Sisters Three Page 24

  ‘So it’s a question of loyalties, is it?’ Fiona said.

  ‘Yes. I know what Kenny stands to lose.’

  ‘I’m not even going to ask if you’re in love with him.’

  ‘I would not be here if I was not.’

  ‘Oh, you might,’ said Fiona. ‘You might be here because your brother-in-law suggested you keep in with Kenny.’

  ‘No. I never see Dominic, hardly ever, and I really do not know anything about what he—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Fiona. ‘But you do see your sister, and your mother.’

  ‘I live with my mother. What does my mother have to do with it?’

  ‘She’s the hub of the family circle,’ Fiona said. ‘Where would my brother fit into a family circle like yours, I wonder? Have you given that any thought, Rosalind?’

  ‘I’ve thought of hardly anything else for weeks,’ Rosie said.

  ‘And what’s your answer?’

  ‘I do not have one.’

  There was something pleasantly intense about the deaf girl; her need to lip-read and the concentration it entailed would be at the root of it, of course. But there was more, a soberness, a fierce, rather chilling need to have her say. She was no milksop, no yielder. Fiona chose her words with care.

  ‘Sooner or later,’ she said, ‘there’s going to a war with Germany. I take it you are aware of that probability, Rosalind?’

  ‘All too aware.’

  ‘And when that happens everything will change.’

  ‘Yes, my father has explained it to me.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘My stepfather, Bernard. Kenny met him at Christmas.’

  ‘Oh, yes, your stepfather, of course,’ Fiona said. ‘Has your stepfather told you that if there is a war with Italy your brother-in-law is most likely to be arrested?’

  ‘Dominic is Scottish. He’s a British citizen.’

  ‘Even so.’ Fiona said, shrugging. ‘Everyone who isn’t a British national will fall under suspicion.’

  ‘What does this have to do with Kenny and me?’

  ‘Rather a lot,’ said Fiona. ‘If your brother-in-law, Dominic Manone, is removed from the equation then there’s absolutely no impediment to you and Kenny getting married – if that’s what you want to do.’

  ‘Has Kenny mentioned marriage?’ Rosie asked.

  ‘It’s safe to say it’s been on his mind, yes.’

  The girl smiled. She looked quite different when she smiled. There was something about her, Fiona realised, that made you want to please her; a dangerous characteristic.

  ‘Why did you never get married?’ Rosie asked.

  Fiona cleared her throat, and said, ‘No one ever asked me.’

  ‘That is a shame.’

  ‘It isn’t the be-all and end-all for women, marriage,’ said Fiona, testily.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to get married?’

  ‘I have a job, a career, and if there’s a war…’ Fiona shrugged again.

  ‘Will you join up?’

  ‘I might. Yes, I expect I will,’ Fiona said.

  She wasn’t quite sure how the conversation had swung on to her problems or if the deaf girl had turned it deliberately.

  ‘I don’t know what I will do,’ Rosie said. ‘I would not be much use as an air raid warden, would I?’ She laughed. ‘I want to marry. I want to marry Kenny.’

  ‘And have children?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And perhaps this is not the best time to be bringing children into the world.’

  ‘If Kenny left the police force, if he joined the army instead…’

  ‘Ah!’ Fiona said. ‘So that’s your little scheme, is it?’

  Rosie looked puzzled. ‘Scheme? I am not scheming.’

  ‘My brother might be forced to stay on in the police.’

  ‘Forced?’

  ‘As soon as a war is declared, perhaps even before then, a little thing called the Emergency Powers Act will be brought to bear and we won’t be able to call our souls our own,’ Fiona said. ‘Do you hear what I’m saying, Rosalind?’

  ‘Yes, I hear you.’

  ‘Firemen and policemen and shipwrights and steel workers and, oh, a host of other trades will become crucial to the war effort and some younger men will have to be left at home to staff these trades and services.’

  ‘You sound just like my teacher, Mr Feldman.’

  ‘I am a teacher; at least I was,’ Fiona said. ‘I apologise if I’ve been lecturing you but you don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation.’

