Читать книгу: «Secrets in Store»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Author’s Note and Thanks

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Joanna Toye

About the Publisher

Chapter 1
January 1942

‘Reg! It’s Reg! He’s here!’

Lily couldn’t help herself. She’d been stationed at the window for the past two hours, as tense as a look-out in a south coast pillbox. Now she tore to the back door the second she saw the latch on the back gate start to quiver. The hinge didn’t even have time to squeak.

‘Mum! Jim!’ she hollered excitedly over her shoulder. ‘He’s home!’

Then she was flying out over the yard bricks, her feet skidding on the frosty surface. A few days ago, the whole country had been blanketed in snow, nearly five inches in their Midland town of Hinton, which had cast feverish doubt on Reg being able to get home at all. The snow had shrunk back now, leaving a scummy tidemark on the fringes of the yard, though it was still cold enough to make her eyes sting.

But Reg was here, finally, and guaranteed a warm welcome. His forty-eight-hour leave was in place of the family celebration they’d hoped to have at Christmas – insofar as anyone was celebrating Christmas in this third (the third, already!) winter of the war. If anyone had thought in 1939 that they’d still be fighting … Still, at least up till now it hadn’t been as cold as that dreadful first winter, or as nail-shredding as the second, at the height of the Blitz.

‘Lil! For goodness’ sake, get back inside! You’ve only got your slippers on!’

The first words from her brother, and he was telling her off! No change there, and Lily had to smile. But she wasn’t surprised: Reg, bless him, was the oldest in the family, and had always been the sensible one, the responsible one – he’d had to be, after their father had died.

Her other brother, Sid, would just have clocked the slippers’ red pompoms, called her Frou-Frou or Fifi – he was always messing about with names – and made some crack about her pinching them off a French sailor. The fact that the British Navy, in which Sid was serving, issued its men with a plain flat-topped cap was a matter of some grievance with him, even though Lily was sure he’d have felt a right cissy in a hat with a pompom on it.

But Sid was away down south at HMS Northney on Hayling Island, and much as they’d tried, he and Reg hadn’t been able to co-ordinate their leave to get home together. When she gave in to despair, which wasn’t often, Dora, their mum, sometimes wondered out loud when or if she’d ever have her three children under the same roof again. But it was no more than everyone else had to put up with, and as Dora was more likely to be heard to say in one of the many maxims she could produce to suit any occasion – ‘What can’t be cured must be endured.’

‘Come on inside, then!’ Lily hung on Reg’s arm. ‘We’ll get the kettle on.’

‘I wouldn’t say no.’ Poor Reg looked chilled through. His train must have been delayed – they mostly were, these days, if not actually cancelled – and he’d probably had to hang about on a freezing platform. ‘Where’s Mum?’

‘She’s upstairs, trying to keep herself busy and not watch the clock—’

‘No, I’m not. I’m here.’

And there was Dora Collins, expectant in the scullery doorway. She was in her best dress in honour of the homecoming, with a Jacqmar scarf at the neck, no less, her Christmas present from Lily. Ever since she’d started at Marlow’s, the town’s smartest department store, or so it liked to claim, Lily had promised herself that as soon as she could afford it, she’d buy her mum something nice. And when Marlow’s had given every junior a small bonus ‘in gratitude for your hard work throughout the year in these difficult times’, it had been earmarked straight away.

Lily had only joined the store the previous June. She hadn’t been expecting anything extra in her pay packet, so the few extra shillings had been a very welcome surprise. But Marlow’s was like that. It prided itself on looking after its employees, even though profits must be well down – for the simple reason that as the war ground on there was less and less to sell. Still, the buyers, like Miss Frobisher, Lily’s boss on Childrenswear, did the best they could, and the shop’s reputation meant that if anything did become available, from tea trays to tobacco, children’s coats to combinations, Marlow’s was one of the first places a supplier would contact.

Reg crossed the yard. Sid, again, would have bounded over and wrapped his mum in a hug, regardless of the rough, chilly wool of his tunic, but Reg, like Dora herself, was more reserved. He looked like her too, with soft brown hair, though his was now cropped short. Sid and Lily, on the other hand, had inherited their father’s mop of fair curls.

Reg kissed his mum on the cheek before she stood back to let him in.

‘Come in, love, out of the cold,’ she urged. ‘And let’s have a good look at you.’

Only that telltale ‘love’ told Lily, and Reg himself, how much their mum had missed him and how very pleased she really was that he was home.

In the scullery, Jim was lifting the kettle from the gas and wetting the tea: he was going to make someone a wonderful wife someday, Sid always joked. Jim wasn’t a member of the family, but as their lodger, he was starting to feel like one. He was another employee at Marlow’s, seventeen and already Second Sales on Furniture.

