Free Return to Fourwinds by Elisabeth Gifford Page A

She’d missed three times. Three times. She was rocking in agitation, and she held her arms round her narrow stomach and let it come to her gladly, this knowledge, this deep root, this baby, already growing inside her. Nothing would part her from this. She looked around the room. How simple and elemental and wonderful this tiny room and her whole life had suddenly become.
    They said another couple of weeks and he could leave. She had to tell him. She knew he would finish with her. She would start to show soon, and then she would have to leave too. In disgrace.
    Early one morning she came in to a great commotion going on in the ward. The war was over. The patients were dancing around, Alf hopping and waving one crutch, grabbing the nurses, and even Matron let herself be kissed. Jim grabbed Evelyn and said, ‘Marry me then.’
    He got hold of a brass ring, with a red glass stone; the sort of ring that left a greenish mark on your skin. He said he would do betterfor her later. When she told him about the baby he was as excited as if the war had ended all over again.
    He was twenty-two when they got married. He was war wounded, but had a fire inside him, determined that he could wrest a living for them. But his lungs were eaten away; sometimes she’d find him gasping and panicked, the small amounts of air claustrophobic in his lungs. His eyes stayed blurred over with cataracts from the gas. Each evening he’d ask her to read the paper aloud to him, because she had such a nice voice.
    He took what he could in the way of work, but mostly he went back and stood in line in the dole queue. He brought home a pittance to keep them alive – just. They did what they could to manage. And then the babies came, Kitty and John, Doris and Bill, and last of all, Peter.
    They did what they could to manage, and he was still sure then that by his will and his bare hands he could make a life for them, refused to take into account any diminishment caused by the war.
    You had to wait to see how bad the damage got while the gas was still burning into the flesh, and you had to wait to see how far the bitterness would burn down into a man’s soul.
    She got out of the chair to stoke up the coals with the poker and sank back down. Eleven o’clock. She may as well snooze here a little longer in case he was back – unless a lock-in started and he stayed on. He would come home sooner or later, flushed and drunk from holding court in the Irish pubs, half the dole money gone again. A small man in a big suit, bought off a dead man’s widow. Always looking for the man who fitted that suit.
    Tomorrow she would take the clock from the front room, and roll up the bedding. Most weeks Peter and Bill would carry it to the shop with the three metal balls above a window filled with boxes of rings and piles of old shoes. On Friday, when Kitty’s money camein, the clock would be back on the shelf, the cover spread on her bed again.
    They ate tripe and vinegar; bruised fruit sold cheap at the market, cracked eggs from Seymour’s the grocer’s. She’d had a grammar school education. She was a clever girl. They didn’t go hungry. Sometimes their dad came home with unlikely things from the pub; rabbit meat that came from no one knew where; once, three gorgeous pheasants that needed plucking of all their gold feathers.

    With the warm weather Ma improved and her wheezing quietened down. The summer when Peter finished at St Alphonse’s school was long and hot and glorious. He’d passed the exam for the grammar, and even the sister who kept a slipper in her pocket to beat them had come out and shook his hand. ‘I hope your father is going to put the money by for your uniform, Peter,’ she told him sternly.
    The old lady teacher with a grey bun and long skirt came out from the infants and smothered him into a hug. ‘And look at you now, Peter. What are you going to be when you grow up?’
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