Secrets of a charmed lif.., p.6
Secrets of a Charmed Life, page 6
“Stop it,” Emmy said.
“Julia has every right to think whatever she wants!” Fresh tears rimmed Mum’s glassy eyes. “Don’t you tell her! I mean it, Emmy!”
Emmy placed the bottle atop the fridge and used the moments when her back was turned to assess her own reaction to the news of Neville’s death. She felt nothing. Neville, most of the time an unemployed actor, had lived on and off with them for four years, starting when Julia was two. Emmy didn’t like the way he treated Mum and she didn’t like the way he looked at her when she started to develop a woman’s body. But Julia loved that Neville could sound like an old man or a French painter or an American cowboy. She loved his outlandish stories and crazy songs. He was the kind of father every kid thought she wanted. He never raised his voice to Julia, never corrected her, never made her mind. After he’d disappear for months on end, he’d come back with a fanciful tale of the adventure he had been on, bearing trinkets for Julia and excuses for Mum. He could see that Emmy saw straight through the lies and pretense, so he brought her nothing. He was handsome and talented. He was also an opportunist and a playboy. Emmy celebrated the day he said he was moving out for good, even though Julia and Mum both cried.
They hadn’t heard so much as a word from him in nearly a year. Julia believed he was somewhere in India on a movie set.
His death meant nothing to Emmy.
“Did you hear what I said?” Mom railed. “Don’t you tell her, Emmy.”
Emmy turned from the fridge. “Someday Julia won’t be satisfied with vague answers about where he is.”
“Today’s not that day.” Mum held out the juice glass.
Emmy took the glass and placed it in the sink where the breakfast dishes were still soaking. “I never said Neville was a lying cheat.”
“You knew I shouldn’t have trusted him. You were just a kid and somehow you knew. God, isn’t that ironic.”
Emmy opened a cupboard and pulled out a tin of corned beef, a loaf of pumpernickel, and a jar of peaches, as Mum apparently had no plans for their supper. “What’s done is done, Mum.”
“Why did he tell me his parents were dead? What was the purpose of me thinking that?” Mum crumpled the handkerchief and tossed it onto the table next to the mail. “Why would he do that?”
“Does it really matter now?” Emmy withdrew six slices of bread, picked off a few flakes of mold, and set them on a plate.
“It matters to me! Why would he tell me his parents were dead?”
Emmy could think of a number of reasons why Neville had lied to Mum about his parents, not the least of which was that when he wanted to move in with them; it was a lot easier for Mum to welcome him when she thought he had nowhere else to go. “Because he wanted you to feel sorry for him. Or because he liked lying to see if he could get away with it. He was an actor, Mum. He made his living pretending to be something he wasn’t.” Emmy opened the fridge and pulled out a jar of mustard.
“Aren’t you Miss Know-It-All,” Mum murmured.
“You asked me. I’m just answering your question. He lied to you because it suited his ends.”
“He told me he didn’t have the money to marry me. Did I ever tell you that? What a fool I was. His father is a professor! He probably has all kinds of money. What a daft fool I was. You’d think I’d know better. . . .” Her voice trailed off.
Emmy opened the tin and the greasy-sweet odor of canned meat permeated the air in the little kitchen. “If you don’t want me to tell Julia right now, I won’t. But if she asks me why he’s taking so long to come back from India, or wherever else she thinks he is, I’m not going to lie to her.”
Mum inhaled deeply. “You won’t have to. I’ll tell her my own way, on my own day. If she asks you where he is, you tell her you don’t know. Because you don’t.”
Her mother was staring at the letters on the table. It occurred to Emmy that if Neville’s mother knew about Mum, she might also know Neville had a daughter.
“How did his mother find you?” Emmy asked. “Does she know about Julia?”
“She knows,” Mum said slowly, her tone calculating. “He told his parents as he lay dying in a hospital in Dublin that he had a daughter in London. That’s where he was. Dublin. Living with a woman half his age, no doubt.”
“And?”
Mum swung her head around. “And, what?”
Emmy set the tin down. “Do they want to see her?”
Mum picked up the top letter and pocketed it. “Doesn’t matter if they do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that. It doesn’t matter if they do. They’re not going to. I want them to want to for a good long time. I want them to want to see Julia and not be able to. I want them to want it so much, it drives them near crazy.”
Emmy forked out a watery slice of meat and slapped it on top of one of the slices of bread. Juice spattered on the counter. “Brilliant idea, Mum. So very fair to Julia.”
Mum rose on unsteady feet and yanked on Emmy’s arm, forcing her to look at her. More meat juices erupted from the tin in Emmy’s hand and speckled the floor.
“That’s right. It is a brilliant idea. It’s my brilliant idea. Julia deserves to have what is rightfully hers. Just like we all do. Just like you do, Emmeline.” Mum let go of her arm. “And I intend to see she gets it.”
Emmy watched as her mother kneeled down and used the handkerchief wet from tears and whiskey to mop the meat juice off the floor.
“They obviously know where you live, Mum. Do you really think you will be able to keep these people from seeing Julia until you have what you want from them?”