The arrangement suited them all. Widowed when Lily was still a baby, Dora had learnt to be tough and independent. But with both her sons away, she felt happier and safer with a man about the house – and Jim wasn’t only useful for the odd pot of tea. There was no doubt that the two raised beds in the yard were going to be a lot more productive this year under his watchful eye. Not only that, he’d even built them a henhouse. They now had fresh eggs – gold dust, nectar and ambrosia all at once – and useful as currency for bartering as more and more things went on the ration or disappeared altogether.

Jim held out his hand to Reg. They’d met once before, in the autumn, when Reg had been passing through on his way to yet another training camp.

‘How’s things?’ Jim asked. ‘Fair journey?’

‘Oh, you know.’

It was yet another way in which Reg and Sid were polar opposites. Where Reg was circumspect, Sid would have treated them to a minute breakdown, complete with music hall impressions of grumpy guards and a star rating for the station tea bar.

‘Well, the tea won’t be long.’

Reg slung his haversack down on a chair.

‘I’ve been saving some of my rations, Mum. And there’s a bit of stuff from the NAAFI.’

He unbuckled the straps and took out a couple of lumpy parcels.

‘Jam … chocolate … a bit of ham.’

Lily’s mouth watered, but Dora wasn’t letting Reg get away with that.

‘Reg! You shouldn’t have! No wonder you’ve lost weight!’

Weight loss was a crime on a par with sedition in Dora’s eyes. Though the Army got first dibs when it came to rations, which was partly why ordinary households were having to cut back, she was naturally convinced that her boy wasn’t being fed as well as she could have fed him if he’d been at home.

Reg gave one of his rare smiles.

‘I haven’t lost weight, Mum, far from it. I’ve toned up, put on muscle, that’s all.’

Dora sniffed disbelievingly.

‘Irish stew for dinner,’ was all she said. ‘I’d better have a look at it.’

She opened the door of the Belling and concentrated on extracting the promising-smelling pot of stew while Lily and Jim discreetly stowed Reg’s offerings in the pantry.

‘Thank you,’ Lily mouthed.

Reg grinned and gave her a thumbs-up.

Lily might not be as close to Reg as she was to Sid, but jam, ham, chocolate or not, she realised just how pleased she was to see him too.

‘All right, Mum, you win, hands down,’ Reg conceded as he laid down his knife and fork. ‘There might be plenty of it, Army food, but it’s not a patch on your cooking.’

‘Oh, get away with you! You’d eat horse manure if it was wrapped up in pretty paper!’

Lily bit back a smile. Their mum was no more capable of accepting a compliment than Lily had been of not shrieking her head off when she’d sensed Reg was at the gate.

‘There’s no more where that came from, you know!’ Dora added, in case she hadn’t dismissed the praise quite emphatically enough.

‘I couldn’t eat it anyway!’ Reg protested. ‘I’m stuffed!’

Dora’s eyebrows shot up.

‘That’s all they’ve taught you in the Army, is it, that sort of talk?’

Lily saw Jim and Reg exchange knowing, ‘man of the world’ looks.

‘I should think that’s the least of it, Mrs Collins.’ Jim gave one of his wry, twisty smiles. ‘Right, Reg?’

‘You don’t know the half of it! But don’t worry, Mum, I won’t be using any language while I’m home. Especially not now Lily’s gone all posh on us, working at Marlow’s. I didn’t see you crook your little finger drinking your tea, though, Lil. Tut, tut!’

Lily flapped her hand at him and Reg ducked out of the way, laughing. He was relaxing now; they all were, with the warmth of some food inside them and the fire nicely banked up.

‘So tell me, what’s new at the swankiest store in town? What’s the best-dressed baby wearing this winter, Lil? Had a run on cut-glass decanters for the folk with cut-glass accents, have you, Jim?’

This time Lily and Jim were the ones to exchange looks. So much had happened in Lily’s first few months at Marlow’s that the last few, apart from the flurry before Christmas and the January sales, had seemed quite tame in comparison.

She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could begin, they heard the latch on the back gate click, followed by footsteps across the yard and then by someone opening the back door itself.

Lily’s heart leapt. Surely not! It couldn’t be, could it? Not Sid? Though it would be just like him to take them all by surprise. And who else could it be, turning up right in the middle of Sunday dinner?

‘Only me!’ trilled a voice approaching though the scullery.

Of course! Beryl! That’s who.

Shy, tactful, reserved – not words you could ever use to describe Beryl. But what could she possibly want this time?

Chapter 2

As it turned out, on this occasion simply a free meal – or at least a pudding.

