Home for Christmas (15 page)

‘A favour for himself, more like,’ Dulcie muttered in an aside to Tilly and Agnes, before turning back to the stall holder. ‘How much?’

‘Tenpence to you, darling,’ he responded, giving her a smile that revealed that several of his teeth were either missing or black.

Dulcie, though, wasn’t interested in his teeth. ‘Tenpence?’ she challenged him. ‘That’s daylight robbery, that is. A bit like the way you got the shampoo in the first place, I dare say,’ she added meaningfully.

‘Here,’ the stall holder leaned across to her, a hard look on his face, ‘I don’t need the likes of you telling me what’s what. If you don’t want it, you can go and buzz off, ’cos I’m telling that there’s plenty that does.’

‘Three bottles, we want, and we’ll pay you sixpence a bottle, and they’d better be full,’ Dulcie announced, ignoring both the semi-threatening pose he had adopted, and Tilly’s impressed gasp at her audacity.

‘Sixpence! I’ve got five kids to feed,’ he told her. ‘And I won’t take a penny less than ninepence a bottle.’

‘Sevenpence,’ Dulcie argued.

‘Look, you’ve had your little joke, now why don’t you clear off and let someone who really wants to do business have a go?’ the stall holder suggested, removing the butt of his cigarette from his mouth and grinding it out under the heel of his shoe.

‘There’s three of us and that’s three bottles, three guaranteed sales,’ Dulcie told him.

‘Four if we get a bottle for Sally,’ Tilly said.

‘Five if we get one for your mum as well, Tilly,’ Agnes added.

‘That’s if you’ve got five bottles?’ Dulcie challenged the stall holder.

‘What? Of course I have,’ he told her, diving beneath the counter to re-emerge with four more bottles, each of which Dulcie insisted on opening and testing.

Several other shoppers had paused to see what was going on, a crowd was starting to gather on the pavement, something that seemed to please the stallholder, until a distant shrill whistle had him cursing under his breath.

‘Ruddy market inspectors,’ he muttered, before telling the girls, ‘Come on, give us those.’

‘Hold this,’ Dulcie told Tilly, thrusting the bottles of shampoo into her hands and then producing her purse. ‘Here’s half a crown for the five bottles,’ she said, pushing the coin towards the man, and then, before he could object: ‘Come on, girls, I’m that desperate for a cup of tea I’m spitting feathers.’

Several minutes later, as they sat squashed together in a café made suddenly busy by a shower of heavy rain, Dulcie said gleefully, ‘Five for half a crown. That’s sixpence each, and they’re all full, I checked.’

‘Perhaps they are damaged stock?’ Tilly said hopefully.

Dulcie laughed. ‘Who cares where they came from? We’ve got them now and that’s all that matters. Come on,’ she cajoled when Tilly looked uncertain, ‘your mum stocked up her cupboards before the war, didn’t she? That’s all we’re doing now: making sure we’ve got some shampoo.’

‘Mum wasn’t hoarding. She was just following instructions from the Government,’ Tilly defended her mother. ‘It was in all the magazines that housewives had to stock up just in case.’

‘And that’s exactly what we’re doing: stocking up just in case,’ Dulcie told Tilly virtuously, adding disparagingly, ‘Poo, this place stinks of bacon and wet wool. I reckon we should head back to number 13 and get our hair washed ready for tonight. I just hope that Drew keeps his promise to bring along some of those American pilots.’

*  *  *

It was mid-afternoon before Olive got to hear about the shampoo and its purchase. She’d been out helping to sort through a donation of second-hand clothes, along with the other members of the WVS, ready to distribute to their local rest centre. On her return she found the three girls jostling for space in front of the front room fire as they dried their newly washed hair.

‘I suppose we should have turned it down,’ admitted Tilly, getting up from the hearthrug where she’d been kneeling with her head tipped forward to dry the back of her hair. Now she let Agnes take her turn in front of the fire. ‘But since Nancy told you that even hairdressers are struggling to get shampoo it seemed silly to pass it up, especially when Dulcie had bargained the man down to sixpence a bottle.’

