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Lillian and her mum waited as he went down the passageway and into the front room. Neither of them suggested that Lillian might start eating her breakfast. They needed to know whether Gran would want them next. From the front room came Dad’s voice, raised in anger and dismay as he heard what his little sister had done.
‘Gone? Gone where?’
Nettie Parker flinched. ‘What is it?’ she whispered to Lillian. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Aunty Eileen’s gone,’ Lillian told her.
‘Oh, my Gawd!’
Nettie put her two hands to her thin cheeks. ‘Now we’re for it,’ she predicted. ‘Eileen! The silly girl. How could she do this to us?’ She pulled out a chair with a shaking hand and sat down. ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked. ‘Your gran’ll go mad. It’s terrible, terrible.’
Before Lillian could work out whether she was supposed to answer this, her father put his head round the front room door and yelled for her to come back in. Reluctantly, Lillian obeyed. As she walked back towards Gran’s room, she saw Wendy sitting on the stairs grinning at her through the rails. She put her tongue out at Lillian as she passed. Lillian did the same back. At that moment her two big brothers, Bob and Frank, came clattering down the stairs.
‘What’s up?’ Frank hissed. ‘What’s going on?’
Aunty Eileen’s done a bunk,’ Wendy said, her blue eyes as big as saucers with the excitement of it all.
Frank whistled and sat down beside her. ‘She ain’t? What, done a midnight flit?’
Wendy nodded. ‘She’s taken everything, even the hairbrush. She just left a letter for Gran.’
‘Wow!’ Frank was fond of American expressions. ‘She’s got a nerve, ain’t she? You got to hand it to her.’
‘She’s a very silly young woman, if you ask me,’ Bob said from his lordly position of oldest son and the accepted clever one of the family.
‘Nobody did ask you,’ Frank told him.
Their father’s head appeared round the door again. ‘Lilli—! Oh, there you are. Come in here when you’re told, girl.’ He caught sight of Wendy and his voice softened. ‘And you better come as well. She can’t of gone without either of you hearing nothing.’
This time it was Wendy’s turn to look alarmed and Lillian’s to make a face before both of them lined up by Gran’s bed. It was easier with Wendy there, as she vehemently denied knowing anything and Lillian just stood beside her, agreeing with everything she said. But Gran still had her suspicions.
‘You and her, you was like blooming Siamese twins,’ she said to Lillian. ‘I can’t believe she’d go and not say nothing to you, whatever she might do to the rest of us, the ungrateful little madam. Walking out in the middle of the night like that! I never knew the like—’
Gran went off on a long tirade. The two girls stood silent, knowing better than to make any comment. Their father nodded and agreed with everything. But eventually Gran came back to her original point.
‘So come on, what did she tell you?’
Lillian shook her head. Despite her concern not to give anything away, the full impact of what had happened was finally getting through to her. Aunty Eileen had been more like a mother to her than her real mum, who was worn down with housework and miscarriages and trying to please everyone. Aunty Eileen had always stuck up for her and put her first. Out of nowhere, tears welled up and spilled over.
‘I don’t want her to go!’ she wailed. ‘I want her to come back!’
Try as they might, her father and grandmother could get nothing more out of her. A sharp smack round the ear from her father only made her cry harder.
‘Get her out. I can’t hear myself think with all this racket going on,’ Gran ordered. ‘You get off to work early, Douglas, and on your way ask at Madame Pauline’s if they know anything. She must of told them; she can’t just walk out of a decent job. And, if they don’t, there’s only one thing for it—we’ll have to go to the police.’
Lillian found herself pushed out into the hallway again, where Frank and Bob grabbed her and demanded to know what was going on.
‘The police!’ Bob said. ‘Gran’s never going to ask them to come here, is she? She’d never do that. It’d give the neighbours a field day.’
‘You’re such an old woman,’ Frank scoffed. ‘But come on, Lill, spill it. Where has Eileen gone?’
He loomed over her, his pale face gleaming with the excitement of it all. Nothing as dramatic as this had happened in their family in their lifetimes.
Lillian stamped her foot with frustration. ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! She’s just gone. She went in the middle of the night—’
She was saved by her father putting his head round the door.
‘Clear off into the kitchen, you lot. Your gran don’t want all this row outside her door. Go on, get!’
It was the beginning of a difficult time. The police were sympathetic but, with nothing to work on, they were unable to do more than suggest that the family get in touch with the Salvation Army. Gran continued to rant and rave about the situation, but all her bad temper couldn’t bring back the daughter who had escaped her heavy rule. Gradually, they all came to realise that Eileen really had gone for good.
Her absence was felt by all the family, though to different degrees. One fewer wage coming in made a difference to all of them, so did one fewer ration book. Mum missed a strong pair of hands to help with the many chores involved in running a guest house. Wendy missed having her blonde curls tamed into cute ringlets. They all missed Eileen’s cheerfulness. Her stories of difficult customers at the hairdresser’s where she worked had livened up the tea table no end.
