of her parents to one another, like swans partnering for life; they had also stolen her future. She would never ever forgive them.
Chapter Fifteen
‘So you’re not coming home for Christmas then?’
Even as her mother asked the question, it was Edith she was watching, Dulcie thought resentfully as she observed her sister talking animatedly several yards away to a group of admirers, who had halted her progress across the crowded floor of their local working men’s club where she had been singing.
Dulcie hadn’t wanted to come to listen to her sister and she certainly hadn’t wanted to listen to her mother praising her so dotingly for doing so, but she’d got caught out on Sunday after church when her mind had been on the previous evening and not what her mother had been saying to her, and too late she realised she’d agreed to join her family to listen to Edith’s debut as a professional singer.
The club was a rectangular room with a bar occupying the full length of the wall at one end, apart from a door that led into a narrow passageway containing the ladies’. The gents’ was outside in the yard where the brewery loaded the beer barrels into the cellar. Behind the bar was a kitchen where volunteers, who sometimes included Dulcie’s mother, made up sandwiches sold at the bar under a glass cover. The distempered walls were stained with the cigarette smoke, which wreathed round the room, gradually rising toward the ceiling.
Behind the bar, with its mirrored back and glass shelves, the club’s manager, overweight and sweating, was pulling pints whilst his wife and the barmaid washed glasses at the small sink.
Dulcie hated the place as much as the rest of her family seemed to love it. It was where the whole neighbourhood came to celebrate weddings, births and deaths, after going through the formal church proceedings attendant upon such occasions.
Since tonight was a ‘social’ night, which meant that the all-male membership was allowed to bring along their other halves and families, the place was packed, whole families, including grandparents, aunts and uncles, in some cases, crowded round the cheap shabby tables on equally cheap, shabby and mismatched chairs. A harsh light beamed down on the small stage, where Edith had performed, at the opposite end of the room to the bar. The whole place stank of stale beer, male sweat, and cheap cigarettes, Dulcie thought, fastidiously wrinkling her nose. A door in the middle of one of the long walls opened into the pool room – a holy of holies that women were not allowed to enter – and it was plain from a few all-women tables that some of the men had already taken advantage of that embargo to escape into it.
‘No,’ Dulcie answered her mother’s question.
‘Are you sure this landlady of yours wants you staying there over Christmas? It seems a rum do to me. You’d think she’d want her house to herself and not filled with lodgers. I know I would. Christmas is for being with your own folk.’
Her mother’s words hit a nerve but Dulcie wasn’t going to let her see that. Olive had been very cool with her since the night Tilly had rebelled, and Dulcie knew that her landlady blamed her, even if she hadn’t said so. The truth was that hers was probably as welcome a presence at number 13 over Christmas as it would have been at her own home, Dulcie thought bitterly. Just as her mother would be fussing over Edith, so her landlady would be fussing over Agnes, making a big thing of her not having a family of her own. Not that Dulcie was going to tell her mother that.
Dulcie tossed her head, her blonde curls caught back in a pretty diamanté bow-shaped hair clip that she’d managed to get reduced, after she’d discovered that it had been slightly damaged. Dropping it on the floor earlier in the week and deliberately twisting the clip so that it didn’t fasten properly had been easily done whilst Miss Timmins, whose eyesight wasn’t very good, and who was really supposed to be retired but who worked one day a week had been in charge of the hair ornaments counter. Poor old Timid Timmy, as they all called her, had looked confused and blinked desperately, her thin, veined hands trembling slightly as she tried to examine the faulty catch. She had been easy for Dulcie to manipulate, and the departmental floor manager when summoned had agreed that the clip could be reduced. He might have given Dulcie a sharp look as she had paid for her purchase but she had felt triumphant rather than guilty. Just like she had felt triumphant that Saturday night at Hammersmith Palais, knowing that David would rather be with her than with his stuck-up fiancée-to-be.
Feeling triumphant was very important to Dulcie. It made her feel she was in her rightful place in the order of things.
‘Actually,’ she told her mother untruthfully, ‘my landlady asked me especially as a favour to her if I would stay there over Christmas.’
‘Oh, well, if she wants you there . . .’ her mother responded, using a tone of voice that suggested to Dulcie that her mother couldn’t understand why that should be the case. Immediately Dulcie’s combative spirit was aroused.
‘She does. She told me that she thinks of me as another daughter and that she doesn’t know how she’d manage without me there to give her Tilly a few words to the wise when it’s needed, me being older than Tilly and everything. Of course, I told her that I’m pleased to do my bit. Treats me ever so well, she does, just like I was her daughter really, always getting me little bits of treats.’ Warming to her deception, Dulcie started to embroider the fabrication she had created.
‘She took us all shopping to the Portobello Market the other week and she bought me ever such an expensive blouse, pure silk and French design, and—’
‘Oh, here comes Edith now.’
The warmth for her younger daughter in her mother’s voice as she interrupted her infuriated Dulcie, causing her to say unkindly, ‘I don’t know where Edith got that dress from but she’s certainly not dressing anything like as well now that she hasn’t got my wardrobe to raid any more. It doesn’t suit her at all.’
‘She looks lovely in it,’ Dulcie’s mother protested indignantly. ‘Pink always was Edith’s colour. I remember when she was born I had this lovely pink layette that I’d saved ever so hard for. The first new baby clothes I’d had. I had to make do with hand-me-downs for you and for Rick.’
‘Oh, Mum, I thought I was never going to get over to you, so many people wanted to stop and tell me how well I’d done,’ Edith enthused, laughing happily as she hugged her mother.
‘More like they couldn’t believe what you were wearing and wanted to get a closer look,’ Dulcie told her nastily, causing the smile to disappear from Edith’s flushed face as she turned back to their mother, looking tragic and upset.
‘Take no notice of Dulcie, love,’ their mother comforted Edith. ‘If you ask me, Dulcie, it’s just as well you aren’t coming home for Christmas, the way you’re always upsetting poor Edith.’
‘It’s just because she’s jealous, Mum, because I can sing and she can’t,’ Edith trumped Dulcie’s earlier insult.
‘Call that singing?’ Dulcie returned, not to be outdone. ‘It sounded more like someone was trying to kill a cat. And you missed that top note in your last song.’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘Yes you did.’
‘Dulcie, why do you always have to upset poor Edith?’ their mother demanded.
‘Why do you always have to take her side?’ Dulcie shot back, taunting her sister, ‘Mama’s little girl who can’t do any wrong.’
‘Here
