Bonfire Memories Read online

  “They’re often the worst. Older people sometimes see grey areas. For a girl like that, life is black and white.”

  “Have you heard from Carl Anderson yet?” Guy turned to face his old friend.

  Enid shook her head. “No news. He said he would call today, but nothing yet.”

  “I wonder what’s keeping him.” Guy ran his fingers through his hair.

  “I don’t know, but he said he had something important to tell us. Strange how he hasn’t turned up yet.”

  “Give him a call again. The sooner he tells us and we can get out of this damn place the better.”

  “What’s brought that on, Guy? You said it was a quaint little village when we arrived. Is this about the girl?”

  “No, it’s not about the girl. It’s about Greta, as it’s always been.” He slumped down onto the sofa. “Why did I leave it so long to come and find her?”

  “You couldn’t afford the fare.”

  “Ten years ago I couldn’t afford the fair. I’ve been able to come here for years now and yet I kept putting it off.”

  Enid sat next to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Why?”

  “Because I’m afraid of what I’ll find, that’s why.” Guy put his head in his hands, fighting back the anger and pain that had lived in his heart for so long. “But it’s not about the girl. It’s not.”

  Or at least it should not be about the girl. He could not afford to get side-tracked by a pair of pretty blue eyes. Those same eyes would no doubt turn cold when she found out the truth about him.

  Chapter Two

  1946

  She’s waiting for me when I leave the pub. I lead her along one of the darkened streets and up into the fields. There’s an old Roman fort up there. It was popular with archaeologists for a while, but they soon lost interest and went in search of bigger, better digs.

  The night is bitter cold, yet I feel warm with the excitement of seeing her again.

  “I came all this way to find you,” she says, when we reach the cover of the trees. It’s so good to hear my own tongue spoken, instead of the flat vowels of the locals. The same vowels I’d had to learn by heart. Nevertheless, I look around, terrified that someone might overhear us. This soon after the war, being German in Britain is not a good idea. Especially if people found out you’d been there all along. If they saw me talking to her, they might ask questions about where I came from. My cover story would not survive too much scrutiny.

  I had already managed to avoid one witch hunt, all caused by that idiot who had a grudge against the Americans at the air base. Suspicion had fallen on someone else. Not that I cared. The man was a Jew. He would not have been dealt with so kindly in the Fatherland.

  “I know, my love,” I tell her, stroking her silky hair, and feeling the desire rising within me, “but you must realise how careful I have to be. If people around here realised the truth…”

  “I would never betray you.” She says it with the simplicity of a child, and I want to believe her, I really do. She always was honest. A little bit too honest. I was miserable when she went so far away, but in reality I knew that she could never keep up the subterfuge needed for the work I had to do.

  “I know you wouldn’t, my love,” I tell her. I hoped I sounded surer than I felt.

  She reached up and stroked my cheek. “I want to kiss you again,” she said. “It’s been so long.”

  I wanted her too, desperately. I’d hidden that part of myself so deep, for so long, because it was dangerous to do otherwise. Now she awakened it. I caught her hand in mine. “Not here.”

  “Not here. Not at the pub” she said, starting to cry. She’s becoming hysterical and that’s even more dangerous. “Then where? You do want to be with me, don’t you? We can find a way to explain it, darling. I know we can.”

  “It’s not that easy. I’ve created a whole new identity here. You don’t fit into it.”

  She bites her lower lip, something she always does when she’s unsure. It was one of the things that first attracted me to her. She’d had so much innocence and uncertainty in such a voluptuous body. I was glad to see she still had that, despite the baby. “I left her to come and find you,” she says. “I hoped we could all be together, as a family.”

  “And we will, my love,” I lie. “Just not yet. My work here is not finished. Meet me tomorrow in Shrewsbury. There’s a hotel there, where we can be alone, away from the prying eyes of these people.”

  She trusts me enough to nod and agree. I do want to be alone with her, just one more time. To hold her in my arms and feel her velvet flesh against mine. Then I must work out what to do with her. I must ensure that the web I’ve woven in Midchester does not unravel.

