At the end of the rehearsal the following night Violet made a big point of waiting for Eddie to clear away his paints and clean his brushes while others went on their way.
‘Ta-ta, Stan,’ she said with a cheery wave. ‘Goodbye, Evie. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’
She and Eddie were the last to leave and it was poor timing on their part that they happened to bump into, of all people, Donald Wheeler, ready with his big bunch of keys to lock up the building for the night. Violet’s heart skipped a beat and she took a step backwards.
He too seemed dismayed. ‘A change is as good as a rest, eh?’ he said with heavy innuendo and a curl of his lip, together with a nod in Eddie’s direction as Violet squeezed by.
‘Now, Donald, that’s not very nice, especially since Violet has done nothing to warrant it.’ Eddie jumped to her defence. ‘I won’t have you upsetting her like that.’
‘It’s all right, Eddie. Take no notice.’ Intent on hurrying off, Violet didn’t look back.
But Eddie stood his ground and glared at her uncle. ‘No, it’s not all right. The way you’ve treated Violet since Winnie died isn’t fair. In fact, your rotten behaviour is the talk of Chapel Street.’
‘Is it now?’ Donald sneered.
‘Yes. And what’s the reason behind it? That’s what we’d all like to know.’
‘What goes on between me and Violet is our business, nobody else’s,’ Donald muttered, thrusting Eddie to one side and inserting the key into the lock. ‘And if, as you say, you don’t want me upsetting her, I’d warn her to steer clear of Hadley in future if I was you.’
The push incensed Eddie, who grabbed the older man by the back of his collar and spun him round.
‘Don’t, it’s not worth it,’ Violet pleaded from a distance of ten yards. She saw how grey and ill her uncle looked and had an overwhelming desire to put as big a distance as possible between them. ‘Come on, Eddie – please!’
‘Count yourself lucky,’ Eddie said as he let Donald go. He leaned in and spoke in an angry whisper that he hoped Violet couldn’t overhear. ‘You’re a bully, Donald Wheeler. If it was left to me, I’d stay and teach you a lesson you wouldn’t forget.’
Violet’s uncle squared up as if for a fight. ‘You and whose army?’
The schoolboy bravado made Eddie laugh then he shook his head. ‘Violet’s right. It’s not worth it.’ He unlocked his gaze from Donald’s and backed off, striding to join Violet. Then he kick-started his bike and waited for her to climb on behind him. They rode out of the yard and onto the main street, leaving Donald Wheeler to secure the building and return to his lonely lodgings.
Violet was still upset when they arrived at Chapel Street so Eddie went into Jubilee with her, through to the back kitchen where he sat her down at the table and made them both a cup of tea.
‘No sugar, ta,’ she said when she saw him dip the spoon into the bowl.
‘One won’t hurt,’ he argued as he went ahead. ‘You turned white as a sheet back there. I was worried about you.’
‘I’m all right,’ she insisted, though she couldn’t stop her hand from shaking as she raised the cup.
‘You don’t look it.’ Deciding to stay where he was until he was sure she was better, Eddie settled into a seat across the table. ‘Come on, why don’t you tell me what’s wrong? It’ll do you good to get it off your chest.’
Everything’s wrong, she wanted to say. But her hidden suspicion about her mother and Uncle Donald was still too shocking for her to share.
Eddie reached across the table to clasp her hand, which reminded him of a trembling baby bird discovered in its nest. ‘This is about your mother’s bracelet, isn’t it?’
She gasped and tried to jerk her hand free. ‘Please, Eddie. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I knew it,’ he persisted. ‘I saw how much it meant to you when you found it in its box and yet you haven’t said a word about it since. There’s got to be a reason for that.’
The initials inside the heart had wormed their way into every twist and turn of her brain. She woke up thinking about it and went through each day bowed by the suspicion that her uncle was, in fact, her father and that her whole life thus far had been based on a lie.
‘There is a reason.’ Hurriedly she took her hand away and rushed from the room. ‘Wait here,’ she pleaded, taking the stairs two at a time and returning with the blue box. ‘I haven’t mentioned it but it’s been preying on my mind and now I think it’s time to show you this.’ She gave Eddie the box.
‘Do you want me to open it?’ he asked.
Violet nodded. ‘Don’t look at the bracelet, look at the note.’
‘“To dearest Flo …”’ he read with a puzzled frown. ‘Do you mean the fact that there’s no signature?’
