DEAD WOOD AND JASMINE

1. BETTY WAITS FOR EDWINA (possibly Chapter One)

Betty sat in the front room of her converted Victorian terraced house, her arms resting on the embroidered sleeves protecting the chair arms. The two small downstairs rooms had been made into one, bookshelves fitted into the alcoves each side of the white fireplace, with inset gas fire. She flicked a loose thread off one of the sleeves, thinking of all the work she and her sister Mary had put into making them, and gazed round the room, wondering what her daughter would think to it.

Not for the first time she mentally rearranged the capacious armchairs, mahogany table with four chairs tucked under it, the tall Minty bookcase, crammed china cabinet and set of small occasional tables, but it was no good. The furniture was just too large for the room. Most of it had come to her after No 65 was sold up and now no one else in the family seemed to want any of it. You’d think Walter and Cissie would have been glad of something decent, with all that hotchpotch they lived in. Every so often she had tried moving things around but it never looked quite right. She abruptly checked this line of thought; what did it matter now, anyway? By unconscious association, her glance fell on an old leather music case on the floor in front of the bookcase. She eased herself stiffly out of the armchair, picked up the case and took it into the kitchen, where she propped it against the leg of the small formica-topped table.

She looked out of the back window, overlooking her small terrace. A grey day. That awful, dreary half-light of a November afternoon: no sun, no clouds even, just a grey blanket. Raindrops recently fallen lay on the leaves of the evergreen climber outside, not a breath of wind to tremble them into life.

One or two people moved about the buildings a hundred yards or so away. Her mind’s eye superimposed the old station over the modern shops and small offices grouped round a paved square. It became harder to do this as time went by, to picture it all as it had been before Beeching axed the line. Not that it hadn’t improved. These old railway cottages had been an eyesore, the red bricks blackened with soot, most of the yards cluttered with junk. When Betty had moved in here, she had told herself it didn’t matter that Lily had spent her childhood three doors along. Certainly she had hesitated, but then saw that it would be crazy to miss what she didn’t need the Estate Agent to tell her was a sound investment. Already young couples were buying, ‘yuppies’ they called them, two salaries coming in, no children. And although there was no station any more, the new motorway was only a few miles away.

She turned her back on the scene, grown even dimmer as the sky darkened with the threat of more rain. She glanced at the clock. Half an hour and she’d get ready to collect Mary to go and do the church flowers. Edwina was not due till late afternoon. Her eyes went again to the music case and the thought came to her that perhaps she had been drawn here not in spite of, but precisely because of Lily Turner and, through her, Freddy. Like those over-sized pieces of furniture, memories encumbered your life, loomed around you and you clung on to them. Clinging to the wreckage, she thought bitterly.

Betty picked up the music case. One of the sides had come unstitched and some cards and photographs fluttered to the floor as she moved it. She bent down to gather them up, and thumbed through them. Her father standing proudly beside his new Austin, two-tone maroon and black, sign of his increased prosperity in the fifties. A postcard showing the Queen Elizabeth. Several airmail letters from the States. Her parents had gone out to see their daughter Ann, the GI bride, five or six years after the war. Her husband Aaron had sent money for the tickets. They’d stayed best part of two months. People did in those days – it took a week to cross the Atlantic. Out on the Georgic, back on the Queen Elizabeth.

Betty shuffled the cards and papers together and reached in the case for the envelope they had fallen out of. As she pushed them back in, her fingers felt a hard object and she drew out a small package. With a sigh she unfolded the faded tissue paper and sat down, her open hand resting on her knee and in it a silver locket, a little blackened, her initials engraved on the front. She turned it over and looked for the first time in many years at the words, ‘Forget me not. Freddy’. As if she ever, ever could. Dear, precious Freddy, her adored twin, her other self. He had given her the locket, with a tiny photo of him in his pilot’s uniform on one side and on the other a small lock of hair. That beautiful mop of tight chestnut curls, the bane of his life but which she so envied, with her lank, mousy hair without so much as a wave in it. She could see him now, standing in front of the mirror at No 65, forcing a parting and plastering it down with Brylcream.

