20
RUBY
14th May
‘Father? Grandmother?’ I called as I went up the front garden path, edging past the furniture haphazardly arranged across the path. ‘Is everything all right?’
Grandmother met me at the cottage door. She was wearing a faded pinny – goodness knows where she’d found it – and a look of long-suffering martyrdom I was growing to know all too well. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf, and she was clutching a broom. ‘Ah, I’m glad you’re home. You can help me take the curtains down to wash them before your father gets back,’ she said briskly.
When I went into the parlour, I discovered everything that was too heavy to carry outside had been pushed against the walls, and all the pictures had been taken down. The piano was covered in a grubby sheet and Mother’s photograph lay face down on the windowsill. In a panic, I rushed upstairs; as I’d feared, everything had been turned upside down and inside out up here as well. In the bedroom Grandmother and I now shared, the contents of the bureau had been tipped out onto the bed, including my underwear drawer, where I kept the box Alfie had given me last year – the one I kept Sam’s drawings in – and my book of Emily Dickinson poems. Frantically, I raked through the piles of clothes, my shoulders sagging with relief when I found them.
I tiptoed back down the stairs and out to the Anderson, placing the box on a shelf inside, and tucking the Emily Dickinson into my cardigan pocket. Then, with a glance over my shoulder, I took my bicycle and cycled back into town, feeling mulish. Blow Grandmother and her spring cleaning!
Oh, if only I could see Sam!I thought as I pedalled. He was back from his training now, but Sunday was three days away, and going up to the camp was, of course, out of the question. When I reached the town gardens I dismounted, intending to find somewhere to sit and read for a while.
I didn’t notice the hunched figure sitting on a bench beside one of the ornamental flower beds – flower beds now filled with cabbages and potatoes instead of pansies and geraniums – until they called my name. ‘Ruby!’
I jumped. It was Alfie, wearing his post office uniform, his own bicycle propped up beside him.
‘Oh, hullo, Alfie,’ I said.
‘Hullo, Ruby.’ He sounded fed up. His hair was standing on end, as if he’d been running his fingers through it.
I leaned my bicycle against the railings behind us and sat down beside him; there wasn’t really any other option unless I wanted it to look as if I was avoiding him. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Not really. Maud chucked me.’
‘What? Oh, no. I’m so sorry, Alfie.’
He looked round at me. ‘She was seeing one of them behind my back – an American. Can you believe it? I can’t stand it. Nothing’s been the same since they arrived. Nothing. They’ve taken over – turned everyone’s heads! It makes me sick, seeing them swanning round town in their flashy cars and jeeps, and all the women throwing themselves at their feet. Oh, I know they’re supposedly going to help us win the war and all that, but really. Who in their right mind would want to get involved with a load of show-offs like that?!’
I sat very still; I didn’t say a thing. He was wheezing slightly. ‘We had a terrible argument, Maud and I. She said I was dull. And – and… there were other things, too.’
I frowned. ‘What other things?’
‘She – she wanted me to do things. Things which weren’t—’ He swallowed, his Adam’s apple jerking, and as I watched, a flush suffused his whole face. ‘You know – gentlemanly.’
‘Oh.’ Now my face was going pink too. ‘Gosh.’
He dug the toe of his boot savagely into the grass. ‘I suppose that’s why she went behind my back with that soldier. I suppose he does anything she wants him to. And after that she told me I was a coward for not joining up.’
‘Oh, nonsense! You can’t join up – what about your chest? They won’t let you!’
‘I know that, but she said she thought it was an excuse. She said if I really wanted to, I’d find a way, bad chest or no bad chest.’
‘Alfie, she was just saying that to hurt you – to make herself feel better for being such a worm. I mean, is my father a coward? He can’t join up either, because of his chest.’
‘Yes, but he did fight in the last war.’
I wanted to shake Alfie. Who cared what an idiot like Maud Tinney, with her brassy-coloured hair and her way of laughing in a patronising and ever-so-slightly-sarcastic way at whatever you said, thought? I’d only met her twice, and after she’d begun yet another sentence with When we lived in Exeter… I’d found myself wanting to shake her, too. ‘She doesn’t know the first thing about you. She’s not even from round here – didn’t her family move from Exeter after they got bombed out? And anyway, if she was asking you to – to do things you didn’t want to, then she’s not the girl for you, is she?’
We sat there for a while in silence until my stomach growled, reminding me I’d not had my supper yet. Did I dare return to the cottage? I stood up and patted his arm. ‘Forget her, Alfie. Plenty more fish in the sea.’
‘Yes, but what if those fish aren’t interested?’ His tone was so gloomy I had to bite back a laugh.
‘Oh, I’m sure one of them will be! Keep your chin up.’
As I wheeled my bike back to the gates, I glanced round and saw him gazing after me.
I took the long way home, ignoring the hunger gnawing away inside me; when I finally returned to the cottage, it was almost nine o’clock. To my relief, the furniture had been taken back inside and everything was more or less in one piece again. Father had shut himself away in his study and Grandmother was thumping around in the parlour. I didn’t go in there to see what she was up to. I ate some bread and margarine standing up in the kitchen, went upstairs and slid the Emily Dickinson under my mattress. As I washed my face, brushed my teeth and got into bed, I was thinking about what Alfie had said about Maud Tinney – how she’d wanted him to do things he hadn’t wanted to do – and about kissing Sam on the old horsehair sofa at the lodge.
I wanted to go further – wanted it more than anything – but I was scared Sam would think I was easy, that that was all I wanted him for, like the women who hung around the camp gates. I’d never realised how lonely I was before Sam came along. He made me feel as if a lamp had been lit inside me, one I didn’t even know was there, filling all the dark corners of my soul with light and laughter and warmth. I was terrified of getting it wrong – of scaring him away.
Perhaps I should ask Vera about it; no doubt she was as knowledgeable about these things as she was about everything else. But even thinking the word sex made me blush to the roots of my hair. I couldn’t imagine saying it out loud, not to Vera, not to Sam, not to anyone. Perhaps if Mother had been around, she might have talked to me about these things. I had a vague picture of lovemaking in my head, pieced together from stories and novels, but they were all very clear it was something strictly reserved for after you were married, and what about babies? How did you stop that from happening?
When I was with Sam, at the lodge, these worries never seemed to bother me; it was when we were apart that doubts came creeping in. We’d talked a few times, in a roundabout way, about the future, but the reality was that Sam would soon be sent off to war, and I had no idea if or when I’d see him again. And then there was the problem of Father, who couldn’t manage without me…
Hearing Grandmother coming up the stairs, I turned my face into my pillow, pretending to be asleep. I heard her sniff as she got into her own bed, but she didn’t say anything. Once she’d started snoring, I rolled over again and lay staring up at the ceiling, turning the same old thoughts about Sam and Father over in my mind, until I was exhausted with them.