Cry to Dream Again Page 5

  5

  They arrived home tired and flustered after the long journey, the rough crossing and the interminable questions posed by the English officer in the customs shed at Dover when he opened their luggage and rummaged through almost all of their purchases. Maman had been ahead of her children in the queue because a burly businessman had pushed in between them. In Maman’s suitcase the officer found the eggs, carefully wrapped in cardboard, that she had sent Ted down to the meadow to collect that morning, and a bottle of wine that she had bought for her husband. “Where do these eggs come from?” the officer asked sharply. On hearing that they came from the family farm, he abruptly confiscated them. Young and decisive, he was all too obviously intent on proving himself in his job. “There will be duty payable on this bottle of wine, madam, and I would advise you not to bring contraband goods into this country in future!” he announced, glaring severely at Maman, who shrank under his gaze, before issuing her with a docket for payment that she had to take across the shed to a cashier. The businessman seemed to be carrying minimal luggage; he opened his briefcase, the customs officer looked cursorily inside and waved him through with a smile.

  When Shirley moved forward to the head of the queue, the officer brusquely instructed her to open her suitcase, with no hint of a smile or any of the polite niceties that one would be sure to encounter in France. “So you do know, don’t you, that there will be duty to pay on these goods?” he enquired as he gingerly lifted the silk dress and the hat out of her case and held them up.

  Her instinct told her at once to employ the secret weapon that she had discovered long ago as a small child: she tossed her blond curls very fetchingly, stared the good-looking customs officer straight in the eye and let the tears fall down her cheeks. “Oh, but Maman bought this outfit for me for my cousin’s wedding,” she sobbed in broken English.

  “Ah, just a moment, will you please, miss?” said the customs officer hastily. His cheeks reddening, he tried to avoid Shirley’s insistent stare. “Please wait while I check with my superior.”

  He dashed off and was away for a good fifteen minutes while other passengers in the queue started to grumble, making acerbic remarks in Shirley’s direction. “Silly girl! She should have known better,” a bulky woman – who was evidently wearing layer upon layer of her own contraband purchases – commented dismissively in a posh voice for all to hear.

  “These French, they think they can get away with anything!” an elderly man blustered.

  Even her brother, who was standing to one side, sighed in exasperation, saying, “Why do you have to go buying clothes in France? You go to Oxford Street often enough; couldn’t you have found something there? At this rate, we’ll miss the train.” Shirley stepped back from the queue and looked away, on the verge of genuine tears. Further down the line, beyond the bulky posh woman and the elderly man and beyond a good half a dozen other passengers, she was startled to catch a glimpse of Alan, who was craning his neck to see what was going on at the front of the queue. When she caught his eye, he smiled in recognition and waved. That smile and that wave gave her the courage to ignore the insults being bandied about around her, and she returned his smile with a rather coy wave, which annoyed the detractors even more. They all turned round in puzzlement, looking for the recipient of such attention, but Alan had already turned away.

  A second or two later, Shirley caught sight of the customs officer returning; she wiped her eyes ostentatiously with her lace handkerchief, one that Mémé had given her as a parting gift, saying, “I don’t have much to give you, my little Chérie, but take this old handkerchief. It is rather special; it belonged to my mother. It is made of Valenciennes lace.”

  “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, mam’selle,” the customs officer’s tone was now more conciliatory. My superior says that there might be some duty to pay on these items, but it depends what they’re made of.” He got out his official notebook again and began to fill in another docket, asking Shirley for her age. On learning that she was seventeen, he appeared even more embarrassed. He turned to Maman, who had just returned from the cashier, and was standing beside her offspring in bewilderment. “My apologies, ma’am, I didn’t realize that this, er, this young lady was your daughter. I thought she was much older and was travelling alone.” Shirley enjoyed watching his confusion: his face was the colour of a tomato. “Let me see these items,” he waved in the general direction of the new outfit. “They’re not silk, are they?”

  “Mais non, non, of course not!” Maman replied in her strongly accented mixture of French and English. “How could I afford silk?”

  “Well, then, I think we can let them through, but please remember next time to be careful what you bring back from France.” Stepping back to collect his thoughts and recover his composure, he realized that he was being remiss in his duties. “But before I let you all go, I must inspect this other bag,” he added as a hurried afterthought. While Shirley folded the dress and put it back in her suitcase, glad that the customs officer had not spotted the green shoes, he turned over her brother’s muddy clothes with scarcely a glance and so missed the cheese that Maman had secreted away in that suitcase.

  Although Ted kept urging his mother and sister to run to catch the train, Shirley dragged her feet, desperate to find out which direction Alan and his father would take. She hoped against hope that they would be bringing their bikes onto the train and storing them away in the guard’s van. In her mind’s eye she imagined the father and son walking the length of the train in search of seats and she concocted a plan. If she placed her handbag on the seat next to her, she might manage to reserve that for Alan or for his father, and, even better, if Maman also reserved a seat with her handbag, they might be able to keep two seats.

