Harry was a changed man after his visit to see Kitty and his mum in Newcastle.
He came back from the North wreathed in smiles, bringing with him a beautiful pair of pea-green leather gloves he’d bought for Ethel in Fenwick’s. She gasped when she saw them, because they must have cost a small fortune.
‘I’d been saving up for them because I wanted to give you something special, pet,’ he said, as he drew her into an embrace. ‘I know I’ve not been much good as a husband lately. Kitty gave me a bit of a talking-to. I promise I’ll try to do better.’
Ethel tried not to show it, but it rankled with her that his sister held such sway over his moods, whereas she was powerless to stop them, even though she was his wife. As she kissed him, the guilt about what she had done with Len on Christmas Eve sat leaden in the pit of her stomach. She’d sneaked back into the house in the early hours of Christmas morning, when Da was still sound asleep, and he hadn’t said a word about her staying out late beyond asking if she’d enjoyed herself. She had replied, truthfully, that she’d had a wonderful night.
William tugged at her sleeve. He had a toy aeroplane and a set of tin soldiers that his Aunt Kitty and his grandmother had given him for Christmas. Da swept him up into an embrace. ‘There’s my bonny lad! You come and tell me all about the big ships you saw on the Tyne and give your mam and dad a moment’s peace.’
As Harry sat down in the scullery, it became clear what had really lifted his black mood.
‘I’ve got a job offer, Ethel, back up in Newcastle,’ he said excitedly. ‘It’s engineering for the ships, like I used to do, and it’s good money, too. We can all go home.’
‘But our home is here, in London!’ she cried, before she could stop herself.
His face fell. ‘I thought you missed the North, Ethel, and you’d want to get away from the smog and be back where we grew up, where we belong.’
She turned her back and bustled over to the sink to compose herself for a moment. All she could think of, every waking moment, was Len, the fella from around the corner. Being in his arms had ignited something in her and she knew it was wrong, but she wanted more. The thought of being miles away in Newcastle was more than she could bear.
‘I like it down here, Harry,’ she said, as if she were reasoning with a small child. ‘We’re settled now and I’m making friends. William loves it and he’ll be starting school soon and Da’s got a job. What about him? He’ll be on the dole if we go back up to Newcastle. There’s more work down here in London . . .’
Harry stared at his hands, as if the answer to their problems might magically appear at his fingertips at any moment. He pursed his lips. ‘I’ve accepted the job, pet. It would be madness to turn it down.’
‘Well, you should have asked me first!’ she shouted, hurling a tea towel to the floor and running from the room. ‘Nobody cares what I want! I won’t leave London and you shan’t force me to either!’
Ethel’s tears had dried by the time Harry came up to bed. He stroked her hair and she turned to face him.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, putting his arms around her. ‘I only wanted to make you happy. You needn’t come with me back up North just yet if you don’t want to. I’ll go to Newcastle, just to get us some money saved up, and you can have time to think about things and come when you are ready. If things pick up in London and I can get an engineering job back here, I’ll be back like a shot. I’ll send you my wages, Ethel. I want to be able to buy you nice things, to treat you right and look after you properly. I know I haven’t done a great job of it until now.’
He went on: ‘There are so many men out of work now, pet, I don’t know how long my job at the cardboard-box factory would have lasted in any case. With a job offer like I’ve got back in Newcastle, you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, not these days.’
‘Oh, Harry,’ she said, gazing up at him. She was secretly delighted that she wouldn’t have to leave London and her tone softened. ‘I wasn’t trying to be difficult. It’s just with losing Mam, we’ve been through so much upheaval. You’ll only be away a little while, won’t you?’
He kissed her, and she felt herself responding to his embrace, but when they made love, she closed her eyes and it was Len’s face she saw, not Harry’s.
As January gave way to a freezing cold February, Harry moved back up North to start his new job.
He wrote to her often, sending her most of his wages just as he had promised. She did her best to write back, with snippets of news of what William had been up to as he had not long since started school, but she wasn’t much of a letter writer and, in any case, she had other things to think about.
Ethel had started to feel rather queasy. It was a familiar feeling, a sickness and a hunger all at the same time, and it was at its worst first thing in the morning. She’d taken to putting a biscuit on her bedside table at night to try to stave off the urge to retch when she woke up by nibbling it.
When the waistband of her skirt began to get tight a month later, she went to see Dr Perkins and sat in his damp, crowded waiting room, fidgeting with her fingers, avoiding catching anyone’s eye in case someone asked why she was there.
Once she was in his consulting room, she lay on the examination table, staring at the ceiling as the doctor prodded and poked around in places she didn’t want to think about.
Then he glanced up, took off his glasses, and said, ‘Congratulations! It looks like you’re going to be hearing the patter of tiny feet soon.’
‘How far gone am I?’ she said, her throat parched.
‘Well, from what you’ve told me about your last monthly bleed being early in December, I would say about twelve weeks or so. You’re the third I’ve seen in here this morning. It must have been all that fine food at Christmas dinner. There’ll be quite a baby boom in Clapham come September!’
He laughed at his own joke as she got down from the table and dressed herself behind the screen. The ticking of the clock on the wall seemed to grow louder and the world appeared to be spinning. She had to steady herself for a moment. ‘I think I might need a glass of water.’
After a quiet sit-down with one of his nurses, she hurried home but there was only one person she wanted to share this news with.
And that was Len.
Ethel waited until William was asleep in bed and Da had gone out to his church meeting before pulling on her coat and sneaking out of the house.
She hadn’t seen Len since that fateful evening, although she’d spent ages peering out of the front window in the hope of spotting him walking up the street. He seemed to have changed his route, perhaps to avoid any awkwardness between them or, more likely, any gossip from the neighbours.