But Lillian felt it most of all. She had lost her friend, her ally, her source of love and security. There was nobody now to give her a big hug and ask how her day at school had been, nobody to take her on their knee and tell her how sweet she was, nobody to stop the others from treating her as a general dogsbody. Lonely and miserable, Lillian would creep inside the wardrobe and breathe deeply through her nose, taking comfort from the lingering remnants of Evening In Paris. But there came a day when even that had gone, and Aunty Eileen with her ready laugh and her unquestioning love seemed to have disappeared from her life for ever.
Chapter Two
‘YOU’RE not going to wear that tie, are you?’ James’s sister Susan nagged.
James looked at the tie in the spotted mirror over the fireplace and adjusted the knot. ‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’ he asked.
‘Can’t you see? It’s too loud.’
James laughed with sheer disbelief. Who could possibly say that dark red with small interlocking yellow squares was ‘loud’?
‘What you mean is, it’s not the sort of thing that Boring Bob wears,’ he said, and waited for the explosion.
Susan’s pretty round face went quite red and her eyes glittered. She clenched her fists. ‘Will you stop calling him that? Bob is my young man and he is not boring!’
James grinned at her. At seventeen, he was taller than her now and able to look down at her, which she hated. She was the elder by two years and had bossed him around when they were children.
‘Not if you like watching grass grow,’ he teased.
‘You—! You’re just so hateful! Mum! Mum, James is being horrible.’
Cora Kershaw came out of the bedroom that she and Susan shared in their tiny flat. Her blue frilly blouse was not yet tucked into her pleated skirt, and her thin hair was all over the place. Her soft face looked even more anxious than usual.
‘Children, please—Jamie, darling, you mustn’t—’
Susan took in her mother’s appearance and found a new target.
‘Mum! You can’t wear that blouse with that skirt!’
Cora looked mortified. ‘Oh, darling, really? Are you sure? Only I thought—Mrs Jefferson gave me this blouse, you know, and she buys her clothes in London. But if you think—I don’t want to let you down. Not when we’re going to tea with the Parkers.’
James went and put an arm round her. He faced his sister.
‘Leave Mum alone, Suse. She looks perfectly all right. More than good enough for the flaming Parkers. Anyone would think we were going to Buckingham Palace.’
Tears of frustration were gathering in Susan’s eyes.
‘Can’t you see? This is important to me. The Parkers have invited all of us to go round and meet all of them. I want it to be perfect. I mean, look at this place—’ She gestured at their home, three rooms and a kitchenette on the first floor of a small terraced house, with an outside toilet that they had to share with the people downstairs. ‘The Parkers live in that great big place just off the seafront.’
‘It’s a guest house,’ James stated. ‘They don’t live in all of it.’
‘But it’s theirs. They own it. They don’t rent it.’
Their mother sighed. ‘I know it’s not what you want, darling. You deserve better than this, both of you. It’s so poky in here. When I first got married, I never expected to still be living somewhere like this, all these years on. Never in a month of Sundays. We had such dreams, you know. We were going to have a big house with a garden and a garage and everything, one of those lovely places down in Thorpe Bay. If only your poor dear father had survived…’
Her voice trailed off. James and Susan were silenced, as they always were, when their mother started on this subject. The words ‘If only…’ had threaded all through their childhood. There was nothing meaningful they could say, for it was true, things would have been completely different for them if their father had not been killed in the war. The eyes of all three of them turned to the photograph in pride of place on the mantelpiece, showing a tall man in cricket whites with dark hair and eyes and a narrow, clever face who looked back at them with a sunny smile. As James grew older, it was becoming ever clearer that he was the image of his father.
James gave Cora another hug. ‘You won’t live here for ever, Mum. I’ll buy you a house with a garden one day, you’ll see.’
He might be the youngest of their little household, but he was the man of the family, had been since he was five years old, and it was up to him to provide.
Cora reached up and patted his cheek. ‘You’re a good boy, Jamie.’
He could tell that she didn’t really believe him. How could a boy who worked in a garage ever get to buy a house?
‘And anyway,’ he said, returning to the argument that he and Susan were having, ‘just because the Parkers live in their own place down by the seafront, it doesn’t mean they’re better than us. So stop having a go at us, Susan. We’re not going to let you down.’
‘I didn’t say you were. I just said I wanted it to be perfect, and you—’ Susan broke off, catching sight of the clock. ‘Look at the time! We’ll be late if we don’t set off in five minutes. Come on, Mum, I’ll help you do your hair.’
After a brief flurry of activity they set out, James and his mother arm in arm, Susan walking just ahead of them.
‘Doesn’t she look a picture?’ Cora said, smiling proudly at her daughter’s back.
‘Lovely,’ James agreed, to keep her happy.
Susan was tip-tapping along in her polished court shoes, neat and proper in the powder blue suit that she had made herself on the old hand-cranked Singer sewing machine. She wore a little blue felt hat perched on top of her head and new white gloves. Her black handbag hung from her arm. The whole outfit had taken months and months of saving from her wages as a junior in the office of a department store in the High Street.
‘Just like something out of a magazine.’ Cora sighed. ‘You look just like something out of a magazine,’ she called ahead to Susan.
Susan turned her head and smiled back at her. ‘Really?’