‘Yes – that set me off thinking. Then, later, when I happened to mention the bracelet to Uncle Donald, he stormed off.’
‘That’s par for the course these days, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but it upset me and made me take another look.’ Violet leaned over Eddie’s shoulder to open the flap of the envelope and point to the initials inside the heart.
Eddie pursed his lips. ‘F and D,’ he said gently. ‘Christmas 1914.’
‘I’ll be nineteen in September.’ Violet’s voice was scarcely audible as she shared with Eddie her deepest fears.
‘The D here stands for your Uncle Donald – is that what you think?’
‘Yes.’ The secret was out and there was no getting away from the shameful fact that her mother had betrayed her husband while he was away at war. She had slept with her husband’s brother. The bracelet and the heart were proof.
‘We can’t be sure,’ Eddie cautioned. He saw how much Violet suffered and wanted to wipe away the tears.
‘No,’ she sobbed. ‘Let’s not kid ourselves, Eddie. I know in my heart it’s true.’
Eddie came round the table and raised Violet to her feet. He held her so close she felt his strong heartbeat and the warmth of him, breathed him in and clung to him to stop herself from falling down a deep hole into despair, into a dark, empty pit that had no bottom.
‘It doesn’t make any difference now,’ he murmured. ‘It’s all in the past.’
Safe in his arms, Violet’s resistance broke down and she started to sob in earnest. ‘But it still matters. Don’t you see? I’m not who I thought I was. I’m a different girl.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I’ve discovered a past that I’m ashamed of. I can’t even bear to think about it. And – what do I call him now, “Uncle” Donald? – he can’t even look me in the eye. You saw what he was like.’
‘Because he’s in the wrong and he knows it.’ All Eddie wanted was to console Violet and hold her until she stopped crying. He stroked her hair and planted soft kisses on the top of her head.
‘It makes a difference, though, doesn’t it?’ Violet raised her tear-stained face to read the answer in his expression.
‘Not to me, it doesn’t,’ he whispered, looking deep into her pleading eyes. ‘Whatever’s gone on in the past, you’re still the girl for me.’
Once more Violet rode the rough seas of her feelings about her origins – up and down the giant breaking waves of regret, shame and disappointment. Somehow, though, it seemed easier with Eddie’s help to banish the hurt and carry on ignoring the note hidden inside the velvet case, tucked away in the box under her bed.
Then there was work that she loved to raise her spirits – pinning and cutting material that smelled of fresh cotton and starch, using scissors to shear through layers of crisp fabric, placing raw edges together then pinning, tacking, gathering and sewing until a finished garment emerged.
In general, as the days went by, Violet found that she preferred being in the attic workshop to serving in the increasingly busy shop, but she dutifully took her turn downstairs, remembering to stick to the two main commandments of shop work – thou shalt not lose thy temper and thou shalt smile and flatter at all times.
‘We need a new outfit for Gertie,’ Ida decided on the Friday afternoon of their first week in business, standing behind the counter with Violet as they got ready to close for the day. ‘Gertie’ was companion to Maud whose blank gaze dominated the window of the recently re-titled ‘Jubilee Drapers and Dressmakers’. ‘She needs to be wearing something that will really brighten the place up.’
‘We could make a wedding dress for her,’ Violet suggested almost immediately. ‘White silk with a dropped waist and a scalloped hem, decorated with tiny artificial pearls.’
‘We could change them round and put Gertie in the window. We’d make quite a splash with that,’ Ida agreed and straight away they went to the pattern books and were so taken up by the plan that they ignored the tinkle of the shop bell and instead kept their heads buried in their fashion bible.
‘Shop!’ Colin Barlow’s loud voice and the rap of his silver-tipped cane against the counter startled them. He brought with him the stale smell of tobacco smoke, which overwhelmed the cologne that he must have applied after shaving first thing that morning. He wore a panama hat, a linen blazer over a pale blue shirt and striped silk tie – as usual, quite the dapper man about town.
‘Good afternoon, ladies. I take it you’re still open for business?’
Violet jumped to attention. ‘Certainly, Mr Barlow. How can I help?’
‘My wife asked me to call in on my way home. What was it for now? Let me think.’ Running a gloved hand along the counter until he reached the stand that displayed sheer silk stockings, he cast a salacious eye over Violet, from her stylishly bobbed hair, down her wary face, on to her long, slender neck and down again to the flowered, flimsy crêpe de Chine blouse which she’d chosen for its lightness and coolness on this hot August day. ‘What did Mrs Barlow require from Jubilee, I wonder?’
