When Miriam got up the next day her head felt thick and her mouth dry. She had slept right through until eight o’clock. Pulling on her warm dressing gown, Miriam padded down the carpeted staircase and into the breakfast room. There was now just the one place setting, which told her that both Jack and Helen had already had their breakfasts and had left for work.
She’d told Helen to go into work as normal, but not to give anything away. Not a word to anyone. It didn’t matter what Helen felt like doing, or saying, she had to put on a show that she knew nothing. Miriam knew it would be relatively easy for Helen to avoid Gloria and the rest of the women welders, but she realised she should also have stressed that she had to steer clear of her father. Jack was the potential spanner in the works. Helen had been using any excuse to go and see her dad at Crown’s since he’d started back at work and she was worried that her daughter would get overemotional and blurt out that she knew about Gloria. And the baby.
Helen adored her father, which might well mean that she would either spill the beans or, worse still, take Jack’s side. And that would truly be a disaster. Miriam needed her daughter on-board. There was to be no jumping ship, which could well be a possibility. After all, Helen now had a half-sister. Even if it was a bastard half-sister.
Miriam realised she would have to ingratiate herself with Helen as much as she could. With hindsight she wished she had been a little more sympathetic to her daughter when she had arrived home and found her in a state yesterday. But, Miriam reflected as she sat down and looked out into a side garden that was looking rather sorry for itself having been battered in yesterday’s winds, it was no use crying over spilled milk. She’d work her way round Helen. She knew how. Had done it enough in the past.
‘Morning, Mrs Crawford.’ Mrs Westley bustled out of the kitchen and into the breakfast room. She was careful to use the tone she always used to greet her employer of a morning. There was to be no hint of last night’s upset.
‘Just a pot of tea, Mrs Westley. I don’t feel that hungry this morning,’ Miriam told her cook.
As Mrs Westley headed back to the kitchen, Miriam looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. She had an hour to get herself ready, and then she would start putting her plan into action.
Jack had been relieved coming back last night to find the house quiet. When he’d read Miriam’s note that she had taken to her bed with ‘one of her heads’, he had breathed an even bigger sigh of relief. He didn’t think he had it in him to pretend that everything was normal.
He’d woken surprisingly early, and without the usual feeling of grogginess that he seemed to be suffering from of late, and had left the house before anyone else was up. He’d hurried to the Royal, but when he walked onto the ward and saw that Gloria wasn’t there he panicked.
‘Sir.’ Jack felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see the same nurse who had been on duty yesterday evening. ‘Mrs Armstrong has just been discharged, but if you hurry, you’ll catch her down the pharmacy on the ground floor. She’s collecting a prescription.’
Jack didn’t need telling twice and ran along the corridor and back down the flight of stairs. He was looking for signs to the chemist when he saw Gloria walking towards him.
‘Jack!’ she said, her face a mixture of surprise and reprimand. ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ she whispered as she reached him.
Jack put both hands on her shoulders and inspected her before planting a kiss on her lips.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, still scrutinising her face. He noticed a bruise the size of a penny had developed on the bridge of her nose.
‘I’m feeling fine, honestly.’ Gloria looked about her, anxious that someone they knew would see them. ‘Just got some painkillers, not that I need them.’
Jack caught her worried look and took her arm. ‘Gloria, I don’t give a damn who sees us any more. Now come on, I’ve got a taxi waiting to take you home.’
Gloria was just glad to get out of the hospital and into the black cab that was waiting at the bottom of the steps to the main entrance. Her concern about being seen dissolved as she climbed into the back of the car. Jack climbed in the other side.
‘Number fifty-six Fordham Road, please,’ Jack instructed the elderly cab driver.
Gloria looked at Jack with a half-smile on her face. ‘Did the girls tell you where I live, or did you remember?’ she asked.
Jack took hold of Gloria’s hand and squeezed it.
‘I remembered.’ He looked as pleased as Punch. ‘And what’s more, I’ve started to remember lots of other things too.’
A few minutes later they were pulling up outside Gloria’s home. As Jack paid the driver and gave him a generous tip, he looked around him.
‘God, I remember this when it wasn’t quite so nice,’ he said, suddenly hit by the memory of squalid tenements and open gutters.
‘You mean when it was a slum,’ Gloria said. The estate had been built just a few years previously after the decision was made by the Corporation to raze all the town’s poorest areas and replace them with new housing estates.
Once indoors, Gloria went straight into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
‘That hospital is lovely. I even had a bath there last night and they washed my clothes. But,’ she added, her face deadpan, ‘their tea’s like dishwater.’
Jack stood and stared at the woman busying about in her little kitchen. He had started to remember so much these past few days – images, thoughts and memories. He realised that this woman he loved, the one now hunting around in her cupboards for some biscuits, was different to the one he’d known, and it wasn’t his memory that was amiss. Gloria had changed. She was different from the woman he had left a year ago, when they had said their farewells in the unlit porch of St Peter’s Church.
Jack carried the tea tray into the lounge.
‘You’ve changed a lot, haven’t you?’ Jack put the tray on the coffee table and sat down in a slightly worn-out, but very comfortable armchair. Gloria smiled. Never in a million years would she have thought that Jack would be here in her home, and that he would be sitting in what she had always secretly called ‘Vinnie’s throne’.
‘I have, but then I think we all have. This war’s changing us all in so many different ways.’ Gloria poured the tea and as she did so, the sleeve of her overalls rode up her arm slightly, exposing a sleeve of bruised skin.
Jack felt himself wince. Then he felt the familiar flood of anger as he thought about Vinnie. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on the bloke.
‘Do you know what’s happening with Vinnie?’ he asked.
Gloria looked up at Jack to see that his face had gone stony-hard; as she looked back down again, she saw her exposed, discoloured forearms. She pulled her denim cuffs so that they were covering the visual reminder of yesterday’s beating.
