People had very ambivalent feelings about Connie Hardy. She had everything anyone could want – big house with acres of grounds, a car of her own, loads of clothes, holidays on ocean liners, people to do her work for her but… she was married to Freddy Hardy.
Councillor Hardy was a big fish in the Markham pond – so big that there was little room for anything else except small fry. In fact, Councillor Hardy was a pike with a successful mass production bakery business. Having consumed the local competition, he was ready to move into deeper waters.
He saw the approaching war as his chance to make a Million.
Aldershot camp was well within his delivery area, as were Bovey Tracey and Salisbury Plain: all encampments where many soldiers would eat huge quantities of bread.
Connie and Freddy Hardy had had only one child. Eve, whose twenty-first birthday it was today. The party was flawed in Connie’s eyes, because she knew that, for all her planning, her husband would turn it into something unstylish and quite vulgar.
‘No time, trouble, effort or money spared, Con. I’ll supply the cash, and leave the rest to you.’
But he never could, never would, never did!
‘Next to Eve’s wedding, this will be Markham’s event of the decade.’
He adjusted the white silk triangle in the breast-pocket of his dinner jacket. He was one of those men black tie dress was made for. He looked handsome, and knew that he looked handsome. Even more so now that his hair had thinned almost to baldness, giving him that remarkable combination of virility and maturity.
‘How’s that?’
Elegant Connie paused for a moment from rolling up her fine silk stockings and looked across at him. Neither of them looked their age.
‘You look very handsome, Freddy.’
‘Do I?’
‘You always do, and you know it. As your mother says – Freddy could charm the birds from the trees.’
How else, Connie thought, did so many people tolerate him? Well, fear for one thing, I suppose. Fingers in everybody’s pies. Wealth? Money buys a fair bit of tolerance. And charm. Power, money and charm – what else did a man need to take his place at the top of the pile?
He had good bones, sensuous mouth, deep-set eyes and straight nose, all of which, plus his well set-up body on which clothes hung perfectly, had the effect of making people believe that there was charm in his ruthlessness. There was not, of course – ruthlessness never has charm – but people will believe anything if it suits them or if they are flattered.
Connie Hardy knew every one of his faults and forgave him none of them, yet she was still attracted to him after nearly twenty-five years of marriage. The Councillor’s enemies would say, ‘She’s such a lady and he’s such a swine really – it makes you wonder what she ever saw in him.’
When he was at his worst, Connie Hardy often wondered the same thing. When at his best, she knew. In bed, they were very good together.
Twice she had decided to leave, only to find herself the next day in a state of satiety, as she always was when he turned on the charm – pleading and promising and stroking and combining romance with practised love-making. He was a double-dealer at heart. For twenty-five of her forty-five years she had been bound and gagged by him. Silver-chain bonds and silken gags, it is true, but she had never been free of him for a day. Her libido was strong, and had been fixed upon him from the day they met.
He picked up a complicated arrangement of black and tobacco-coloured georgette drapes and fly-away panels from the bed. ‘Put it on and let’s have a look.’
She abandoned her stockings and stepped into the georgette sack which immediately became a most elegant gown of the latest French chic.
He came and stood beside her, viewing their reflection with satisfaction. ‘We two are OK, Connie. Still not a woman in the county to touch you for class, Connie. We’ll show ’em tonight. Last fling before the lights go out.’
‘We are not giving Eve her Coming of Age purposely to show them, Freddy.’
‘Well no, Connie, but we shall just the same, shan’t we?’
He flashed his white teeth at her as he often flashed them at his secretary when getting her to work overtime for no extra pay, or at a bunch of old aldermen who were being difficult with their votes.
‘Don’t get into any arguments about council business.’
‘So long as nobody gets into arguments with me.’
‘That’s just what I mean, Freddy. It is for you to see to it this evening – it is not their daughter’s party, it’s our daughter’s.’
‘I know.’
‘Then don’t go within twenty feet of Councillor Greenaway.’
Councillor Greenaway was the first and, so far, the only Labour man ever to be elected to the town council. He had set out to disrupt the cosy club that up till then had ruled the town and, although his one dissenting vote on matters such as how the rates were spent did not count for much, the pertinent – or impertinent, if the colour of your politics was blue – questions he asked in Council received a disproportionate amount of reportage, and created more discussion in the Tory Club lounge than was good for its Alderman and Councillor members.
Connie was ready now and sat smoking a cigarette and watching Freddy as he glossed back his hair and ran his fingertips over his Ronald Colman moustache. ‘The man keeps a damn sweet-shop. If I don’t want to argue with him, then I don’t.’
‘He’s also one man who doesn’t rely on you for his living, so it’s no skin off his nose if you lose your temper at your daughter’s party.’
‘I could take him if I set my mind to it… buy up his lease or something. But he’s all right. He’s good for me, none of the kiss-my-backside attitude like the rest of them. If he wasn’t a damn Red, I could quite get on with him – funny enough, we do get on in our own way.’
‘Well, for tonight, you forget he’s a damn Red.’
‘All right, all right, you don’t have to go on, I want it to be right for Evie just as much as you do… In fact… look,’ he paused and felt in his jacket pocket. ‘I went to Winchester today, for a special little present I had made, just from me to Eve.’
