‘The milkman will be here soon,’ he said. ‘Can’t a man have a couple of drinks without his daughter shouting the odds?’
‘If you can afford whisky, you can afford to give me money for your keep,’ she raged at him. ‘You tell me why I should work all week just to keep you! What’ve you ever done for me?’
‘I kept you in luxury and gave you a good education until you were thirteen,’ he retorted. ‘How easily you forget that.’
‘I can’t forget that you swindled people and that you beat me within an inch of my life before you ran away like the pathetic coward you are,’ she shrieked at him. ‘I shouldered the burden of looking after mother and trying to appease Aunt Hazel all the time. You’ve got no idea what kind of hell I had to go through.’
He stood up, and suddenly he looked so big and frightening she thought he was going to hit her. She backed away towards the door to the garden, wishing she hadn’t been quite so reckless.
‘Was it such hell that you felt compelled to rob a house up in Blackheath?’ he said, his voice steady but with a hint of menace. ‘You sanctimonious little thief.’
Verity felt a cold shiver go down her spine. How could he know about that?
‘No good looking like you don’t know what I’m talking about,’ he said with a sneer. ‘I know what you did. You sold that silver pheasant that came from my family to the jeweller’s in Blackheath. I knew straight away it was mine, and I went in to ask about it.’
‘There was nothing wrong with us keeping a few valuables back from the bailiffs,’ Verity said indignantly. ‘We had nothing to live on, I was too young to work and mother wasn’t capable.’
‘Nothing wrong with keeping those things, nothing at all,’ Archie said and came closer to her, bending a little so his face was right up to hers. ‘I admire that kind of resourcefulness. But I got chatting to the jeweller, and he told me the little hard-luck story the girl who’d sold it to him gave him. Then he went on to tell me about a silver jug that turned out to be stolen from a house in The Glebe.’
Verity suddenly felt very faint.
‘You’d better sit down, my dear. You’ve gone chalk white, and it would be beastly if you fainted,’ Archie’s voice dripped with sarcasm. He pulled out a kitchen chair and nudged her on to it. ‘First rule of thieving is that you don’t try and sell the goods in the area you stole them from,’ he said. ‘You are very lucky he assumed you lived miles away, otherwise he would’ve called the police. I didn’t, of course, enlighten him that I knew the culprit. I said my pheasant was stolen a few years ago.’
‘Why didn’t you say something before?’ she asked.
‘Because, my dear, I was actually impressed that you could be so resourceful. One could say a chip off the old block. I thought that in the fullness of time, once I’d got to know you all over again, we could pool our resources and work together to become rich.’
She stared at him, her mouth agape. Surely he couldn’t be suggesting they robbed houses together?
‘I can’t do that,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I only did the one burglary because I needed money, after Aunt Hazel died. I felt really bad about it.’
‘Not so bad you gave it to charity? Instead, you had the bathroom installed,’ he said, raising his eyebrows. ‘Yes, I found the receipts for that, and for all the other little jobs you had done. Very sensible, really, most girls of your age would’ve spent it on frivolous stuff like clothes.’
He had her cornered, and she knew he wasn’t going to let her off lightly. What a fool she’d been to think he’d changed and that he cared about her.
‘You see why I encouraged Amy to go away?’ he smirked. ‘My dear, resourceful little daughter, how lucky it is that you are in a job where you can find out who has cancelled their telephone because they’ve gone away.’
‘I can’t get that information,’ she said in horror.
‘You can,’ he laughed. ‘Dopey Amy even mentioned that it is part of your job to disconnect a line when it is not in use. Not that I would be so stupid as to encourage you to rob a house where you had been the person to do that. But I know you can easily look at someone else’s work sheets.’
‘I won’t do it,’ she said firmly. ‘You can’t make me.’
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Is that so? Believe me, Verity, I have many different ways of making sure you obey me. You won’t like any of them.’
Her heart was racing with panic, she felt sick and scared out of her wits.
‘How could you say such a thing to your own daughter?’ she asked.
He laughed again. ‘I wonder your aunt didn’t tell you. You aren’t my daughter. I never wanted any children. Your mother was pregnant when I met her, only she omitted to tell me that. I thought she was smart and sexy, and that together we could go places. It turned out she was neither of those things, just a lying, greedy, self-centred gold-digger. But by then I’d made the mistake of marrying her.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
February 1941
A letter from Miller was still lying on the doormat when Verity came home from work, which meant Archie hadn’t been back to Weardale Road for three whole days. She thought it would be marvellous if he’d cleared off with a woman, fallen under a train or even been killed in a bombing raid. But she couldn’t be that lucky. He’d been saying they were going to start their ‘new business’ any day now, and as she’d managed to get him a list of disconnected telephones in Kew and Putney, he could even be away checking out the addresses right now.
The house felt like an ice box. At least when he was there she came home to a fire blazing. Waiting for him to turn up again was nerve-racking. She felt unable to relax, knowing he could walk in the door at any moment. And there was always the threat, if she said the wrong thing or did anything he didn’t like, that he would hit her. He had struck her at Christmas, that was for saying she was going to spend Christmas Day with a friend from work. He’d slapped her round the face so hard she fell over, and told her she wasn’t going anywhere.