‘Well,’ Gloria said, knowing exactly what Jack was thinking, or, rather, planning on doing. It was exactly the reason why she hadn’t wanted it to come out that Vinnie wasn’t the father. It was like a bloody line of dominoes – you knocked the first one and there was a chain reaction.
‘From what the police told me yesterday, the impression I got was that they were going to keep him in custody for a good few days. Maybe even a week. I think they wanted to keep him in until they’d got him in front of a magistrate.’
Gloria looked back down at the tray, then picked up the plate of shortbread and offered some to Jack. She hoped he hadn’t picked up on the slight flush she’d felt come to her face. A flush she always got when she told a lie. Not that it was a lie as such – more an exaggeration. The police officer who had come to take her statement had told her that Vinnie would be kept in the cells overnight, but was unsure as to how they were going to proceed thereafter.
‘So, they’re going to charge him?’ Jack asked, trying to keep his voice even.
Gloria nodded, although she had no idea if they would or not. It was still a domestic. And she was sure that once Vinnie had calmed down and told them his tale of woe about being lied to by his conniving wife – who, he had just found out, was not only having an affair but had also had another man’s baby – he might just end up walking out of the custody suite a free man.
Jack pushed himself out of the armchair and stood up. ‘We have to come clean about everything now.’ He started pacing the small living room. ‘Enough secrets.’
Gloria had known this was coming. She had lain awake most of the night in the hospital, her mind turning over what to do, and what not to do.
She knew Jack and Vinnie well enough to have a good guess at what was going through both their minds. Vinnie would be sitting in his cell, becoming increasingly wound up. He was probably just simmering at the moment as the beating he had given her had probably taken his temper off the boil. He’d also be worried about what the police were going to do with him. But she knew it wouldn’t be long before he’d find himself back at boiling point. Gloria had learnt a lot these past few months. She had been working long hours, and had her hands full with Hope, but she’d still had time on her own to think, and she had come to realise just how controlling Vinnie had been. Or rather, how controlled she had been by him. And if there was one thing that got Vinnie’s temper piping hot, it was the fact he wasn’t in the driver’s seat any more.
‘I agree with you,’ Gloria said, taking a sip of her tea and savouring it. It had been a long night and it was looking as though she had another long day ahead of her.
‘That’s good.’ Jack was visibly relieved. ‘I thought I’d have an argument with you on my hands.’
Gloria took another sip.
‘I agree. It’s inevitable we have to tell everyone about us, and, of course, about Hope.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But I really think we have to choose our timing well.’
Jack looked at her and was about to object. If it was up to him, he would march right back to the home he shared with Miriam and tell her everything.
‘I know you just want to go straight back to Miriam and tell her everything,’ Gloria said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘And so do I,’ she stressed, her arms stretched out as she gently took hold of Jack’s large hands, gnarled and scarred from his early years at the yard.
‘It’s going to be wonderful to finally be free of all these secrets and lies.’ Gloria looked around her front room, which was spick and span and homely. ‘We can live here together, or better still, find a new place that we can make our own.’
Jack nodded, thinking how lovely it would be to come back to a place they could call their own and simply enjoy being a family.
‘But,’ Gloria added, her voice becoming more serious, ‘this isn’t just about us. I did a lot of thinking last night.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Obviously, I don’t give a fig about Miriam. You know that already. She’s the most heartless person I know, just out for herself.’ Jack nodded his agreement. Since he had started to get his memory back, he’d had flashes of his former life with Miriam and they had not tallied with the picture his wife of twenty years had painted – in any shape or form.
‘It’s Helen I feel awful about.’ Gloria’s voice changed; the guilt she was feeling could be heard in her voice and seen on her face.
‘She was so brave saving me from Vinnie. No one’s ever stood up for me like that. She came to see me in the back of the ambulance and I felt terrible. It was far more painful than all the beatings I’ve had off Vinnie. I felt so guilty. There she was, risking getting battered to a pulp herself—’
Gloria broke off. She’d been lying on the ground, her arms shielding herself from Vinnie’s fists, when she’d caught a glimpse of Helen, her face contorted with fear as she’d swung the shovel round and knocked Vinnie flying.
‘That girl was terrified. But she protected me all the same.’ Tears had now come into Gloria’s eyes. How wrong could you be about someone. They had all demonised Helen for so long now, she had become a two-dimensional figure. A caricature. But she wasn’t. She was a young woman who had problems, just like they all had. And, just like the rest of the women welders, she’d stuck her neck out when required and put her own safety on the line to help another woman in need.
‘I want you to give her one last Christmas before this scandal breaks. Because it is going to be scandalous, no matter how we go about it. Her life is going to change, just as ours is. And I know how much she adores you – how she was by your side while you were in the coma and how determined she’s been to help you get better.’
Gloria had now started to cry. She hated hurting people. And she knew Helen was going to be devastated when she found out.
Jack got out of his chair and sat down next to Gloria on the sofa. He wrapped his arms around her and let her cry out her tears. He knew Gloria was right. And he realised that he had been pushing thoughts of Helen to the back of his mind, convincing himself that she would take it all in her stride – that she’d be fine. But he knew he was kidding himself.
‘You’re right,’ Jack said when Gloria had stopped quietly weeping.
‘You’re right,’ he said again. ‘Helen is going to be devastated. I’ve not thought it through, have I? I’ve been selfish. And the last thing she needs is two selfish parents.’
There was a pause as he thought about Christmas, which was just a few days away. It would be hard to keep his feelings in check around Miriam, but he’d have to. His daughter deserved it. He owed her. He would make this Christmas special. And it might also help lay the foundations for a future in which he hoped Helen would be able to forgive him, and perhaps also become a sister to Hope.