Mum rose to her feet in one swift movement. “Is that what you think? That this is about what I want? When has anything ever been about what I want?”
Emmy turned back to the sandwiches. “That’s all it ever is,” she muttered.
Mum pulled at Emmy’s arm again, more gently this time. Her calm touch surprised Emmy.
“You’re wrong, Em.” Mum reached up to touch her daughter’s face and Emmy involuntarily flinched. Mum tenderly tucked a curling wisp of hair behind Emmy’s ear. “Someday I am going to prove it to you.”
For a moment, there was no age difference between the two of them, no crossed purposes, no opposing forces. They were just two women trying to chisel a happy life out of a giant hulk of rough-edged circumstances.
Then the moment passed. Mum pulled the letter from her pocket, held it over the rubbish bin, and saw that Emmy was watching her. She shoved it back inside the pocket and sat down again.
“There’s a designer who wants to teach me how to make patterns for my wedding dresses,” Emmy said a moment later. “He’s Mrs. Crofton’s cousin. He wants to see a couple of my sketches. He might mentor me in exchange for some hours working in his studio. He designs costumes for the West End, Mum.”
Mum furrowed her brow in consternation. Emmy could see that her mother was forming a response that Emmy would not want to hear.
“I’m nearly sixteen. Practically an adult,” Emmy said, already in defense mode.
“Nearly isn’t is, Em. You’re not an adult yet. Not in the eyes of the law.”
“But I know I can handle the extra work. Even when school starts in September. I can handle it. I’ve only a year left, anyway.” Emmy’s voice was rising in pitch and volume, and she tempered it to prove she was the rational adult she was claiming to be. “It’s not going to be a problem, Mum.”
“School isn’t starting in September.”
“What do you mean? Of course it is,” Emmy said.
Mum picked up the other envelope that had come in the day’s post and held it out.
Emmy wiped her hands on a dish towel and then took it.
The stationery was crisp and smelled of ink and importance. The return address was the school’s. Emmy sensed as soon as her fingers touched the paper that the letter would change everything that had happened that day. Her eyes caught the words “invasion” and “safety.”
“You and Julia are being evacuated to the countryside, Emmy,” Mum said. “They’re serious about it this time. You’re leaving London next week. All the children are.”
Seven
THE first time London’s children had been evacuated, nearly a year earlier, Mum had flat-out refused to send Emmy and Julia away. Her attitude then had been that there wasn’t a war, not on English soil, anyway, and she was not going to put her daughters on a train to God-knows-where. Emmy remembered her saying as much to their teachers at school, Thea next door, and anyone else who asked why Julia and Emmy were still in London. Emmy also remembered seeing something else in Mum’s eyes besides the defiance. Mum had felt it wasn’t in her best interest to send them off into the countryside, but for reasons Emmy was unsure of. There seemed to be more to Mum’s refusal than just outward unwillingness to be parted from her daughters.
There was no precedent for London being emptied of her children; no previous war had demanded it. The last time there had been an exodus for safer homes was during the plagues, and then it was only the rich who fled the cities. The adversary this go-around was not a disease but legions of army planes carrying bombs. It was an astounding concept that Germany could strike England by air and subdue her without even setting foot on her soil. But Mum had scoffed at the idea that the only way to ensure Emmy’s and Julia’s safety was to entrust them to strangers.
“You and Julia aren’t going anywhere,” she had said when the letter had arrived in August 1939, advising her to prepare her daughters for evacuation. When the other children in the neighborhood trudged to school carrying suitcases and gas masks, their weeping mothers trailing after them, Emmy and Julia had stayed home and played checkers. Some mothers, who had looked down their noses at Mum the day before, apparently hopped over the police cordon at the train station and snatched their children back before they boarded. Those who bravely waved good-bye got postcards from billeting officials a week later advising them of where and with whom their children were living. Emmy found out after many of her classmates started coming back to the city that foster parents arrived at designated churches and community centers in rural villages to look over the trainloads of London children and then they chose the ones they wanted like buyers at an auction. One of Julia’s six-year-old friends had been parted from her older brother because, so the story went, he could work a field and she could not. That little girl still had nightmares six months later. In the end, it had all been for nothing. The doomsayers who foretold that the Luftwaffe would flatten London had been wrong.
Emmy and Julia weren’t the only children whose parents could not or would not bow to the notion that evacuation was the only course of action that made any sense. There was a set of parents just down the street from the Downtrees who kept their children back, and on the next block over, a couple more. The sisters and these other children had gathered at the home of one of the houses for impromptu lessons since the schools closed after the children left the city. But within a month, the schools had all opened again because most of the children had been brought back home. At the time, everyone had concluded that Britain would win the war on the fields of France and in the air over the English Channel.
But when Dunkirk fell some months later, the air raid sirens began to wail a little more often and the doomsayers began to raise the specter of a second evacuation of London’s children. Emmy gave it little thought. Mum had kept them back during the first one; she’d do the same if there was another.
Emmy had been happy to stay behind during the first evacuation.
And now she was insistent that she stay behind for the second.
But this time, Mum would not hear of it.
For half an hour Emmy argued with her.