  Ted’s fears were justified: the boat train had already left, so there was a long delay before the next one, ample time in fact for Alan and his father to emerge from the customs shed, but there was no sign of them. Beginning to lose heart, Shirley was forced to conclude that they had left the port by some other route and had already headed off by road into the Kent countryside, which meant that it was highly unlikely that she would ever see Alan again. Disappointment, not in any way alleviated by the grey skies and the bleak outlook from the train, was a poor exchange for the joys of life in France.

  Not surprisingly, her father was anxious about them, because it was much later than he expected when at last he heard their ring at the doorbell. It took him some time to come to the door and his agitation did not ease with their arrival. That in itself was not so unusual, for he often had bad days, particularly when his war wound played up. Maman, who had been none too pleased at losing the eggs to the customs officer, was annoyed at finding little food in the house and was not very disposed to show her husband much sympathy. “I thought you would be bringing French bread and eggs with you…” Pa said lamely, trying to justify the lack of preparation for the returning travellers.

  “Excuses, excuses! How could you, Reggie!” Maman exclaimed irritably. “All we have is cheese and a bottle of rather good wine I brought for a special occasion, and this certainly is not a special occasion! The wretched customs officer confiscated the eggs. They’ve never done that before, so I don’t understand why they should do it now!” Her discontent developed into indignation. “And, Reggie, didn’t your mother do any shopping before she left? I left a list for her to take to the grocer’s. It’s only just up the road! And the greengrocer comes past with his barrow most days. I suppose I’ll have to see if there’s a tin of something, but it might have to be baked beans.” Baked beans and cheese it was for their distinctly unpalatable supper, mitigated by a small tin of French pâté lurking in the cupboard and evidently undiscovered by previous customs officers.

  “Voilà! I am very, very tired and I am going to bed,” Maman declared in annoyance after she had eaten as much of the frugal meal as she could face. What a comedown this was after her mother’s delici
ous meals! How could she bear to stay in England with its dull people and its dreadful food? If only Reggie were a little livelier, it would all be so much more bearable.

  “I need to talk to you; please stay down a little longer!” her husband pleaded with her.

  “Can’t it wait till the morning?” Maman retorted. “Look how tired the children are too!” Ted and Shirley both baulked at being described as children.

  With one voice they contradicted their mother: “No, no, we’re fine. We’ll stay and talk to Pa for a while.”

  Shirley stared at her father; there was no doubt that something was very wrong. He was tired, not physically in the way that they were tired after their travels, but drained of colour and of spirit. In their absence he had lost more of his fair curls, the curls that she had inherited, and his skin had become flabby and grey. He had scarcely moved from his armchair since opening the front door to them, yet he appeared uncomfortable in it, shifting his increasing weight every couple of minutes to a different position. Though he was not generally renowned for the fluency of his conversational skills, he was even less communicative than usual. Nevertheless, when Ted began to tell him about work on the farm, he brightened up.

  That was the weirdest thing: in spite of his insistence that he would never go back to France, Reggie listened eagerly to their news. “The harvest was fairly good, though it did rain on us several times. We’ve planted winter wheat in the field across the track,” Ted was saying, “and I think Pépé is going to sow the field nearer the village with oats next spring.”

  “That’s good, that’s good,” Pa mused.

  “Oh, and I forgot to say, Pépé is thinking of buying a tractor!” Ted exclaimed. At this Pa really did liven up, asking what model of tractor and all manner of technical questions of the sort that Ted and Pépé had discussed many times at great length.

  “Well, old chap, you’ll have to learn about tractor maintenance then! I dare say I can teach you something about that!” Pa said in evident delight, although he himself admitted that he was unlikely ever to see the tractor himself.

  He then turned to his daughter: “So Shirley, did you enjoy yourself?” It was time for Shirley to resume her English identity and abandon her French nickname, Chérie. Shirley, her English name, had been given to her in honour of her paternal grandmother’s second name, though she was none too pleased that the name had been appropriated by an American child film star. She wanted that honour to be reserved for herself.

  “Yes, Pa, thank you. It was all right. Well, Maman and I went to Paris, and that was wonderful. Maman bought me a dress and a hat and shoes for Edith’s wedding; would you like to see them?”

  “Go on, then, Shirl,” said Pa having recovered something of his old self. “I had forgotten about Edith’s wedding. It’s in two or three weeks isn’t it? Come on; let’s have a fashion show, then, if you’re not too tired!” Late though it was, Shirley was delighted to don her new clothes, even though the audience consisted only of her brother and her father, and not the officious customs officer, or Alan, that handsome young man who had been such a help to her on the boat. She was sure that she would never forget him or his name and she would look out for him everywhere, in the street, on buses, on the Underground. She had already set her heart on seeing him again.