He gave her the locket on their birthday, in 19** Freddie did not think he was going to survive; he never made plans for ‘when this is all over’, as so many did. He wasn’t afraid of death, only that he might be forgotten. He told her he felt as though he was looking in on life, a life he was not part of any more, like a ghost: seeing, hearing those he loved, but already in the shadows.

Betty took out a couple of photo albums to ease the weight in the music case and put them on the shelf where her cookery and gardening books lived.
________________________________________________________________________In childhood they had squabbled, like all children. Betty idolised him and longed to do everything he did, share everything with him – friends, interests. Not being allowed to, most of the time, only heightened the appeal. Sometimes he would taunt her, as he went off without her, but sometimes he’d feel sorry and bring her back some trophy from his adventures: an old coin dug up in the search for Roman remains, an apple scrumped from Mr Fitton‘s orchard. Once it was a caterpillar in a matchbox. Dirty clothes and scratched knees would earn a half-hearted rebuke from his mother; for her it would have been a severe scolding.

At 11, they both won scholarships, Freddy to the Boys’ High School, Betty to the Girls‘ Grammar , but she had been taken out at 15 to work in the shop. Freddy stayed on; it was obviously more important for him to get a good education. Freddie was sensitive to his sister’s disappointment and spent time showing her his text books and lesson notes. He introduced her to poetry and when Dad put up the summerhouse they would spend hours in there, reading aloud from Keats or Shelley, sometimes making up imitative poems of their own. She could not harbour a grudge against him. He’d usually call in at the shop on his way home, cap pushed back over his unruly curls, one hand squeezing her waist while the other sneaked a bullseye off the counter. It was useless to protest that Dad would notice – he always went through the books with a fine tooth comb – Freddy would just take the sweet out of his mouth and say, ‘Shall I put it back then?’ She never told him that she would have to pay for it or have it deducted from her already meagre wage.

Even after Lily Turner was taken on to help out at weekends and she and Freddy became sweethearts, he still told her everything and often they would go about as a threesome. Of course, it made life easier for Freddy at home if he could say he was going out with his sister and avoid cross-questioning.

Then the war came. Freddie had started his third year in the sixth form. He was to take the Oxford and Cambridge Entrance examinations. He wanted to read English and was determined to get a blue for cricket or rugby; he had captained the school teams for both and played cricket for the County. But the talk in the common room was also of the danger from Germany and how shamefully Chamberlain had behaved over the Sudetenland. They were far from convinced of ‘peace in our time’ and fierce debates were held as to whether or not action should be taken to stop the maniac Hitler. And once he got into a scrap with a chap who said he would refuse to fight. ‘So what would you do if a Gerry attacked your sister?’ Freddy had asked. ‘Well, at least I’d be innocent of shedding blood’ was the reply. ‘And what is your sister, if not innocent?’ Freddy had turned his back in disgust; you couldn’t hit a coward.

Freddy did not go back to school after Christmas 1938. He had been offered a place at Cambridge but joined the RAF. Before starting to train as a pilot, he married Lily. Mrs Shepherd pursed her lips and sulked: she could never confront Freddie, however angry she might feel, but a sense of disappointment hung about her, of being let down. To the others she lamented his choice of a girl from Railway Cottages: he, an educated man, an officer, who could have anyone, and the others passed on these remarks, as she perhaps intended. Freddie never reacted. He let it all wash over him: Lily had given herself to him and he owed it to her to do the honorable thing. He might be killed during training and what if she were pregnant. Anyway, he loved her. In the end he was sure everyone else would love her, because they all loved him and because he had no experience of being denied what he wanted.

Another glance at the clock. She had lost track of time and would now be cutting it very fine: they had yet to go and choose the flowers. Just as well she had told Edwina she’d leave a key hidden ‘just in case’. Betty pressed the locket into her palm and picked up the tissue paper, then changed her mind and fastened it round her neck with the help of the mirror over the fireplace.