  ‘I do not remember the last war but Bernard has told me about it. Do you remember the last war?’

  ‘I was a child, a child on a farm on an island called Islay.’

  But she did remember the last war, how her father had tried to enlist and how he had been turned down for service because he was weak in one arm, an arm almost torn off by a bull at the Dalmally market in the year that Kenny had been born. It seemed that a man who could work a team of plough horses or shear a flock of sheep could not necessarily fire a rifle or load a howitzer. Her father had not been dismayed at being rejected and, as the war had dragged on, he had often expressed relief that he had been permitted to stay safe at home. He was too down-to-earth a person, her father, to brand himself a coward for not dying in the trenches like many of the young men from the island. She thought, in the same breath, as it were, of Max again, of the vicious nature of his patriotism, his thirst for conquest, and wondered vaguely if he were even now flying bombing missions in Spain, rehearsing for a greater conflict to come.

  Rosie got to her feet suddenly. ‘I am sorry. I should not be asking these impertinent questions. I only came here to see if Kenny was – was all right.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ said Fiona.

  She would have liked the Conway girl to stay, to talk, to provide her with company until Kenny came home but she was wary of any relationship that involved even a modicum of surrender. It was as if she had used it all up eight years ago in Germany, in that hotel room in Berlin, with Max.

  She got to her feet too. ‘I will tell him you called.’

  ‘Will you tell him, please, that I miss him.’

  And Fiona said, not sternly, ‘Of course I will, my dear.’

  Chapter Twelve

  It was one of those dull, cold, depressing February spells when all signs of an early spring had been crushed by hoar-frost and heavy, snow-laden cloud but Penny had done her level best to prevent Tony slipping into black, snarling moods and Dougie from freezing to death in the stables where he spent long hours matching up the printing machines.

  Even Frobe seemed mournful and would trail in from hunting expeditions mewing plaintively, head first to the food bowl and then to the hearth where she would stretch out before the grate and ignore all Tony’s efforts to get her to move.

  Penny cleaned and cooked, drank coffee – and ate too much.

  She’d gained pounds since coming to Blackstone and her clothes pinched in all the wrong places. She’d tried to discipline herself to go for a walk every afternoon but the weather was awful and Tony refused to let her stray further from the house than the end of the pasture. She’d also tried limbering with the rhythmic exercises she’d been taught in League camp some years ago but she was no longer a nimble teenager and soon became breathless and disheartened. She was turning into a frumpy hausfrau whether she liked it or not, a wife without the consolation of a man to share her bed. Several times she’d tried to persuade Tony to make love to her again for she felt that if she could please him in that way he would stop despising her and perhaps even abandon his passion for Dominic’s wife.

  Meanwhile, they read books and magazines, attempted crossword puzzles, completed intricate jigsaws, drank too much, ate too much, and talked as little as possible in the tedious hours between meals.

  Penny didn’t even have the pleasure of shopping for groceries now, for Tony had forbidden her to accompany him into Breslin which, according to Tony, was
crawling with tin-pot officials all far too nosy for their own or anyone else’s good.

  Then one afternoon Tony informed her that he was going away for a day, possibly two, warned her not to wander far from the farm and told Giffard to keep out of sight if a Civil Defence volunteer or local copper showed and started asking awkward questions. Penny watched him drive away in the Dolomite, certain that he was going off to meet his lover, Polly Manone.

  It was wearing on towards dark before Dougie came in from the stables with the cat hanging on his shoulder. He stroked the animal gently, tickled her ears and crooned to her before he set her down on the kitchen floor by the food bowl to scoff the mutton scraps that Penny had put out after lunch.

  Penny was baking. Breslin was not short of cake shops but beating sponge mixture was good exercise and an excellent way of passing the time. She wore an apron over a blue twill skirt and had her hair bound up in a bandanna.

  Dougie said, ‘Tell me, Penny, who does your hair?’

  ‘I do it myself,’ Penny said, glancing up from the bowl. ‘Why is it you ask?’

  ‘I could do with a trim, if you’ve got the time.’