  Pa’s reaction was appreciative and surprising. “You look lovely! It does my heart good to see you, Shirl, and to have you back. You too, of course, Ted,” he said looking proudly at his son. “You know, I really do enjoy your stories of the farm!” He spoke absent-mindedly to no one in particular, “I sometimes wish I could face going back there. I suppose I have a lot to be grateful for, not least the happy times I spent there with your mother, even if the rest of it was grim. That’s where we were married after all – and it’s not the fault of France or the French…” Words failed him and a satisfactory conclusion to his sentence eluded him.

  Shirley was about to ask whose fault it was when her mother called down the stairs, “Come on, children! It’s time for bed!”

  Shirley was on the point of heeding her mother’s call, but suddenly remembered the all-important letter. “Oh, Pa!” she exclaimed. “How silly of me! How could I have forgotten! The letter about the audition, has it come, do you know?” Her mind had been so focused on her encounter with Alan and the immediate past that all thoughts of the letter had been erased until now.

  Pa moved awkwardly in his chair. “Audition? What audition was that?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean, the audition with that new ballet company, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet; I applied to before we went away,” she replied in exasperation at his forgetfulness.

  “Ah, that. No, I haven’t seen any letters for you, but go and look on the hall table; I expect your granny may have picked up letters off the mat while she was staying here.” Shirley went straight out into the hall, but found nothing on the table apart from a vase containing some withered flowers, presumably brought by Granny but not cleared away before she left. Having searched under the table, she took the vase into the kitchen, emptied the water into the sink and threw the dead blooms into the waste bucket, fearing that something had gone wrong. There was no question that her application had not arrived at Sadler’s Wells, because it would have been sent off with the others by Miss Patience, who was such a stickler for punctuality, accuracy and detail that there was little risk that she would have overlooked it. What would she do if there were no audition and no place for her in the company? The thought of going back to school was too dreadful for words. She would go and call on Miss Patience first thing the following morning. She put her head round the living room door. “Night, night, Pa, see you in the morning!”

  “Was the letter you wanted there?” he asked.

  “No, nothing, nothing at all.” Disconsolately, she climbed the stairs and fell on her bed, but did not sleep. Anxieties about the audition and images of Alan revolved in her head until eventually they intermingled in her dreams and Alan became the prince who lifted her high above the mass of grey, worrisome creatures writhing about on a stage beneath her.

  6

  Both Shirley and Ted were surprised to find their father still at home the next morning when they came downstairs for breakfast. Maman had been out to buy bread and other essentials and the milkman had already called, so the cupboard was not as bare as it had been the previous evening. Pa was sitting in his armchair, appearing to have been there all night. Maman shook her head more in frustration than in sympathy. “Your Pa’s in great pain; it’s his war wound,” she said. “He can’t go to work.”

  After the War had finished and he and Maman had moved to England, Pa had become a railway engineer, despite his mental trauma. On the railway he was able to forget about the horrors of war, and trains, which had fascinated him since his childhood, were his lifeblood; he worked on them all day and read about them in magazines at home in the evening. He had only very rarely taken a day off, even when he had flu after the War, or when his wound made him limp badly, so this was undoubtedly one of those awful days that afflicted him from time to time; sometimes they were caused by his nightmares and hallucinations, or at others by his injury; occasionally – and this was probably what was happening now – by both together.

  Maman, who only yesterday in France had tried to make light of her sorrow on leaving her parents and her native land, looked like a lost child back in this foreign country. “Vraiment, je ne sais pas quoi faire,” she said, reverting to French for comfort. Shirley and Ted did not know what to do either, though at first they were not unduly concerned, for Pa usually recovered quickly and this crisis would be sure to blow over, as others had in the past. “At least you must be off to school, Ted, that’s certain; go and get your games kit,” said their mother, collecting her thoughts, taking action and giving her son his orders. Ted groaned, ate up his cereal and went out to collect all his school belongings, which had been lying untouched in t
he cupboard under the stairs for the duration of the holiday.

  “Right, I’m off, then,” he announced more positively, appearing in the doorway laden with satchel, winter games kit and various other items necessary for the term. “Hooray, only one more year in school for me and then the farm in France!” he exclaimed joyfully to an unreceptive audience. Strangely, no one had mentioned anything about school for Shirley or told her to collect up her satchel, so she remained seated at the table. Her future after the School Certificate had been the subject of some discussion at the end of the summer term. She had made it absolutely plain to her parents that she was not going back to school, but Pa had insisted.

  “Look here,” he said, “you’ve done very well in the School Certificate and who knows what you might do if you stay on. Maybe you could become a teacher.”

  “But, Pa,” she had protested, “I don’t want to be a teacher. You know I want to be a dancer!”

  Maman, who had encouraged her to dance since she was four years old, had taken her every week to Miss Patience’s ballet classes, had made costumes and helped with scenery for shows and supported her application for the audition, had intervened, taking her daughter’s part, “Reggie, you know she wants to dance and you know how good she is.” But Pa, who did not know how good she was, since he had little more than a passing interest in the ballet, only enough for him to sit patiently through the said shows to please his wife and daughter, was purely and irritatingly pragmatic in his reaction.