Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [115]
‘It really is most inconvenient, me having to come here,’ Vi was saying crossly, ‘and it’s very selfish of you to carry on like this, Francine.’
‘All I want is the address of where Jack is staying. You could have saved yourself a journey if you’d given it to me straight off when I asked.’
For a moment Vi looked taken aback, and Jean guessed that her twin had still been thinking of Fran as the cowed sixteen-year-old she had last seen nearly ten years ago.
‘I don’t know why you should be making all this fuss anyway, Francine. What business is it of yours where Jack is? You haven’t seen him since he was born,’ Vi reminded her, then rounded on her twin. ‘This is all down to you, Jean, making trouble, because you haven’t had the good sense to evacuate your two.’
‘Don’t go blaming Jean, Vi,’ Fran answered. ‘It’s me that has asked after Jack and wants to know where he is.’
‘Well, you can ask all you like. I’m not telling you. I’m not having him upset when he’s settled. I’ll thank you to remember that me and Edwin are his parents.’
‘You aren’t acting much like parents, are you, sending him away and not even having him home for Christmas? And as for your Edwin, I reckon he never wanted him in the first place.’
Vi’s face was blotched with angry colour. ‘You’ve got no right to say that.’
Jean went cold and her heart missed a beat. She had been hoping against hope that Vi would not say that. But now it was too late, she had said it, and Francine had drawn herself up to her full height, which was a good two inches taller than Vi, closer to four with those high-heeled shoes she was wearing.
‘Oh yes I have.’
Francine’s voice was as soft as butter but as clear as the noonday sun. It shattered the careful ten-year-old fiction they had all spun between them with all the force of one of Hitler’s bombs being dropped on a glasshouse, and to just as devastating an effect.
‘After all,’ Francine pointed out fiercely, ‘Jack is my son.’
Jean bit her lip. This was what she had been dreading from the minute she had opened her front door and seen Fran standing there. There had been something she had seen in Fran’s eyes that had warned her that it wasn’t just the war that had brought her sister back. Even so, she truly believed that if Francine had seen that Jack was happy and loved by Vi and Edwin, she wouldn’t have said anything. After all, it was plain that she loved her son and wanted the best for him.
Francine had been so young when she had had Jack, and unmarried. Jean would have taken Jack herself if she hadn’t been so ill, and then afterwards, when she had lost her own baby, she had wished desperately that she had had Jack, but it had been too late then. Vi and Edwin had stepped in and offered to take Jack and bring him up as theirs.
‘He’s been nothing but hard work since we took him in,’ Vi was raging now. She had never liked being put on the spot or criticised, and of course she was taking it out on Francine. ‘There’s bad blood in him and no mistake.’
‘He’s a little boy,’ Francine protested furiously. ‘All you had to do was love him; that was all. But you don’t love him. If you did he’d be here with you, not sent away to live with strangers.’
‘Me and Edwin have done our duty by him and by you. I don’t know how you dare speak to me as you are doing after the shame you brought on yourself. The shame you could have brought on all of us if it had got out what you’d done. There’s many a man would have said that kind of child should be sent to an orphanage and not brought up in a decent family. I’ve done my best with him but when there’s bad blood there it always comes out. If you ask me it will do him good to find out how lucky he was when me and Edwin had him. Teach him a bit of a lesson.’
‘I want to know where he is.’
‘Well, I’m not