  ‘You wish me to cut your hair?’

  ‘It’s clean. I had a bath this mornin’.’

  Penny pushed the bowl away. She was pleased by the diversion but not at all sure that Giffard wasn’t flirting with her.

  As if reading her thoughts, Dougie teazed his greying locks and said, ‘Tony won’t take me down to the barber in Hardgate an’ I’m beginnin’ t’ feel like the wild man o’ Borneo.

  Penny laughed. ‘Oh, very well. Place a chair under the light and I will find my scissors and make you respectable.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Dougie said. ‘Tidy’ll do.’

  She washed sponge mixture from her hands and went upstairs and brought down her special make-up bag, took out a pair of long-bladed scissors, a little pair of clippers and a miniature razor with a sharp, fixed blade. She found a bath towel on the rack in the laundry room, swept it around Dougie’s neck and tucked it under his collar.

  ‘Sit,’ she said.

  Obediently he seated himself on the upright chair directly under the light.

  She moved behind him, lifted a comb and the long scissors and touched his hair lightly, flicking the comb and scissors through it. She had never touched Giffard before and she was surprised at how pleasant and consoling the intimacy was. She lifted a tuft of hair with the back edge of the comb and snipped it off.

  ‘Ah’m no’ wantin’ a Barlinnie special, remember,’ Dougie said.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘A prison haircut, a baldie.’

  Penny laughed again.

  It was almost dark outside and she had a strange feeling that it might snow tonight. She found that prospect exciting. Behind her, almost at her heels, Frobe stretched out in front of the fire, purring loudly. She ran her fingers through Giffard’s hair and with her thumb tweaked down his right ear, snipped carefully, snipped again. He sat patiently under the bath towel, moving his head only when she told him. She pressed her breasts against his shoulder blades and lifted the fringe of thinning hair over his brow: snipped.

  Dougie said, ‘Has he gone off for t’ be with his girlfriend?’

  ‘I expect that may be so,’ said Penny.

  ‘An all-nighter?’

  ‘Probably, yes.’

  Dougie said nothing for a while.

  Then, ‘You’re no Jew, Penny, are you?’

  She stopped, scissors poised.

  Dougie said, ‘An’ you’ve never been in Vienna in your life.’

  She worked the comb, lifted hair, trimmed it away.

  ‘How do you know?’ she said.

  ‘Hummelstreek,’ Dougie said. ‘I just made the name up. There’s no such mountain that I know of.’

  ‘Oh, I see. It was a trick.’

  ‘Where are you really from? Germany?’

  ‘Yes,’ Penny said. ‘Berlin.’

  ‘This money we’re makin’, is it for the Nazis?’

  ‘That is not my concern,’ Penny said.

  She felt no sense of shame and no panic at being caught in a lie. The story had not been watertight in the first place and the only surprise was that it had taken someone like Dougie Giffard to guess the truth. She bore no animosity towards the little Glaswegian, had no desire to hide from him or invent more lies.

  She said, ‘Does it concern you who the money is for?’

  ‘Naw, not much,’ Dougie said.

  ‘You are wrong about the other thing, however.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It is true that I am not a Jew. I am a half-Jew. My mother is Jewish.’

  ‘So you weren’t chased out o’ Vienna?’

  ‘Of course I was not,’ said Penny. ‘I have never been to Vienna.’

  ‘What does your old man do?’

  ‘My old man?’

  ‘Your father? Is he a Nazi?’

  ‘My father is dead.’

  She felt Dougie stiffen a little and knew that he would be frowning that deep, steep frown. She ran a forefinger down the nape of his neck and felt him shiver.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Dougie said.

  ‘You do not have to be sorry. It is nothing to you.’

  ‘Did your father engrave the plates?’

  ‘He was involved in making the plates, yes.’

  ‘So the plates are your inheritance, your legacy?’

  Penny laughed softly. ‘What a fanciful person you are, Dougie. No, the plates are not my inheritance. My father was not an engraver. He was a banker. The plates were made by a team, a team that was taken over when he died.’

  ‘Taken over by the Nazis, you mean?’

