moving!”

  “But Gladys, we have to raise some money.”

  “We’ll manage. Ryan and Islwyn must help. We’ve helped them many times when they were getting started and plenty of times since. Now they must help us.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not arguing, Arfon, dear. I’m just not willing to reduce our standards. How will my girls find suitable husbands if we are reduced to living in some slum?”

  “Not a slum, but a small, inexpensive house.”

  “With small, inexpensive neighbours! No, we owe it to Joan and Megan to give them a chance of finding someone deserving of them.”

  Arfon tried every way to convince her but Gladys would not be budged. Her answer to anger, frustration, insults and downright pleading was always the same.

  “We are Westons, and we are staying put!”

  Gladys went on with her plans for the party amid continuing protestations that the money was needed for more important things.

  “Damn it all, Gladys, I daren’t even take a drink of whisky from my cupboard in case I can’t afford to replace it!”

  “We’re talking about my money, I’ve saved it
from the housekeeping for this occasion and I won’t let the goings on of Islwyn Fowler ruin my plans!”

  “My ‘goings on’ too dear,” he reminded her.

  Gladys blamed her son-in-law for cheating the family firm but her husband’s dishonesty was never mentioned. “Islwyn might be married to our daughter, Arfon, but he doesn’t run this family, we do.”

  “Do we? Then I say we have to sell up and we have to cancel this party!”

  “Pass me that writing pad, dear, I must confirm the Jenkinses on my list of invitations. That old man we met in the house you refused to buy for me, he’s a Jenkins. I think we can count that as an introduction and invite his grandchildren. I wonder about Jack’s friend Terrence? Is he married, d’you know? Perhaps he’ll be home for Christmas; those old families make much of togetherness on special occasions – as we do of course, dear. If I arrange this party as close to Christmas as I can, he might be home and able to come.” She tapped her cheek with her pencil, her eyes seeing into the future to a magnificent and glittering affair. “I wonder if I could call and ask his grandfather for his address?”

  Arfon opened his mouth time and again to complain, but he gave up and chuckled instead. Somehow they were going to get through this and it wouldn’t be crawling shame-faced in the dust, but head held high. He kissed Gladys and poured himself a large whisky.

  * * *

  In the disused area of the docks, a man was staggering along with a head full of aggression and a stomach full of ale. He stopped to pee in the water of the dock where the hollow containers floated rusted and forgotten. It had been intended to float them across the channel as part of the invasion plans but better designs had been developed and they had been left to rust away.

  The man looked at the odd shapes, remembering how it had been to sail with those first invaders to set foot on French soil. A brightness in the water below him caught his bleary eye and he bent down to investigate. It was a bike and a good one by the look of it. The stone-built edge of the dock sloped sharply but he crawled down and reached out for the handlebar.