Olive sighed, she’d heard – and seen – enough of what some unscrupulous emergency service workers did in the aftermath of bombing raids not to guess how the shampoo had been come by. Theoretically, no decent person could approve of looting, especially when the looted goods were then sold on at a profit to the looter. But whilst they were working together Mrs Morrison had confided to her that she’d snatched up a handful of stair rods she’d seen lying in the street on her way past a recently bombed out house.

‘I know I shouldn’t have done,’ she said guiltily, ‘but my niece is getting married at Christmas and they’re desperate for household goods, and I couldn’t help thinking that if she didn’t have them, someone else would. Now, of course, I feel dreadfully guilty about it. But these clothes we’re sorting are all from bombed-out properties. You can tell that by the state they’re in.’

What she’d said was true, Olive knew.

‘The stall holder said that the shampoo was fire-damaged stock,’ Tilly added.

‘Well, it’s done now,’ was all Olive felt able to say.

The front room certainly smelled very pleasantly of shampoo and clean hair, and she supposed that she couldn’t really blame the girls for being girls.

Two hours later Olive was beginning to wish that her lodger and her daughter were perhaps not quite so much girls after all, as the whole house seemed to have been taken over by preparations for their evening out at the Palais.

The ironing board had had to be set up in the kitchen so that Dulcie could press the semicircular black satin skirt as well as the cream silk blouse she was going to wear with it. Not to be outdone, Tilly had insisted on boiling the kettle so that she could steam some very small creases out of the rose-coloured silk velvet dress Olive had had made for her the previous autumn.

Surveying the chaos into which her normally organised and tidy kitchen had been turned, Olive could only reflect that it was just as well that only two of them were going to the dance and not all four.

Two heads of newly washed, pin-curled hair bobbed up and down as their owners giggled and squabbled. Thankfully Agnes, as an officially paired-up young woman, was not obliged to put herself through the Saturday afternoon ritual of ‘getting ready’ with quite the same intensity as Tilly and Dulcie. She was going to the cinema with Ted.

Tilly, after carefully carrying her newly steamed dress up to the bedroom she shared with Agnes bounced back into the kitchen announcing that she was going to do her nails.

‘Not near my skirt, you aren’t,’ Dulcie warned her. ‘I don’t want nail polish all over it, thank you very much.’

‘It would be better doing your nails somewhere a bit cooler, darling,’ Olive felt obliged to point out, ‘that way the varnish will dry better. It’s like a laundry in here with all the steam.’

‘Somewhere cooler. That means the bedroom, and that’s freezing,’ Tilly complained.

They were having some of Olive’s vegetable soup for tea. It would be warming for them, and, she hoped, wouldn’t leave a smell that would linger on their newly washed hair, Olive decided, as she watched her daughter, her tongue protruding slightly from between her teeth, as she applied the rose-coloured polish to her nails.

Dulcie had opted for bright scarlet polish for hers, and now, as she finished ironing her silk blouse and put it carefully back on its padded satin hanger, she announced, ‘I’m going to go for that Pompadour curls hairstyle tonight. I saw it in a copy of
Woman
magazine that someone had left in the staff canteen.’

‘Pompadour curls? What’s that?’ Agnes asked.

‘You’ve got to draw your hair back from your ears and then pin it into big formal curls on top of your head, and then you tuck the hair from the back under the side curls with some Kirbigrips,’ Dulcie explained, adding, ‘Of course, I’ll need a bit of a hand. Not you, Tilly,’ she told Tilly, who looked up from doing her nails and was about to speak. ‘Your mum can do it for me.’

‘That’s very generous of you, Dulcie,’ Olive told her, her mouth twitching slightly. You couldn’t help but laugh sometimes at Dulcie’s wilyness, even though you knew how adept she was at getting her own way, Olive acknowledged.

‘If it’s still raining when you go out you’ll need to tie a scarf over your hair,’ she warned Dulcie.

‘Oh, I hope it isn’t,’ Tilly wailed. ‘My hair will go all curly if it is.’

‘I thought you weren’t interested in Drew,’ Dulcie pointed out.

‘I’m not,’ Tilly insisted, ‘but that doesn’t mean that I want to look like a fright with wild curls.’

‘What I want is to see this table cleared ready for tea in five minutes,’ Olive took the opportunity to tell them both.

