Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [57]
Sam slammed the record down on the table and opened the back door, striding down the garden. Jean could see him leaning over the fence at the bottom of the garden. Poor Sam.
The twins came downstairs, looking uncertainly round the door.
‘Where’s Dad?’ Lou asked
‘He’s in the garden.’
‘He took our record.’
‘Well, you’ve both been told often enough not to play them so loudly. It’s bin driving me and your dad mad, and half the street as well, I expect,’ Jean scolded them.
‘Mum, me and Lou have been thinking that we’d like to be singers and make records,’ Sasha informed her.
‘Yes. Like Auntie Francine. Well, like she’d be if she’d made any records. Is that why she’s gone to America?’ Lou asked.
‘Your auntie Francine has gone to America because she’s singing with Gracie Fields, and as to the two of you making records, well, I dare say your dad will have something to say about that,’ Jean warned them firmly.
Sam was still leaning over the fence. Things couldn’t go on like this. Jean wiped her hands on her apron and headed for the back door.
‘Where are you going?’ Lou asked her.
‘Never you mind. You two stay here and no playing any loud music.’
‘I bet she’s gone to talk to Dad,’ Lou told Sasha as soon as Jean had gone.
‘I wish that Luke and Grace were here. It’s horrid without them,’ Sasha sighed.
Sam hadn’t heard her coming, or he was ignoring her, Jean didn’t know which but she did know that the sight of his unmoving back view wrenched at her heart.
The Michaelmas daisies they had planted the year after they had moved in were in full bloom, along with Sam’s prized chrysanthemums, their cheerfulness at odds with the prevailing atmosphere at the Campions’.
As much as she missed Luke and feared for him, which she did, Jean could understand why he had done what he had, and yes, she was even proud of him, though at the same time so very, very frightened for him. But she wasn’t Sam. Luke had not gone against her wishes and her advice; he had not turned his back on her as she knew Sam felt Luke had on him.
She took a deep breath and closed the distance between them. They weren’t a couple who were physically affectionate with one another in public, but instinctively Jean put her arm round Sam and stood close to him. To her relief he didn’t, as she had been half-afraid he might, pull away from her, and when he turned to look at her she saw that there were tears in his eyes.
Her heart trembled and ached for her husband. Oh, Luke! But how could she condemn her son for his father’s pain? She loved them both.
‘Our Reg was seventeen when he went off to war,’ Sam announced without preamble. ‘I can see him now, Jean. A good-looking lad, he was.’
Jean nodded. Sam and his family had lived close by when they were growing up and she could remember Sam’s elder brother.
‘He was always our mam’s favourite.’ Sam’s breath shuddered in his throat. ‘She were never the same after we got the news that he’d been killed. I allus thought that she’d rather it had been me if one of us had to go.’
‘No, Sam, don’t say that,’ Jean begged him, her eyes filling with tears.
‘It was only having that ruddy whooping cough that saved me from going, and I reckon if I had I would have been dead, an’ all.’
Jean nodded again, but didn’t say anything, sensing that now wasn’t the time. She knew the story of how contracting whooping cough and being ill for so long had meant that Sam had been declared unfit for military service, and how although he never said so in so many words, that had left him with a feeling of guilt because his brother who had gone off to war had died whilst he who had not, had lived.
That had been before they had started courting, after the war was over. She had felt only relief when she had heard the story. It always made her heart clench with fear to think how easily she might have lost him before she had even loved him.
‘War does terrible things to a man, Jean. Even them that did come back,