‘Won’t the car be enough?’
‘That’s our official present, look good in the Clarion, this is just from me – father to daughter.’
Connie Hardy opened the box and said an unambiguous ‘Oh, yes’ at its contents. A pair of ornate, sparkling dress-clips in the shape of letter Es, and in a kind of style that was most popular amongst girls who shopped for their jewellery at Woolworth’s – in fact Woolworth’s sold a very good copy of these very clips. It was the current fashion for girls to give one as a token of fidelity. They cost only sixpence, cheap enough for a girl to bestow her fidelity quite frequently.
Although he had the aforementioned health, money, power, etc., he unfortunately did not have any innate sense of style, and having found it very difficult to acquire, he had married it instead. Connie’s own present to Eve was a slender art-nouveau statuette.
‘Oh Freddy… they’re… they’re…’Oh my dear Lord! she thought, what can I say? ‘…they’re real diamonds.’
‘Of course they’re real – wouldn’t be much point if they weren’t.’
In Pompey that same night, Able Seaman Greenaway and his two mates mingled with the shoppers in Lake Road. He had made up his mind that he would apply for transfer to where promotion was going to be fast. He was no fool: he knew that he had no serious chance of getting Freddy Hardy’s consent.
‘Let’s all apply,’ suggested David Greenaway. ‘We should probably all go.’
‘Och noo, Greeny, you’ll not get me in a sardine can.’
‘But think of the promotion, man,’ David Greenaway said. ‘We could be petty officers within a year.’
David Greenaway was of unremarkable height and breadth, made more noticeable when he was with the two Glaswegians with whom he had palled up on their first day – big, broad lads, one with flaming red hair, the other gypsy black with pock-marks of virility pitting his chin. With their little round caps and tight jerseys that showed off their physique, the young sailors swung along abreast through the market, turning the heads of Portsmouth girls done up and ready for a night out.
‘Ye know, Greeny, these Pompey lassies are a bit of all right. I should’ne mind going to a hop.’
‘Not for me, I’d rather just have a quiet pint. You two go, I’ll see you back on board.’
‘Come on, we’ll find a dance-hall with a bar,’ said the red-haired one.
‘We’ll toss ye for it,’ suggested his pock-marked mate.
The Glaswegians lost, cheerfully.
‘Come on, Greeny, cheer up. You look like a wet week in Dunoon.’
David Greenaway looked into his beer. ‘It’s my girl’s twenty-first birthday.’
‘Aw, and she’ll be living it up without ye. Let’s chip in and have a wee tot or two.’
The Scotch whisky loosened David Greenaway’s normally tight tongue.
‘She’s the reason why I need to go on the subs.’
‘You’ve no cause to bother your head about promotion, Greeny,’ said the red-haired sailor. ‘An educated chap like yoursel’, with your old man owning a shop of his own, why, you’ll be in a peaked cap soon enough.’
‘Will she no have you as you are?’ asked the other.
‘It’s not like that… though I do want to get some quick promotion. It’s not Eve, it’s her father, he’s the big potato in our town. Rich… big house… owns a bread and cake factory. A borough alderman and a right swine with his employees. Fancies his chances with the women.’
Dave Greenaway’s two mates understood: no decent working-class family would gladly welcome the daughter of the owner of a cake factory who had so many other points against him – alderman, skirt-chaser.
‘And his darling daughter fancies ye?’
‘More than fancies me. My God, she’s lovely. I can never see her without thinking of big, ripe luscious strawberries with cream.’ His gaze was away out of the sawdust and smoke of the bar. ‘She’s like that… pink and tender and sweet.’
The red-haired sailor nudged his mate. ‘I can see ye’ve got it bad, Greeny.’
‘I want to ask her to marry me.’
‘Ye could run away to Gretna.’
‘No, no… for a start my Mam wouldn’t forgive me.’
Her beautiful, educated voice had not a trace of Hampshire breadth.
We could run away and be married over the anvil at Gretna Green, David.
His strawberry-flavoured girl would have run to the ends of the earth with him.
No, Eve, I don’t want us married without our two families there when we come down the aisle of St Mary’s, I want the Greenaways and the Hardys smiling at one another.
That’s like waiting for the Montagues and Capulets to smile at one another.
It was, perhaps, an awareness of their universal, ageless situation that gave Eve and David such romantic notions about one another. They were very much in love with forbidden love – had been since they first met.
If we wanted to go behind their backs, Eve, we could simply get a Special Licence. Although Dave Greenaway thought himself and Eve to be beyond hidebound influences and convention, a Special Licence still held for him connotations of illicit sexual connection and hasty marriage. I want my Mam to respect you.
‘Is she having a shindig for her birthday?’
‘Oh yes, a great do with a marquee and a band, it’ll be in all the local newspapers.’
‘Well then, she’ll no doot be dancing, so what about it? I’d not say there was much wrong wi’ a dance for Greeny too.’
So, with his troubles shared and two decent Scotches inside him, Able Seaman Greenaway was persuaded to go dancing, and had not at all a bad time with a plump, blonde-haired girl who had sweet breath and whose breasts were like satin cushions inside her satin blouse and who wore his hat through the streets when she let him walk her home. But, of course, she wasn’t Eve.