‘I’ll do the table,’ Agnes offered. ‘It won’t take me long to get ready.’

When Tilly and Dulcie had gathered up their possessions and were taking them upstairs, Olive used the opportunity to ask gently, ‘If everything all right, Agnes? Only you don’t seem to be smiling as much as you normally do. Is something’s wrong?’

‘No. Nothing’s wrong. I’m all right really,’ Agnes insisted, so quickly that Olive knew that her instincts had been right.

‘All young couples have their fall-outs at times, and when there’s a war on things aren’t always easy. If you and Ted have—’

‘It isn’t Ted. He’s ever so kind. Just the kindest person there could be.’

‘But someone has upset you? Is it someone at work?’

‘No.’ Again Agnes shook her head, but she was now looking agitated and upset, and Olive would have dropped the subject if she hadn’t seen the glint of tears in her eyes. Agnes didn’t have a mother of her own to turn to – Agnes didn’t have anyone of her own to turn to – and that stirred Olive’s maternal heart.

Having put the ironing board in its place under the stairs, she said, ‘Come and sit down for a minute, Agnes.’

‘I’ll just finish doing the table. Dulcie and Tilly won’t want to be late going out.’

‘The table can wait and so can Tilly and Dulcie. Please tell me what’s wrong.’

Silence and a downbent head were Agnes’s only response.

Olive wasn’t going to give up, though. She reached for Agnes’s hand.

‘Agnes, when you came here to lodge, I promised Mrs Windle and Matron that I’d look after you properly. What do you think they’d have to say to me if they knew that I knew that you were unhappy and I didn’t do anything to find out why? They wouldn’t be very pleased with me at all, would they?’

‘Oh, it isn’t your fault,’ Agnes said instantly, looking dismayed.

‘Then whose fault is it?’ Olive pressed her.

She watched as Agnes’s thin chest lifted and then fell again, a single tear splashing down her face.

‘It’s mine,’ Agnes half-whispered, half-hiccuped. ‘’Cos of me being abandoned outside the orphanage and not being respectable. Ted’s mum likes things to be respectable, you see, on account of them having a Guinness Trust flat, and because of her ending up . . .’ Aghast at what she had nearly betrayed, Agnes covered her hand with her mouth, her face bright red.

‘Agnes, what is it?’ Olive asked her. ‘Ted’s mother has been unkind to you, is that what you’re saying?’ Olive guessed.

‘No. No, she hasn’t been unkind to me,’ Agnes defended her beloved’s mother. ‘I wouldn’t want you thinking that. It’s just, well, I don’t think she thinks I’m good enough for Ted. When Ted brought her and the girls down to our station to shelter from the bombs, she never said a word to me. She just looked at me as though . . . as though she wished that I wasn’t there.’

‘Oh, Agnes,’ Olive sympathised. ‘Have you spoken to Ted about this?’

‘No. It wouldn’t be right, me saying things about his mum to him behind her back. And besides . . . well, Ted’s got plenty on his plate with him having to earn enough to support his mum and the girls. I wouldn’t want him thinking that I was complaining and letting him down. Nothing’s been said at all, and Ted says that the reason his mum doesn’t ask me round to have my teas with them or anything is because they haven’t got the space, and I know that the reason he can’t come here for his Sunday lunch when you invite him is because his mum likes him to help her with the girls on a Sunday. It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about not knowing where I’ve come from, and that not being respectable, especially now, with Ted saying how important being respectable is to his mum.’ What Agnes couldn’t tell Olive, out of loyalty to Ted and therefore to his mother, was just why respectability was so important to Ted’s mother.

‘Oh, Agnes, of course you’re respectable. You’re one of the most respectable girls I know. Ted’s mother isn’t going to hold it against you because you were abandoned.’

But even as she said the words Olive knew that they might not be true. People could be funny about things like that, especially mothers of sons who wanted to marry girls like Agnes.

‘I really wanted to make friends with Ted’s sisters. I miss the little ones from the orphanage, but when Ted brought them down the underground I couldn’t get a word out of them.’

‘I expect the Blitz and all the bombs frightened them,’ Olive tried to comfort her, but Agnes didn’t look very reassured. Then Olive had an idea.