It was so very tempting to go to the police, to throw herself on their mercy and spill out the entire sorry story. But she had burgled the house in The Glebe, and she’d sold valuables from Daleham Gardens when they were supposed to be left in the house for the bailiffs. But what the police would do to her didn’t frighten her half as much as Archie did.
He was as sly as a fox, the most plausible liar she’d ever met, and he could twist things to make himself look like the most tender-hearted father to any onlookers, and her the ungrateful, troubled daughter. Then there was the violence. She knew he was more than capable of giving her the kind of beating he had given her back at Daleham Gardens. And worse still there would be no warning when it came.
It had been a shock to be told he wasn’t her real father; to have believed he was for so many years seemed a terrible thing. Yet it was also a relief to know they shared nothing more than a name. One she intended to change the minute she could get away from him.
She picked up the letter from Miller, and just looking at his big, sprawling handwriting made her feel warm inside. She hung up her coat and took the letter upstairs to read it, just in case Archie came in.
Three weeks had gone by without a letter, which made this one even more precious. In his letter just after Christmas he’d suggested that she come up to Scotland for Easter.
She had the feeling that once she was with Miller, she would be able to tell him everything about Archie, and he’d find a way out of her problems. Of course she didn’t want to admit she’d burgled a house, that was shameful, but she felt Miller would take into consideration how much pressure she’d been under, and help her.
Just holding his letter in her hand made her feel less alone and frightened. Maybe she could even pour it all out in her next letter to him and get it off her chest.
She savoured opening the envelope, leaning back against the headboard of her bed, knowing in a few moments she would be transported to his world of forests,
wild animals and wide open spaces. She started to read.
Dear Verity,
This is a very difficult letter to write, but I must do it, for to leave it any longer would be so wrong …
Verity frowned. This sounded like it was going to be a confession about something bad.
But surely not, Miller wasn’t that kind of man.
I am afraid I have met a girl up here. Because of that I must end our friendship, as she wouldn’t understand me writing to you. And besides, it wouldn’t be right to string you along thinking you were going to come up here at Easter for a holiday.
May I explain that I came to a different world up here, and I’ve found I’m not the man I was in London. I want different things now, another kind of life, and my new girl is a quiet wee thing who fits into the forest like a rabbit or a pheasant.
I have so many things in my head that I want to tell you, to make you see why this came about and where I am going, but all that will do is make me feel justified, and it won’t lessen your hurt and sorrow.
But I do think you need a very different man to me, and I sincerely hope you find him and have great happiness.
I thank you again for giving me shelter in your home, for being a good friend too, perhaps the best I’ve ever had.
Yours,
Miller
Verity let the letter drop on to her lap, and for a moment was transfixed with shock. Miller was the one good thing in her life, and he didn’t want her any more.
She sat there for some time before she could even cry. Only Miller could let a girl down so kindly; she could imagine him, pen in hand, trying to find the words that would hurt the least.
But however he dressed it up, she’d been abandoned for someone he liked better. She hoped his ‘quiet wee thing’ would turn out to be stultifyingly boring, and he’d be tormented in his dreams of all the laughs they used to have and those passionate kisses at Christmas.
It was ignoble to think bad thoughts about his new girl, but she couldn’t help it. Miller should have been her man, her future husband and father of her children. Now she had absolutely no one to turn to for help with Archie.
So she’d just have to go along with his plans.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
1942
Ruby came out of Hither Green Station and for a moment just stood still outside, looking towards the Railway Hotel, the big pub on the corner which Verity had mentioned once while she was down in Babbacombe.
Ruby had been told while on the train from Charing Cross that Hither Green Station and the street next to the railway embankment had been bombed during the Blitz. Repairs had been made to the station, but from where she stood she could see the bombed street, the rubble only partially cleared, and she felt a pang for all those who had lost their loved ones and their homes.
The Daily Mail had reported just a short while ago that Torquay was a funk hole, where cowardly people were hiding from the war. Ruby very much resented that, as did most of its residents. So maybe there hadn’t been any really serious bombing incidents yet, but factories there were providing all kinds of goods needed for the war, and the locals worked very hard to reach targets, often above and beyond the call of duty.
Many of the hotels had been taken over by the military too; they used them for specialist training and for billeting men before shipping them off to the fighting. The Palace, where Ruby had worked before the war, was the main hospital for RAF officers. She had been kept on as receptionist, and was in charge of the men’s medical records.
She had seen airmen with such terrible injuries that she now knew exactly what war was all about, and it had changed her. Gone were the days when she thought of nothing but going dancing and what dress she was going to wear. In her off-duty hours now she practised first aid, helped Wilby with the evacuees and collected old clothes door to door. These clothes were for people who had been bombed out, and she helped sort them into men’s, women’s, children’s and babies’ in a storeroom above a shop in Reddenhill Road.
This change in her had also made her see how badly she’d treated Verity, and she’d already been up to London twice, once in the late summer of 1940, and then again last year. Both times she’d seen Verity from a distance but hadn’t spoken to her.