  ‘By the party, a branch of the party.’

  ‘Was your old man murdered?’

  ‘Of course he was not murdered. He died of a disease in the kidneys.’

  ‘Is your mother still in Germany?’

  ‘You are very good at asking questions,’ Penny said. ‘My mother is in New York now, with her sister in New York. It was through my mother’s sister that Carlo Manone became involved in all of this.’

  ‘Why didn’t this Nazi “team” you talk about just take over completely,’ Dougie said. ‘Why did they bother wi’ Carlo Manone at all?’

  ‘They required the currency to be manufactured in England.’

  ‘I thought it was just a bit too well organised,’ Dougie said. ‘I take it you stayed on in Berlin t’ make sure your mother gets somethin’ out of it?’

  ‘That is correct.’ She busied herself with his hair and for several seconds neither of them spoke and there was no sound in the kitchen but the purring of the cat and the rapid clickety-click-click of the little steel blades. Then Penny said, ‘Are you going to tell Tony what I have told you?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Will you not tell Dominic?’

  ‘Why would I want t’ tell Dominic?’

  ‘Because he pays you. Because he is your boss.’

  Dougie gave a wry little grunt. ‘I don’t know who mah boss is an’ I don’t care much. There’s big money to be made off of this operation an’ all I want is a wee share. I owe somethin’ to Dominic for keepin’ me alive but all Dominic’s doin’ is payin’ off his father’s debt. If you ask me, Penny Weston, the bulk o’ the profits from the money we manufacture will go t’ finance agents.’

  ‘Agents?’

  ‘Nazi sympathisers in Britain. God knows there’s enough o’ them. There’s a new name for them now,’ Dougie said. ‘It’s called a Fifth Column; an army wi’ no uniforms or guns, but ready an’ willin’ t’ fight from the inside when the time’s ripe.’

  ‘Informers?’

  ‘Informers, saboteurs, spies; they’ll all need funds.’

  ‘Counterfeit money?’

  ‘The best counterfeit money that money can buy.’ Dougie fumbled under the bath towel and eased out an arm. He flung the towel back like a toga and, without t
urning, held up his hand. In it was a five-pound banknote. ‘Money like this.’

  Penny put down the scissors, took the banknote reverently between fingers and thumbs, her blue eyes round as moons.

  ‘O Gott! O Gott!’ she whispered. ‘You have done it. You have truly done it.’

  ‘Aye, I have,’ Dougie said. ‘What’s more, it is damned near perfect.’

  ‘Perfect!’ Penny gave a hop of delight. ‘I knew that you would make it perfect.’ She leaned over the chair-back and kissed the printer on the brow. ‘When do you think you can begin the run?’

  ‘Two weeks, maybe three,’ Dougie Giffard said.

  Leaning over him, breasts brushing his cheek, she held the note out.

  ‘Keep it, lassie, keep it as a souvenir,’ Dougie Giffard said. ‘Before the summer’s over we’ll have a hundred thousand more.’

  * * *

  She wore an elongated Rodex country style overcoat and a navy blue hat that rendered her almost invisible against the great mass of the privet hedge.

  Tony fisted the steering wheel and slid the motorcar alongside the kerb. She scuttled out of the shadows so furtively that for an instant he was not entirely sure that it was Polly at all. She jerked open the door on the passenger side and flopped in beside him, did not reach for him, did not offer him a kiss: said, ‘Drive, Tony, drive away quickly.’

  ‘My place?’

  ‘No. No, around the park, just around the park.’

  ‘Is Dominic…’

  ‘For God’s sake drive, will you?’

  He found gear, pressed the accelerator and shot the Dolomite forward away from the Manones’ driveway. Polly’s urgency, her lack of interest in anything but escape hurt him. He had been looking forward to the moment of meeting, to seeing her smile, to having her in his arms. Now he was roaring around the corner with tyres squealing as if this were a getaway and not a lovers’ tryst.

  ‘Why did you call me?’ Polly said.

  ‘I needed to see you,’ Tony said.

  ‘Did you have to leave a message with Leah?’