‘How does she do it?’ Lily demanded as she and Jim washed up. ‘She must be able to smell Mum’s cooking from right the other side of town!’

‘I know. The War Office should use her as a sniffer dog. Perhaps she could do the same with explosives.’

‘I always think that’s so hard on the poor things,’ fretted Lily. ‘Imagine being a little puppy, thinking life was all chasing your tail and gambolling about with your brothers and sisters, then going to some nice family as a pet – instead you’re crawling about on a battlefield or a bombsite.’

‘On the other hand you might grow up to be a rescue dog,’ offered Jim. ‘That’d give you a nice warm glow, finding people alive in the rubble.’

‘True,’ Lily conceded. ‘They ought to give them medals … but we’re getting away from Beryl! Inviting herself in like that and taking the bread out of our mouths!’

‘The rice pudding, you mean,’ lamented Jim. He’d been looking forward to seconds. ‘Not to mention the—’

‘Exactly! Mum even gave her the skin. The best bit!’

Lily finished his sentence for him: she often found they were thinking the same thing at the same time. It was one of the things which made Jim so easy to get along with, and they did get on, most of the time – except when he was teasing her about her attempts at knitting, or her deficiencies with the weeding, or when he used a long word she didn’t understand – he’d been able to stay on at school to take his School Certificate, lucky thing. Lily usually gave as good as she got, though – she’d had enough practice with her brothers. But this time she knew she and Jim were in total agreement.

‘Not a scrap left for you or me – or the hens!’ she grumbled.

‘Oh well. To be fair, she is eating for two.’

Jim shook the washing-up water from his hands and wiped them on his trousers: woe betide anyone who needlessly ’wore out’ Dora’s towels. She’d sworn by that thrifty dictum for years, and tea towels too, and since the latest Government advice had instructed people to leave crockery to drain to avoid that very thing, she could congratulate herself on having been right all along. When the handy tip had been broadcast on the wireless, she’d permitted herself a smile that could almost have been described as smug. Lily had only dried off the cutlery and the saucepans – being in the kitchen was more about letting off steam over Beryl than being much practical use.

‘We’d better go back through,’ she said reluctantly. ‘It’s not fair to inflict Beryl on poor Reg.’

When they did, though, Beryl seemed well ensconced. Dora was knitting yet another balaclava – her hands were never idle – and Beryl, whose were, and were folded over her pregnant stomach, was holding forth to a glazed-looking Reg.

‘I wonder if you and my Les’ll ever meet up?’ she mused, raising a hand to twirl a strand of her shoulder-length blonde hair with a painted fingernail. Beryl might have been getting on for the size of a tank, but she was a glamorous tank, camouflaged with powder and peroxide.

It was a pretty dim question, given that there were two million men in the Army now, and it wasn’t as if recruitment was organised in the same way as in the First War, with towns raising Pals’ Battalions.

Reg, who’d been a mechanic before the war, had been quickly snapped up by the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, while Les, he’d already learnt, had joined the local regiment. Reg tried gently to point this out, but Beryl seemed convinced his path and her husband’s would cross, because Les, she informed them, had been transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps and was now officially an Army driver.

‘How did he manage to swing that?’ quipped Jim, hauling over a couple of dining chairs for himself and Lily. ‘If they’d seen the way he used to take corners in our delivery vans …’

Till he’d been called up, Les Bulpitt had been a driver at Marlow’s. Beryl had worked there too – it was how they’d all met.

Beryl pregnant … that had been just one of the many things that had happened since Lily had started at Marlow’s. Lily thought back to that terrifying first day, standing frozen with fear outside the Staff Entrance, and Beryl sweeping by, all scent and smart remarks, even though she was only a junior herself, (a more senior junior maybe, but still a junior). But when Beryl had found herself in trouble, she’d had to throw herself on Lily and Dora’s mercy, the start of the most unlikely friendship since Fay Wray and King Kong.

If Les and Beryl’s wedding had had the whiff of the shotgun about it, everyone had rallied round to disperse the cordite and make the day the best they could. They’d been a merry party – Les and Beryl, Lily as bridesmaid, Jim as best man and official photographer. Dora had made the dress, Sid had made it home to walk Beryl down the aisle – well, into the Register Office – and Les’s mum, Ivy, had tapped up no one liked to think what black-market contacts to help lay on a magnificent spread.

Now, with Les’s dad in the Merchant Navy, and Les away at training camp, Beryl was left living with Ivy and Les’s younger sister, Susan. Susan, bless her, was a bit backward – quite a lot backward in fact – more like age two than twelve. From the time she’d spent over at Ivy’s since the wedding, Lily had to admit that watching Susan laboriously try to do a simple jigsaw could make a Sunday afternoon pass very slowly indeed. No wonder Beryl needed to escape.