Wilby said it was daft to get so near, then to back off. All she had to do was write a letter and apologize. But Ruby had put pen to paper so many times, and yet she could never find the right words to explain herself.
Today she was determined to speak to Verity, even if she had to stay another night in London to do so. She’d come up this time to check on her mother. A well-meaning air-raid warden had reported to the police that she was in a bad way, and they in turn had telephoned Wilby.
The air-raid warden had found her huddled in an alley with a black eye one very cold night, and he’d got the idea she couldn’t go home because of a violent husband. In fact she was just drunk and confused, she couldn’t even remember who had hit her. When Ruby saw her, she read her the riot act about looking after herself, then cleaned up her room and left.
She had no sympathy for her mother. There were so many people in real difficulties all over England, and most of them were grateful for any help. Ruby saw no reason to waste time or energy on a woman who would never change her ways, even if she was her mother.
The first time Ruby had come to Hither Green, in the summer of 1940, to see Verity, she was attending a three-day medical course in New Cross. It was far more intensive than basic first aid, intended to train civilians like her in case there should be a very serious incident where they needed to pull in extra people with medical knowledge and practical skills to help.
She had gone to Weardale Road on an impulse, because the course ended earlier than she’d expected and her train back to Torquay didn’t leave Paddington till seven in the evening.
Reminders of Coronation Day and the Weardale Road street party came to her as she approached the house. Everything still looked much the same, but shabbier.
She knocked on the door, but there was no reply. She was still standing there, wondering if it was worth coming back a bit later, when a fat middle-aged lady spoke to her.
‘You won’t find anyone in till later,’ she said. ‘Both of the young ladies work for the Post Office and they work shifts. I saw them going off before six this morning, giggling like they was going on a fun day out.’
Ruby sensed this woman with a sour face didn’t approve of anyone who enjoyed life. She also sensed she was the street gossip and it would be wise not to give her any ammunition.
‘I wasn’t looking for a young woman,’ she said. ‘It was Miss Ferris I was looking for. I suppose she’s at her work too?’
‘Didn’t you hear, love? She died a couple of years back. She’d turn in her grave too if she knew her niece had had a male lodger since then, and now this brassy blonde with her tight skirts and her bright red lipstick. Heaven only knows what the two of them get up to alone in that house without supervision.’
Ruby hadn’t known about Verity’s Aunt Hazel dying, and it made her feel sad that she hadn’t been in touch to comfort her old friend. But she wasn’t going to let that slip. ‘I’m sorry to hear about Miss Ferris,’ she said, determined not to rise to the woman’s spiteful remarks about Verity. ‘I was just hoping she’d make some curtains for me. What did she die of?’
‘A heart attack at her work,’ the older woman said. ‘Hardly surprising, really, what with the trouble of having that sister of hers turning up uninvited with her kid and expecting poor Miss Ferris to take care of them. That lazy good-for-nothing never did a thing for her sister when she was living in a posh house and the kid was at private school. But as soon as that crook of a husband of hers disappeared and the woman fell on hard times, she came here expecting handouts.’
‘How unpleasant for Miss Ferris,’ Ruby said. She thought the woman’s venom against Verity’s mother was harsh and unnecessary. She wondered if she was the same gossip Verity had spoken of so
metimes.
‘Then her sister went and stuck her head in the gas oven!’
‘Did she really?’ Ruby exclaimed. She knew already, of course. She’d seen how much it had affected Verity too, but she wasn’t going to say anything that would blow her cover. ‘Well, thank you for your help, obviously I’ll have to find someone else to make my curtains.’
Ruby walked away; she had the feeling if she talked to that unpleasant woman for any longer, she’d say something she’d later regret. She was very shocked to hear of Aunt Hazel’s death, poor Verity must have felt very alone, with her mother gone too. Ruby wondered about the male lodger. Was he her boyfriend? She just hoped, if he was, it hadn’t all gone wrong for her.
Ruby thought that if Verity had gone to work at six this morning, she’d probably finish at four, so she went to a cafe in Lee High Road, right across from the end of Weardale Road, ordered tea and a sandwich, and waited.
She had read an entire local newspaper, including the obituaries, and was just about to give up and leave when Verity jumped off a bus, with another girl.
The pair of them stopped almost outside the cafe and it looked as if they were discussing whether they needed anything from the shop before going home. It gave Ruby the chance to get a good look at her old friend.
She looked very pretty, and far more womanly now; she’d only ever had the tiniest of breasts before. Ruby remembered how she used to despair of them ever growing. But they had now, and she was radiant, her blonde hair plaited around her head like a crown, and her face tanned. She was wearing a blue polka-dot shirtwaister dress Ruby remembered. The wide navy-blue belt around her waist made it look tiny. She had white socks and plimsolls on her feet, and her legs were very brown, so she must have been outside a great deal during the summer.
Ruby’s whole being wanted to run out of the cafe and hug her, but Verity had her head thrown back, laughing heartily at something the other girl was saying, and Ruby felt she had no right to intrude.