‘Perhaps she wanted to know how we were getting on with her latest garments,’ Violet suggested, refraining out of shyness from giving an exact description of Alice Barlow’s recent order for pink silk lingerie consisting of petticoat and camiknickers edged with Belgian lace.
‘Ah yes, that was it – her under-things!’ Colin Barlow smiled to see the blush that crept up Violet’s neck and over her cheeks. ‘She’d like to know – are they finished?’
Violet clung to the second commandment – thou shalt smile. She swallowed hard and tried to ignore her customer’s wandering eye. ‘I’m not sure, sir. Shall I go upstairs and see?’
‘No need,’ Ida interrupted. ‘It so happens that I spoke to Muriel half an hour ago. She thought we’d have the work finished by Monday, as promised.’
‘Alice will be disappointed – and so will I.’ Appearing disgruntled, but with a smile hovering on his lips, Colin Barlow seemed in no hurry to leave. ‘Perhaps I should buy her some stockings to make up for it.’
‘Shall I go upstairs and check again?’ Violet asked Ida, by this time so embarrassed by the blatant way that Colin Barlow was undressing her with his eyes that she felt her palms begin to sweat. She rushed up to the attic without waiting for an answer, only to find that the earliest, revised deadline Muriel could meet for Alice Barlow’s under-things was in two hours’ time.
Violet went back downstairs and reported accordingly. ‘Miss Beanland says she will do her best to finish the work and get the garments delivered to you at Bilton Grange later this evening.’
‘Will she now?’ Everything about Violet – her words, her appearance, and especially her embarrassment – seemed to amuse the chemist-shop owner. ‘That’s very good of her. And who will deliver it? Will it be the good-looking young man on the motorbike as before?’
Ida looked up from her pattern book. ‘No, I’m afraid Eddie’s working at the picture house this evening.’
A frown appeared on Colin Barlow’s brow, but Violet could tell that it was for theatrical effect. He pretended to be at a loss. ‘Oh, dearie me.’
‘I’m holding an extra rehearsal for my principal players in Hadley tonight and Muriel will have to go to her St John Ambulance meeting once she’s finished here,’ Ida went on. ‘But, Violet, you could borrow my bike and cycle out there with Mrs Barlow’s order.’
Violet’s heart sank at the same time as a fresh smirk appeared on Colin Barlow’s face. ‘Are you sure it would be all right for you to cycle all the way out to my house with the parcel for my wife?’
Sweating in earnest now, Violet knew she had to agree. ‘Of course, it would be no trouble at all.’
‘Smashing!’ came the quick rejoinder followed by an equally rapid exit. ‘Now that, ladies – and I speak from the point of view of one who recognizes a well-run shop when I see one – is what I call excellent customer service!’
‘I could have done without this,’ Violet grumbled to Dick Thomson after she’d caught the bus up to Valley Road and knocked on the door of number 20 to borrow Ida’s bike, propped in its usual place against the front of the house. She deposited Alice Barlow’s carefully wrapped petticoat and camiknickers in the wicker basket attached to the handlebars while Dick sat in his overalls on the doorstep and smoked his pipe.
‘What’s the rush?’ he asked.
‘Don’t ask me. But when the Barlows say jump, we jump – that’s all I know.’
Violet would have stopped for a longer conversation with Eddie’s dad, who seemed to her more approachable than Eddie’s mum. Though at fifty-four he was worn down by the years of hand-to-mouth existence that had followed on from the war, he usually managed a smile and a joke and Violet enjoyed the similarities between father and son – they had the same loose-limbed, easy gait, for instance, and the same thick hair, though Dick’s was now grey and dull whereas Eddie’s was a glossy dark brown.
‘I’d better get a move on,’ she told him as he turned the bowl of his pipe and tapped it against the step. ‘Say hello to Eddie from me when he gets home from work. Tell him I hope to catch him later.’
‘Rightio,’ Dick promised, watching her manoeuvre the pushbike out onto the road. ‘And mind you take care on that moor road. The dynamo is broken so you’ll have no lights once it gets dark.’
‘I will,’ Violet promised. ‘I want to get this over and done with long before dusk, believe me.’