Helen Forrester - Thursday’s Child

When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut .

Gitanjali-Rabindranath Tagore

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

‘Dawn’t be a fool,’ shouted James as he slapped me hard across the face.

I stopped shrieking and began to weep, rocking myself backwards and forwards, my hands clutching at my nightgown as if to tear it.

James, with tears running down his face, was saying: ‘Now, dawn’t take on so, luv.’

His Lancashire accent, usually carefully suppressed, was homely and comforting, and gradually my weeping lessened and I lay back on the pillow. The medicine bottles on the mantelpiece changed from red blobs to definite shapes, and James’s face, so like Barney’s, ceased to be a blurred mirage and I saw how exhausted he looked.

That last winter of the war had seemed particularly long and cold. Although in Wetherport bombing raids had ceased some time before, most of its inhabitants were worn down by overwork and poor food, and Mother was not surprised, therefore, when at the end of March I caught influenza. On the morning that James called, I was feeling better, and, with the promise that on the following day I should get up, Mother had tucked me up in bed with two hot-water bottles, and had gone out to shop. She had been gone only five minutes when the doorbell rang.

I let it ring twice, in the hope that whoever was at the door would go away, but the third ring was such a prolonged one that in desperation I got out of bed, hastily wrapped myself in a blanket and pattered along the icy upper hall and down the equally icy Victorian staircase to answer it.

On the doorstep stood James, looking as white as if he had just seen the sticky result of a direct hit on an air-raid shelter. Mist had formed little globules of moisture on his red hair and on his muffler; his face was blue with cold.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked apprehensively, and shivered in the draught from the open door.

‘Get back into bed and ah’ll tell thee,’ said James.

In spite of ten days of illness, I ran up the stairs and scrambled into bed, my heart pounding with foreboding.

‘It’s Barney,’ I muttered, my teeth chattering. ‘Something has happened to Barney.’

James limped slowly up the stairs, drawing off his gloves as he came, entered my bedroom and sat down heavily on the bedside chair.

One of my hands lay on the coverlet and he took it in his.

‘Peggie, dear, Barney was killed the day before yesterday. Mother got the news this morning.’ The words came in the precise, clear tones he used when clarifying a point of law for one of his clients.

Although the news was something I had feared daily for months, I was stupefied by it and could not for a moment grasp the implication of his words. It was said that lightning did not strike twice in the same place, and it seemed impossible to me that in one war a woman could really lose two fiancés.

Jackie had gone down in the Swallow in 1939, a month before our wedding, and it broke my heart, but I was young then – and young hearts mend – so that when Barney proposed to me four years later life once more became worth living.

I had known Barney all my life. He was big, red-headed and impetuous, and I fell in love all over again. His only sorrow seemed to be that his twin brother, James, was lame and could not, therefore, join the Army with him. This had separated them for the first time in their lives – and now they were separated for ever.

‘Kill me, Lord, kill me too,’ I had shouted in my agony, as James’s words bit into my heart and mind.

I must have had hysterics; otherwise James would never have struck me, but I remember only an enveloping, physical pain. Barney was dead, and the knowledge of it killed part of me.

I clung to James’s hand: ‘Why did he have to die?’ I sobbed. ‘Why not take a useless fool like me, not a good man like him? Why couldn’t I die instead?’

James loosed his hand and put his arm around me. He smoothed the hair away from my eyes: ‘The good God must have other work for you to do,’ he said.

James was not the kind of man to talk about God, and his words stuck in my mind, but at that time I just lay in his arms with his face close to mine, and thought only of my own misery and not of his. He and Barney were identical twins, and he must have felt as if one of his limbs had been amputated without anaesthetic – yet he never mentioned his mother’s or his own suffering.

James was still nursing me against his damp overcoat when Mother returned from shopping. She could never tell the brothers apart unless she saw James limp, and she thought it was Barney sitting beside me.

‘Barney, how nice to see you. Leave at last!’

James said, ‘I’m James,’ and Mother understood.

‘My poor darlings,’ she said. ‘Your poor mother.’

In her time, Mother had faced many crises, and she was wonderfully patient with James and me that day. It was she who remembered to telephone James’s office – James was a solicitor, as was Barney – to ask his clerk to cancel his morning appointments, and it was she who later bundled him off to work, after letting him talk to her about Barney while she prepared lunch for him.

‘Is someone with your mother?’ she asked.

‘My aunt is with her.’

‘Then when you have eaten this, go away and work. Work is a good opiate.’

When he had gone, she came and sat on my bed and talked to me. She did not talk about Barney, but about James, of his brilliant brain, his sensitiveness and the sorrow he must be feeling. She said firmly that Angela, who is my younger sister, and I must help to comfort him and his widowed mother.

I listened dully. At that moment I did not care about anybody except Barney, and every time I thought of his lying, blown to pieces, in a German field, sobs shook me and I writhed in my bed, so that the pillows grew damp and the sheets became hopelessly twisted.

When Mother realised that it was too soon to divert my thoughts to other people, she sat quietly by me until Father and Angela returned from work. Perhaps she knew what I had not realised, that James loved me more than Barney did; and maybe she hoped that when the pain had worn off, I would transfer my love of one brother to the other.

Father came in and stared down at me with pitying eyes.

‘I am sorry, child,’ he said.

He bent and kissed me: ‘Have courage, little girl.’

He went away to eat his dinner, and I heard the quiet murmur of his and Mother’s voices in the room below.

I heard also Angela’s key in the lock of the front door, and the patter of Mother’s slippers as she went to meet her in the hall. I heard Angela give a little cry of anguish; Mother must have told her the news immediately, so that she did not blunder when she came up to see me.