Wartime Wife Read Free Page B

chicory crawled along his tongue.
    The living room was comfortable though dark. After eating and half finishing the coffee, he settled down to doze, the tiring journey, the fear of what the future held finally catching up with him – except he didn’t sleep. Something caught his eye.
    In the corner of the room, he saw – wooden, old-fashioned, but compelling – a gramophone. Next to it was a pile of records. Like a man starved, he slid one after another off the pile, hiseyes widening and his heart lifting. Jazz, popular songs of the day and classical; the latter were in the majority.
    Lovingly, he caressed the works of Hoagy Carmichael, Ella Fitzgerald and Caruso. Amongst them all he found a performance of
Cavalleria Rusticana
.
    The music wafted over him, salve to a tormented soul. The memories returned. Fearing to face them and blaming the music for their resurgence, he went to bed, but even there he could not escape. The past was too recent, too raw.
    Behind his closed eyelids he was back there, in 1929, pledging allegiance to the Nazi Party. To do otherwise would have isolated him completely from his friends, the young men he’d known for most of his life.
    The dream was pleasant enough, but unfortunately led into the later nightmares. He wasn’t ready to face them, and wasn’t sure he ever would be.
    In the morning, Michael checked his inheritance. The pledges – so he had found them named in his uncle’s ledger – were stacked on shelves, in cupboards and drawers, each labelled as to their content: watches; gold, watches; silver, bracelets, necklaces, rings; miscellaneous silver; miscellaneous gold – the latter, he discovered, included a number of gold teeth. He wondered what misfortune had occurred to necessitate the obvious discomfort of having a filling ripped from one’s mouth.
    Furniture was stacked and labelled in a back room, clothes parcelled and placed on myriad shelves.
    Some of the items pledged saddened him; a child’s clothes – pledged to pay for a funeral, it said in scrawled writing. So Crombie was right. His uncle had been too sentimental for his own good. The clothes were shabby, never likely to be sold on or reclaimed. He threw them into the pile he was making of items to be disposed of. It was growing swiftly.
    Other items almost made him laugh out loud or certainly raise his spirits.
    Combinations. New.
    A glass eye?
    A pair of black lace garters. Never worn.
    He didn’t hazard a guess as to the reasons why any of them had been pledged. After checking the dates – years ago – he threw the items onto the pile, had second thoughts about the black lace garters and retrieved them.
    The next thing he did was to destroy the family photographs. He didn’t want them staring down at him. He didn’t want to remember who and what they were because in doing so he would be reminded of what he had done.

Chapter Three
    One week later, Mrs Riley came in response to Mary Anne’s letter, sneaking along the back lane like a thief in the night, just as instructed.
    Mary Anne looked up as the back gate creaked open, the sound making her stomach churn. As she eyed the quick, thin figure scurrying up the garden path, her instinct was to curl her hand over her stomach. God knows, every mother’s first instinct was to protect the new life within.
    But you can’t keep it. Harry will hate you being pregnant just as he did the other times. And you have to live with him – if you can call it that.
    The formalities were quickly dispensed with. Mary Anne wanted no friendship with this woman. The bottle was as small and brown as the person who brought it. She clenched her jaw as she handed over the two pounds she was being charged. Two pounds! She didn’t doubt that the canny old woman had made enquiries first to see how much she could afford. She had a shrewd face and small, quick eyes, the sort that eyed up everything in order to weigh up its worth.
    Mary Anne did a few sums in her head. With a bit of