Even James had to admit that his sister was looking pretty. Plenty of men would be delighted to go out with her. Why she was so stuck on Boring Bob was a mystery to him.
‘I do hope the Parkers will like us. This is so important to Susan,’ his mother said.
‘Mum, the Parkers aren’t as wonderful as Suse likes to make out, you know. Has she told you how they came to be living here?’
‘No, but—’
‘Susan told me one day. She says that Gran Parker’s husband once had a butcher’s shop in Upminster, but he died of a heart attack and his elder son, Norman, took over. Norman was useless, and what profits he did make he spent at the races. On top of that, he had a nasty temper. Bob’s father, Doug, was the younger son and he thought he could make a better fist of it and said so, and one day when they were having a row Norman picked up a knife and attacked Doug. His arm was so badly injured that at one point they thought it was going to have to be amputated. Norman walked out, joined the army and died in India of malaria, the butcher’s went bust and, with what money was left, Gran moved to Southend with Doug and his family and put a deposit on the guest house. Which was fine until the war came and that business nearly went bust too. From what I can make out, they’re just about hanging on now, with people wanting to go on holiday again. So you see, they’re not a grand family living in a big house. They’re ordinary people who’ve had a lot of bad luck, just like you have.’
‘Oh—yes—I see. Dear me, what a terrible story! Fancy one brother attacking another like that. How dreadful.’
Going over the tale kept them occupied as they made their way along the depressing back streets with their rows of almost identical houses till they could see the grey gleam of the Thames estuary, finally emerging on to Southend seafront just past the gasworks. All three of them paused to take in the scenery. Susan gazed at the dome of the Kursaal, where she had met Bob at the dance hall. Cora looked mistily at the pier, marching out across the grey mudflats to the shining river. She and her late husband had taken many a romantic stroll along its mile and a quarter of decking. James looked at the Golden Mile of amusements and longed to be there with his friends, playing the machines and eyeing up the girls, instead of being stuck with this gruesome family tea with the Parkers.
It was still too early in the year for many day trippers to be about, but the sunny weather had brought out plenty of locals to walk off the effects of their Sunday lunches. Young couples wandered hand in hand, families marched along in groups, elderly people stopped to look at the fishing boats or across the water to the hills of Kent, dogs ran around barking at the seagulls.
A brisk walk along the promenade in the spring sunshine brought the Kershaws to the Sunny View Guest House, set a few houses back from the seafront on a side road. There was not much to set it apart from any of the others in the terrace. They were all three storeys high with square bay windows, grubby brickwork and dark paint. All displayed ‘Vacancies’ signs. James couldn’t imagine wanting to stay in any of them. They looked most unwelcoming.
The front door of Sunny View was opened by a skinny kid of thirteen or so with long plaits. She looked about as pleased to see them as James was to see the Parkers.
Susan put on her grown-up voice. ‘Hello, Lillian dear. How are you today?’
‘All right, I s’pose. You better come in.’
Bob came to meet them in the hall, took Cora’s coat and gave it to the kid to hang up, then opened the door to the front room.
‘We’re in Gran’s room today,’ he told them, in a tone of voice that made it clear they should think themselves honoured.
The entire Parker clan was gathered in the gloomy room. After the fresh sea air it smelt stale, a mixture of cigarette smoke, polish and cooking fat. James found himself introduced to each family member—Bob’s grandmother, parents, younger brother Frank and the kid Lillian. But none of them made any impression on him, for there, sitting amongst them, was the most stunning girl he had ever seen.
‘My sister Wendy,’ Bob said.
She was a natural blonde, her hair in soft curls round her lovely face. Her eyes were big and blue and her lips were luscious, while her body was as alluring as Marilyn Monroe’s. She wore a pink jumper that showed off her magnificent breasts to perfection, and a wide belt emphasized her narrow waist. James was mesmerised. There was a general shaking of hands, during which James got to grasp hers.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he managed to say. He felt hot all over.
Wendy kept hold of his hand a few telling moments longer than necessary. ‘Likewise,’ she said with a cool smile.
James was horribly aware that she knew just what effect she was having on him and, what was more, she was enjoying it.
He sat on the dining chair nearest to where Wendy perched on the arm of her father’s seat. Around him, the two families were making polite small talk. The words buzzed about him but made little sense. Then he realised that Susan was hissing at him.
‘James!’
‘What?’ he asked, disorientated.
‘Mrs Parker is asking you a question.’
With difficulty, he focused on Bob’s grandmother. She was a grim-looking old bat, dressed entirely in black with a large cameo brooch at the neck of her blouse.
‘Yes, Mrs Parker?’ he said, trying to sound intelligent.
From across the room there came a snigger. James glanced over. It was Frank, a lanky young man of about twenty with a shadow of a grin on his face. He understood just what the problem was.
‘I asked what you did for a living, young man.’
James looked back at the grandmother.
‘I’m an apprentice mechanic at Dobson’s garage,’ he told her.
‘Hmm, well, it’s a good thing to have a trade. Our Bob has a position at the bank, of course.’
‘Yes, Mrs Parker,’ he said. Nothing on earth was going to make him sound impressed.