  ***

  1966

  “I’m the worst journalist in the world,” Cara groaned as she sat on her bed looking at her empty notepad.

  The walls were decorated with posters of Paul McCartney and Elvis Presley. Paul stared out with innocent blue eyes and floppy brown hair. Elvis’s blue eyes smouldered, beneath swept back black velvet hair. Above the bed was a smaller picture, cut from a magazine. It was of Guy Sullivan and taken from a western. He played the bad guy, and died at the end, but Cara still thought he was wonderful.

  The bed was strewn with fashion magazines, most showing Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. Cara aspired to look like either of them in turn, depending on what day of the week it was. On that day, she had gone for the Jean Shrimpton look, with straight hair, back-combed lightly to give it the devil-may-care look that had taken her over an hour to get right.

  “How do you work that out?” asked Nancy. Nancy was thirty-eight years old, so more than ten years older than Cara, but they had become devoted friends. Nancy’s red hair was also back-combed, much higher than Cara’s, and she wore much more make up. It suited her vivacious nature.

  “He was just so handsome that I completely forgot what I was supposed to be doing. Lord knows why he thinks he’s Hollywood ugly, or whatever it was he said. Honestly, Nance, he’s got to be at least six foot four, and has the most amazing eyes. Sometimes they look blue, sometimes they look grey.” Cara rested her head on her hands. “And his smile…” She sighed. “It’s odd, because he seems sad too, but I can’t work out why.”

  “That’ll be that Selina Cartier, the witch,” said Nancy. “She breaks hearts wherever she goes. First that poor husband of hers, and now Guy Sullivan. No wonder he had to turn to directing, after that scandal. Mind you, it’s different for men. Ingrid Bergman had to leave Hollywood when she got … well, you know.” Nancy’s hands formed a ‘bump’ motion on her tummy. “Men are never judged the same.”

  “There was something else,” said Cara. “I think he was offended by what I said about his film having a German as a hero. I suppose it’s his art. I know how upset I felt when Mr. Black said the first article I tried to write for him was rubbish. It was like he was disrespecting my child. Still, he liked the next one.”

  “Not enough to pay you for it,” Nancy sniffed.

  “It’s experience, Nance.”

  “Hmm. I could say the same about you working behind the bar, but at least I pay you.”

  Cara stood up and threw her arm around her friend. “You do more than that. You’re the best. I’m finally starting to feel as if I’m being accepted by folks. I’m no longer seen as one of the dreadful Baker family. Honestly,” she said, going to the wardrobe to find a nice dress for the lunchtime shift, “you’d think with one of my brothers going to Oxford University, another one in the air force, and our Millie working for the government, people would forget that we were once the poorest family in Midchester.”

  Cara’s mother, Martha Baker, had moved to the village with her four older children just before the war, when Cara’s father was called up. Until then they had been travellers, moving from place to place. Mrs. Baker, widowed soon after her husband went abroad, and heavily pregnant with Cara, had found it difficult to settle into village life. The gossip of the local women, who
worried far too much than was good for them about the hue of Mrs. Baker’s white sheets, and the fact that the children wore frayed hand me downs, did not help.

  Things had been a little better since Mrs. Baker remarried and became Mrs. Potter, but Cara still often felt the weight of the villager’s disapproval. Cara’s own recent transgression had not helped. She sensed that they had been waiting for her to fail just so they could say that they had seen it coming a mile off.

  “Don’t you know it’s poor people’s fault that they’re poor?” Nancy quipped. “Seriously, pet, people can’t forgive poverty, because they’re terrified it will be them one day.”

  “Yet old Peg Bradbourne isn’t rich, and everyone treats her like the queen. Not that she doesn’t deserve it. She’s lovely.” Peg had been one of the few people to show kindness to the struggling Martha Baker.

  “Ah, but that’s genteel poverty. It’s quite a different thing. How old is that woman now? Eighty-five? Ninety? Yet she’ll be there at lunchtime, in the same seat at the bar, waiting for her bottle of stout. She’s going to see us all off.”