Emmy was too old to be evacuated.
There was no real danger.
How did Mum know they would be safe just because they weren’t in London?
And the real reason, of course. Emmy had a job. And a dress designer interested in seeing her sketches.
Emmy was not going.
Mum had an answer for every excuse Emmy gave her. The letter in her hand said every child fifteen and younger was to be evacuated. The danger was genuine. The only safe place was in the country.
As for Emmy’s little job, as Mum called it, did Emmy really think there would be fittings for wedding dresses with the war looming for real now, overhead?
Besides, Julia could not go alone. Not after what they had seen happen to classmates the last time.
“You have to go with her,” Mum said. “We’re done talking about it. You’re going.”
“Please don’t make me, Mum.”
“It’s not up to me!”
“Yes, it is. You can do what you did last time. Just refuse to comply.”
Mum’s eyes had glossed shiny with emotion. “This time it’s different. You really must go, Emmy. It is for the best.”
Emmy wanted to grab her mother by the shoulders and shake her. Shake her until she told Emmy everything.
“The best for you, you mean,” Emmy said instead. “Now you can spend the night with whomever you wish, whenever you wish, and as often as you wish.”
Emmy waited for the slap across her face. She wanted it. She wanted to feel the sting of Mum’s reproach. She wanted the welt to rise on her skin and blossom crimson in front of Mum.
Mum raised her hand slightly and Emmy braced herself for the impact.
But the slap didn’t come. Mum lowered her arm and a second later it hung loose at her side.
“You and Julia are leaving on Wednesday,” she said. “Don’t tell her about Neville. She doesn’t need to know right now and this is going to be hard enough. You have to go with her, Em. Hate me if you want, but you know I can’t send her away alone. You know I can’t.”
Mum turned and walked out of the kitchen.
Emmy felt as if she had been slapped anyway.
* * *
EMMY dreaded telling Mrs. Crofton that she was being forced to leave London. For the next two days after Mum got the notice, she imagined herself arriving for work on Tuesday and telling Mrs. Crofton she was being evacuated. She pictured Mrs. Crofton replying that she would not be able to keep the job open until Emmy could return. Emmy rehearsed hearing Mrs. Crofton say that there was no way now to hide Emmy’s age from her cousin, and that Emmy would have to hope she could win him over when she was older, assuming he still had any interest. Emmy pictured Mrs. Crofton muttering she should never have hired Emmy in the first place. She didn’t want to keep hearing those words in her head, but they played and replayed over and over until it seemed like she had already told Mrs. Crofton and the dream was already dead. Everything about the situation seemed so ridiculously unfair. Emmy couldn’t completely blame Mum for the turn of events, but she needed to blame someone for the war and Emmy was angry at her mother for insisting she evacuate for Julia’s sake, as though Emmy’s own safety were not a consideration.
Mum came home Monday evening from a meeting at the school with a list of things the girls were to bring and not bring. Julia, excited to be going on a train to the country like some privileged heiress, was full of questions. She was enthralled at the idea of spending the autumn at a country home and riding a horse—as if all country homes had one—and growing her own pumpkins and skipping stones over a pond and counting stars. Emmy had only one question. How long would the evacuation last? The year before, the children began returning within a month. She could only hope it would be the same this time around. She had to get back to London. This opportunity for her and her designs would not wait for her.
Wishes didn’t come true by wishing.
On Tuesday afternoon before work, Emmy took Julia next door to Thea’s as usual. Their neighbor was in the middle of getting together a box of supplies for her Anderson shelter, a hut of corrugated steel covered in earth and half-buried in the ground in her back garden.
The Downtrees’ flat was connected to Thea’s and six others so that their brick, two-story homes looked like one long house with the same front door repeated seven times over. Each of the narrow flats had a splash of lawn in the front and a tiny garden in the back. Brick partitions separated the gardens. The neighbors had little flower beds and tomato vines and pots of pansies in their tiny gardens. The Downtrees had a stone slab, overgrown hedges, and dirt. Thea had erected an Anderson shelter in her minuscule garden when she was told her cat would not be welcome in the public shelter the neighbors all shared in the cellar of the shoe repair shop at the end of the street. Her private shelter nearly filled the space from garden wall to garden wall. The Andy looked like a dog kennel made by someone who had no idea how to construct one and so the builder decided to bury the evidence of ever having tried. Mum thought it was hideous; Julia was plain terrified of it.
“Oh my goodness, do you still need me to take Julia today?” Thea’s eyes were shining with agitation. The news of the second evacuation had everyone on the street preparing for the worst, whatever that was.
“I still have to go to work today. It’s my last day—at least for a while,” Emmy said. “I’m hoping we’ll be back soon.”
Thea stared at Emmy as though she had spoken in a foreign language, one Thea didn’t understand.
“Soon?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m hoping this evacuation will be like the last one.”
Thea was holding a wicker basket filled with biscuits, tins of sardines, and bottles of soda water, but she set this down and told Julia, who was standing next to her, that the mother cat had moved the kittens into a bureau drawer and she should go see how cute they were. As soon as Julia had dashed upstairs, Thea turned to Emmy.
