Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [3]
Jean nodded and made herself smile. Best not to think of that other little one, baby Terry, who had come too soon and lived for such a short space of time, nor of how poorly she had been. He would have been nine now if he had lived, the same age, give or take a couple of months as Vi’s Jack.
Jean started to frown. She couldn’t help feeling guilty about Jack sometimes. Vi had claimed that she wanted another child, but Edwin certainly hadn’t, and Jean didn’t think they would have had him at all if she hadn’t been carrying her poor little Terry. Vi had always had that competitive streak in her that meant that whatever she, Jean, as the eldest, did, Vi always had to try to outdo her.
‘Come on, you lot, hop on and look smart about it,’ Sam said. He waited until they were all on the bus and sitting down before getting on himself and telling the conductor, ‘Six to Kingsway.’
‘Turn round so that I can redo that plait,’ Jean instructed Louise, ignoring the protests she made when she replaited her hair quickly and tightly, while warning the twins, ‘Now remember, you two. If your auntie Vi offers you a second piece of cake you’re to say “No, thank you”. I don’t want her thinking that they don’t know their manners,’ she told Sam, answering the unspoken question in the look he was giving her.
‘Huh, chance’d be a fine thing. Mean as they come, your Vi is. Besides, she isn’t the cook you are, love, so I doubt they’d want a second piece.’
‘Go on with you. It will probably be shop bought and fancy,’ Jean told him, but his compliment had touched her, and it was no good her pretending that she wasn’t pleased to have him praising her home cooking and not Vi’s fancy shop-bought cake, because she was.
‘More money than sense, the both of them,’ Sam told her. ‘Look at the way Edwin’s gone and bought that young idiot Charlie his own car.’
‘It’s for his job, on account of him putting Charlie in charge of the office.’
‘Aye. It makes as much sense as giving him a fancy title for doing what amounts to nowt, if I know young Charlie.’
Jean looked anxiously at her husband. She knew that it hurt Sam that he couldn’t give their own children the same luxuries their cousins enjoyed, even though he tended to disapprove of Edwin’s business practices and the way he treated those who worked for him. Edwin owned a small business that fitted pipe work in Merchant Navy vessels, and the current threat of war had brought an increase in the amount of work Edwin was being asked to do and consequently an increase in the money he was making. But no increase in the wages he was paying his men, as Sam had remarked to Jean.
The next stop would be theirs. Jean could feel the familiar fluttering in her tummy. She did so hope that Vi wasn’t going to be in one of her ‘difficult’ moods.
Vi, or Vivienne, as she now insisted on being called, stood in her bay window of her bedroom, craning her neck so that she could see as far down Kingsway as possible through her net curtains. Brand new, her nets were, and how she was expected to keep them looking like that if she was going to have to have those nasty blackout frames put up every night she didn’t know. You’d think that living here in Wallasey there’d be no need for that kind of thing, not like down in Liverpool with its docks, or Wavertree where Jean lived. Edwin had been furious when he’d had to have his beautiful lawn dug up so that they could get their air-raid shelter put in and she didn’t blame him. Luckily they’d been able to put it out of sight of the house at the bottom of the garden behind the apple trees.
Jean and her family should be here soon. She lifted her hand and patted her newly permed hair. Jean might be the elder by ten minutes but she, Vi, felt far superior. She looked down at her new dress. Silk not cotton, and a birthday present from Edwin. Edwin was doing very well for himself with his business and she’d done very well for herself in marrying him, as Edwin himself liked to remind her. Vi’s mouth thinned slightly.
Jean would never have been able to manage a husband like