The cold air nipped at her as she hurried up the road and around the corner, her footsteps echoing as she went. It was gone eight o’clock and dim gaslight glowed through curtains all along the street as families gathered together to keep out the winter chill.
In her dreams, she’d imagined herself back at Len’s house on Christmas Eve so many times. Everything that had happened just seemed so right; how he’d taken her in his arms and how natural it had felt when they were in bed together. Afterwards, he’d held her for ages and told her tenderly, ‘You are such a beautiful woman, Ethel.’
Now her heart was in her mouth as she rapped on Len’s blue front door.
He answered with a look of surprise, but the warmth in his eyes was unmistakable. ‘Ethel! What are you doing here?’
She glanced down at her stomach and back up at him.
‘You’d better come in,’ he said.
She followed him through to the scullery, where his shoes were sitting, neatly polished, on some newspaper on the kitchen table. A pan of potatoes was boiling on the stove and the smell of cooking meat made her stomach rumble; she’d been too nervous and sick to eat anything for her tea earlier.
He moved the shoes off the table and pulled out a chair for her to sit on.
She glanced around the room, taking in the traces of the life he’d led before he was widowed. There were some ornaments on the mantelpiece – a flowered jug and a china dancing girl – and an apron hung from a peg by the back door. A crocheted mat had pride of place over the radiogram on the sideboard. Everything was spick and span.
‘Len, there’s no easy way to say this,’ she began. ‘I’m expecting. And I think it’s yours.’
He sat down opposite her and clasped her hands in his. ‘Oh, Ethel, I shouldn’t have gone as far as I did on Christmas Eve, forgive me. It’s just you’re such a treasure, I couldn’t help myself. I wasn’t trying to break up a happy home.’
Before she knew what was happening, all the longing of the last two months without seeing him spilled out.
‘I’m not happy, Len,’ she said. ‘I’m not happy at all. Harry’s not the man I thought he was when I married him. He’s away working up North now and the worst thing is, I don’t miss him; I miss you. I know that sounds silly because we barely know each other, but he doesn’t talk to me like you did that night. Sometimes I think he can’t stand the sight of me. And he’s got troubles of his own that, well, they get in the way of us being together.’
Len’s face lit up. ‘I only stayed out of your way because I didn’t want to cause trouble, but I can’t stop thinking about you, Ethel. I would give you all the tea in China if I had it. If you ever need a listening ear, I’m here. What do you want to do about us?’
The way he said ‘us’ made her stomach flip. He really did see them being together; it wasn’t just a drunken fling.
‘We can’t be seen to be having an affair,’ she said. ‘Not round here. And we can’t tell anyone about the baby.’
The woman in the next street over had just about been tarred and feathered for cheating with the tallyman.
‘Are you certain it’s mine?’ said Len. ‘I mean . . .’
‘From what the doctor said about the dates, yes, it’s yours, Len.’
‘But what about your husband?’
‘Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ she said conspiratorially. There was a little well of excitement building inside her at the thought of this shared secret with Len. Only they would know the truth. This baby would bind them forever, no matter what. It wasn’t a betrayal of Harry, no. He had betrayed her by not being the person she thought he was, with all his selfishness and strange ways. He’d let her down and she’d ended up in Len’s arms. That was the truth of the matter.
‘It wouldn’t be too hard to make him think it was his, but it would just be a case of convincing him that the baby had come a bit early, that’s all,’ she said, staring at the floor. For some reason she felt guilty admitting to Len that she’d been with Harry, as his wife; it was as if the betrayal was the other way around.
‘Ethel, please don’t misunderstand me,’ he said. ‘I know I have no rights over you and if you were mine, I wouldn’t expect a thing anyway. I’d just be glad you were in my life. A man can’t own a woman or expect things of her. That’s not what marriage is about, is it?’
Ethel looked at him. He was older than Harry, maybe five years or so, greying, and his eyes crinkled when he smiled, but she thought he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. For the first time in her life, a man was treating her with respect. Da had controlled her, Harry had neglected her, and now Len wanted to care for her, to treat her as his equal. She felt almost giddy with desire.
She leaned in closer. ‘We can get through this, can’t we, Len?’
He gazed at her adoringly. ‘Yes, together we can face anything, Ethel. If you’ll let me, I’ll be here for you, as much as I can. It’s nobody’s business but ours, that’s the way I see it; it’s our secret.’
Ethel stood up and walked over to the back door. She slipped the apron on. It fitted her perfectly, even with her growing bump.
‘Yes, it’s our secret. We’ll find a way, won’t we?’ she said, beaming at him. ‘But first, I’d better get your dinner out of the oven before it burns to a cinder.’
Harry was over the moon to find out that Ethel was expecting but when the baby came a full three weeks early at the end of September, instead of mid-October, he was so worried, he jumped on the first train down from Newcastle.
Ethel lay in bed glowing with happiness, with the baby nestled in her arms, wrapped in a beautiful shawl knitted by her friend Doreen. William was so curious about the new arrival, he kept poking his fingers through the bars of the cot when the baby was sleeping and Ethel had to tell him to keep off. He had a mind of his own, just like his father, and that drove Ethel up the wall. There were questions from him morning, noon and night about how things worked and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was exhausting having to deal with that on top of the baby. Da was good with him, he kept him busy, tinkering about in the back yard. In fact, they were managing so well without Harry, she barely noticed he was gone these days.
She tensed as she heard the front door slam followed by his footfall on the staircase and as he came into the bedroom, she gave him a tight little smile.
Harry rushed to her side and gazed down at the bundle in her arms. He leaned in and kissed Ethel. She tried not to tense at his touch. She felt nothing for him now.
‘My daughter,’ he said, stroking the baby’s cheek. ‘My little girl. Daddy’s here.’