  Nancy stopped at the posters of McCartney and Presley, looking at them appreciatively. “You know, I think Paul is the type of man you marry. But Elvis … Mmm, I’d have other less respectable plans for him and his swivelly hips…” She winked at Cara, and left the room.

  True to Nancy’s word, Peg Bradbourne was the first one through the door when they opened the pub.

  The Quiet Woman pub was in the centre of Midchester, and as such the hub of all the gossip and information. It had been owned by Nancy’s uncle, Tom Yeardley. He sold it to Nancy when he and his second wife decided to move to America. His only child, a daughter, had married an American airman, and Tom wanted to be able to spend his final years with his grandchildren. There had been a lot of gossip about a woman running a pub, but Nancy was mostly impervious to such criticism. She soon proved she could be just as tough as her Uncle Tom when she needed to be. Only when the bar closed did she moan to Cara about the way she was treated, particularly by the men. There had been uproar when she installed a juke box in the pub. As such, it gathered dust in the corner. The only time music played on it was after closing time when Nancy and Cara liked to listen to The Beatles, ‘Twist and Shout’ as they cleared everything away.

  “What can I get you, Peg?” said Cara, smiling at their first guest. “A Harvey Wallbanger? A martini, shaken not stirred? A champagne cocktail?”

  Peg’s old eyes twinkled. “That’s what you get for hobnobbing with the rich and shameless, is it?” She jumped up onto her stool with the energy of a five year old. “I saw you, driving up the Grange this morning.”

  “Not much gets past you, Peg.” Cara put a bottle of stout and a glass on the counter. Peg’s nosiness was different to everyone else’s. There was no malice to it. She just liked to know what was going on, and considered herself something of a sleuth.

  “So?” said Peg. “What’s he like?”

  “Oh he’s very handsome,” said Cara. “But sad too.” It did not occur to her to keep anything from the village’s First Lady.

  “Sad? Why?”

  “I didn’t find out. He’s here on private business, he says. So I didn’t like to pry.”

  “Call yourself a reporter?” Peg grinned.

  “Oh, I know, I’m awful…”

  “Now,” said Peg, reaching across the bar and patting Cara’s hand, “I don’t mean to be unkind, pet. You’re the hardest working girl in Midchester. It’s not a bad thing that you’re fazed by a nice looking man. It shows you’re human. I must go up and meet this Mr. Sullivan.”

  “Oh be careful, Peg. There’s this woman, Enid, who is his secretary or something. She’s very fierce and protective of him. You can tell.”

  “In love with him, do you think?”

  “Oh I don’t think so. She’s old enough to be his mum.”

  “Tsk,” Peg pursed her lips, and winked. “Just because a woman reaches a certain age doesn’t mean she’s not partial to a nice bit of cream cake.”

  Cara laughed. “My life would probably be much simpler if I stuck to cream cake and left men alone.”

  “Oh well,” said Peg, “everyone is entitled to one mistake, pet, and you didn’t know, did you?”

  “Yeah, but it was a pretty big mistake as far as the village is concerned.” Cara did not want to think of the past, so she shook her head to clear away the thoughts. “But that is in the past. I shan’t be that stupid again.”

  More people came into the bar, so Cara went to help Nancy serve them. It was the usual lunchtime crowd. Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, who had recently moved into a new bungalow opposite the pub; Herbie Potter, the postman, who was Cara’s stepfather, and a few other villagers. Mr. Simpson and Herbie went into the bar with the men, whilst Mrs. Simpson joined the other ladies in the lounge. Nancy had once tried to introduce a mixed bar, but even her resolve could not make it work. The men and women liked their separate spheres in the pub.

  Cara knew that Peg liked to sit at the bar in the lounge because she could see both rooms from her stool. Peg also had very good hearing, so did not miss any conversation.

  “So I looked at the broken roof tile,” said Mrs. Simpson, “and I said, ‘Mon dieu, how did that happen?’ Then they sorted it out, voila!” Since her son had married a French girl during in the war, she peppered most of her speech with Gallic phrases, much to the amusement of everyone else in the village.