‘Gor blimey!’ said Reg when she’d gone, complete with the matinee jacket Dora had knitted for the baby, and which had been Beryl’s transparent excuse for ‘just dropping by’ at dinnertime. Dora pursed her lips and unwound some more navy wool. It was an expletive too far for her, but that was war for you. ‘She can’t half talk, that one!’

It was true. Beryl had always had plenty to say for herself.

‘You’d told me a bit about her,’ Reg went on, ‘but in the flesh … I should think “my Les” is glad to get away! I daresay you will be too, Jim, surrounded by all these women. You’re next for call-up, aren’t you?’

Lily swatted at her brother again, and caught him this time, on the arm.

‘Cheek! You tell him, Jim! You like it here!’

Jim gave a half-smile and shrugged.

Lily thought nothing of it at the time. But afterwards, she’d remember that.

It might have been cold and dank and generally horrible outside, but the hens still had to be seen to and locked up before dark.

Reg declared he was ‘gasping for a fag’ so the three of them wrapped up and went out into the yard in the last of the feeble daylight. Jim didn’t think Reg’s cigarette and the henhouse straw would be a terrifically good mix, so he volunteered for the hens’ bedtime lock-up, leaving Lily stamping her feet and swinging her arms as Reg lit up. He still couldn’t get over the fact that Beryl was convinced he and Les were bound to meet.

He drew on his cigarette and chucked his spent match over the fence.

‘Anyway, if he’s just been called up, he’ll get a home posting for the first few months, if not years – how old is he?’

‘That’s the thing,’ Lily said. ‘Les is twenty, the same as you.’

‘What? How come he hasn’t been called up till now?’ Reg sounded outraged. ‘Or volunteered? You mean he’s sat on his backside when he could have been—’

Reg had volunteered the minute he was eligible, at eighteen – and Sid the same.

‘Before you get on your high horse, Reg, Les was called up before.’

Lily had only learnt this herself when Les’s call-up papers had come just before Christmas.

‘Don’t tell me,’ exclaimed Reg. ‘Tried to pass himself off as a conchie! Or unfit!’

‘He was unfit the first time. Susan, his sister, because she’s like she is, she’s not strong. She gets all sorts of infections and things,’ Lily explained. ‘Les had tonsillitis that he’d caught off her, so he failed the medical.’

Reg snorted and took another disdainful draw on his cigarette. Lily could see she wasn’t convincing him.

‘Les isn’t a shirker, Reg, honestly,’ she insisted. ‘I mean, he’d hardly have planned it this way. It’s not the best timing, is it, for him to be called up now, when Beryl’s due in a couple of months?’

‘It’s how it is, Lil,’ said Reg plainly. ‘There’s plenty of blokes fighting this war that have never seen their kids.’

‘I know, I know.’

The tip of Reg’s cigarette glowed in the dusk. Lily wondered if he was going to tell her, or if she’d have to ask. That was the trouble with Reg. He was such an oyster. You had to prise things out of him.

‘Reg …’

But for once, Reg saved her the trouble.

‘I know what you’re going to say, Sis. And yes, it’s why I’m home. This leave isn’t just in place of Christmas.’

‘Oh, Reg! You’ve got your posting! Where? Tell me! Where are they sending you?’

Jim had finished his henhouse duties now, and he joined them, cradling two brown eggs in his hand. He could tell from Lily’s face that something was up.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Am I interrupting?’

Though they’d been putting him up for six months now – or putting up with him, as he joked – Jim was always sensitive about not intruding into family matters.

‘He’s got his posting,’ Lily said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it, Reg?’

Red took a final long drag on his cigarette and pinched it out between his thumb and first finger. His hands were so worn and calloused after years of grappling with the insides of engines he could crush a wasp the same way and not feel the pain, he’d told them.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Jim.

The Army didn’t send you abroad till you were twenty – or tried not to; Reg’s last birthday had been a turning point, they all knew.

‘I’ll tell you two,’ said Reg slowly. ‘And I’ve told Sid. But not a word to Mum, not yet. I’ll tell her tomorrow – and in good time, not just before I leave, so she’s got the chance to take it in. But I don’t want her brooding on it longer than she has to.’

‘For goodness’ sake Reg, tell us!’ Lily had trouble keeping her voice down. ‘Where?’

‘They haven’t told us officially,’ said Reg. ‘We’re not allowed to know – and nor are you. But we all do know.’

Jim and Lily looked at him, waiting.

‘Africa,’ said Reg quietly. Walls, even those between their house and their next-door neighbours, were reputed to have ears, after all. ‘North Africa. This bit of leave’s my pre-embarkation. We sail next week.’