  “So when are you going to visit that son of yours in France, Myrtle?” asked Peg.

  “Len won’t go, you know. It’s not that we don’t love Monique and the children, but well … Len says they’re very French over there.”

  “Really?” Peg had a twinkle in her eye. She winked at Cara, who was serving the ladies. “Who’d have thought that?”

  Cara stifled a giggle and got on with her work. She could only pick up bits of gossip as she served customers and cleared tables. Mr. Black, the mayor and newspaper owner, was having a dinner party, and some of the younger women in the village were going to help serve, whilst a couple of the men were going to look after the guest’s vehicles. Herbie Potter was saying there might be a strike at the Post Office over pay and hours, but he got little sympathy as everyone considered him to have the easiest job in the area.

  “You stop by home every morning for a bacon sandwich,” said Len Simpson. “I didn’t have much chance of that when I was working down the pit.”

  There was some talk about the situation in Rhodesia, but that seemed so far away and had so little to do with the insular world of Midchester, no one had much to say other than that it was a ‘rum job’.

  Mainly people were talking about the impending Bonfire Night celebrations. That was real and immediate. With Midchester being such a quiet village and with only one pub, any sort of event was treated like a jubilee celebration.

  “Do you remember,” Len Simpson was saying, “when someone was convinced that they found that body in the bonfire?”

  Cara stopped what she was doing, to listen. She had a vague recollection of hearing the story before, but could not remember when. “When was this, Mr. Simpson?”

  “Oh, now let me see. It must have been after the war, because we couldn’t have bonfires and firework displays during the black out. And before the war, we didn’t really do much of that sort of thing. It’s old Tom Yeardley who started it all up again. It got us all in a lather, it did. But we went out there to look and it was nothing. Just an old Guy Fawkes effigy.”

  “It was Cara who found it,” said Herbie Potter, quietly. “Don’t you remember, lass?”

  “No.” Did she? Cara felt an icy tingle on her spine. She tried to recall the scene, but to no avail. That did not stop her feeling suddenly cold and afraid.

  “Well, you were only about five or six at the time.” Herbie said, turning to the pub landlady, “Nancy, you must remember it, because we all thought young Sammy Granger was behind it. The little …” Herbie paused, rem
embering that the ladies, though in the next room, might hear him, “the little tyke disappeared a day or two after, and he’s never been seen since.”

  “I remember now,” said Len Simpson, nodding. “We thought it was him, because a couple of days earlier him and his friends had pulled this stunt where one of them dressed up in ragged clothes and stuck newspaper out of the armholes, reckoning to be an effigy at the Guy Fawkes contest. It made us all laugh, but no one was fooled. Sammy was a rum ‘un though Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.”

  “Sammy was alright,” said Nancy, hotly. “He couldn’t help that his mother drank too much and didn’t care where he was. He was clever and given half a chance…” The telephone in the back hallway began to ring, stopping Nancy from completing her statement.

  “Oh, still holding that candle, hey?” said Len, to general laughter around the room.

  Nancy slammed a pint of beer on the bar and went to answer the telephone. When she returned she looked pale. Cara, who had taken glasses back to the bar, ready to wash them, heard her say “Of all the things…”

  “What is it, Nancy?”

  “What?” It seemed as if Nancy had just been woken from a dream. “Nothing, just that the delivery might be a bit late tomorrow. Cara, I have to nip out as soon as we close. Can you finish up here?”

  “Well, okay, but I do have to …” Cara smiled wryly. “I have to go and talk to Mrs. Cunningham about the rules for the Guy Fawkes effigy contest, would you believe? I’m meeting her in the Village Hall. I think they call that synchronicity. Or coincidence or something.”

  “There’s a lot of that about,” said Nancy, pressing her lips together.

  Cara went over to Peg and, without needing to be told, changed the empty bottle of stout for a full one. Lowering her voice, because she did not want to face teasing from the customers again, she said, “Do you remember me finding that body, Peg?”

  “Oh yes, dear. You were really shaken up about it, if I remember rightly. You insisted that the effigy must have got up and walked away. It took your mum ages to calm you down.”