Secrets in Store

‘Well, good question.’ Jim pushed his plate away, unfinished – unheard of. ‘I’m considering lots of options, actually.’

‘Are you?’ There was something in his tone, and Lily pushed her plate away too. It was one thing to dismiss his suspicions about Mr Simmonds, but this sounded serious.

Jim looked at his watch.

‘I should go. I’m due back soon.’

‘Jim!’ protested Lily. ‘You can’t leave it like that! Aren’t you going to tell me what these options are?’

‘Not till I’ve narrowed them down a bit.’

Lily made a conscious effort to stay calm. ‘Let me narrow them down for you. You stay here and get promotion after promotion till you take over from Mr Marlow.’

‘Hang on!’ Jim looked into the distance and pretended to shade his eyes against an imaginary sun. ‘What’s that I see? Oh yes. A flying pig.’

‘Well, why not?’ protested Lily. ‘His son’s not interested, and he’s got to hand it on to someone.’

‘Well, that’s a nice little fantasy.’ Jim tipped back on his chair. ‘You carry on with it. Maybe in your world, Lily, we’re not even at war – men, women, children dying every day while I’m telling our customers why we haven’t got any tray cloths.’

Like a round of mortar fire his words hit home. Suddenly, with horrible clarity, she knew. Idiot that she was! Why hadn’t she realised Jim wasn’t the sort to take ‘no’ for an answer?

‘You’re going to re-apply, aren’t you, to the Army? Tell them you want a desk job.’

‘Well, there’s enough of them,’ Jim said reasonably. ‘Someone’s got to keep things going behind the scenes.’

‘Pen-pushing?’

‘It’s still a lot more useful than what I’m doing here. And they can’t say I’m not suitable for that!’

Lily swallowed hard.

‘But Jim … it could be … you could be sent anywhere!’

‘That’s rather the point with work of national importance,’ said Jim, stressing the ‘national’. ‘Or there’s plenty of other kinds of war work. Factories, shipyards, the mines—’

This was getting worse.

‘The mines?’

‘They’ve lost a lot of men to the Forces. They’re going to have to replace them somehow, and it’s one job women can’t do.’

The vision of a blackened Jim humping coal was even worse than one of him jabbing someone with a bayonet.

‘You, a miner? You can’t be serious.’

Jim looked at her straight, sincere.

‘Lily, please. Put yourself in my shoes. In all conscience, how can I stay here selling tray cloths, day in day out – if we had any to sell? How do you think that makes me feel?’

‘Well, all right …’ It made him deeply unhappy, she could see. ‘But—’

‘If you don’t see me as a miner or a steelworker – and I’ll give you that, you could be right, then at the very least I could jack this in and go home. There’s plenty of work on the land.’

Of course! Jim had grown up in the country – his mother had moved away from Hinton and met his father there. She would be over the moon if he made that choice. And farming was a reserved occupation.

Jim suddenly tutted and looked at his watch again.

‘All this talking – you’ve made me late!’

He stood up and pushed his bowl of plums and custard towards her.

‘You can have this. I’m not hungry anyway.’

Lily looked up at him, speechless.

‘See you,’ he said casually.

He smiled briefly and walked away.

Lily looked down at the bowl in front of her. She found she wasn’t hungry either. In fact, she felt rather sick.

Surely he – she – hadn’t had a reprieve from the Army just for him to go off somewhere else?

Chapter 7 (#u21c8cd86-824c-5fca-a4a2-cd52d07923b1)

Dinner break over, plums untasted, Lily went back to her department with a heart that felt as if it was strapped into the Big Dipper at Blackpool Pleasure Beach – as if it hadn’t had enough ups and downs lately.

Instinctively she glanced across to Furniture. Jim was nowhere to be seen, but Gladys, busy straightening the rails, mouthed ‘Delivery’, which gave Lily some relief. At least that explained his absence. He wasn’t up on the management floor handing in his notice. Yet. Even so, Lily found it difficult – impossible, actually – to share Miss Temple’s outrage over the fact that Gentlemen’s Outfitting had received a quantity of caps when Miss Frobisher had had children’s pixie hoods on order since before Christmas.

‘It’s getting ridiculous!’ Miss Temple complained, but her indignation only emphasised Jim’s point. If they couldn’t get the goods to sell anyway, Marlow’s would be happy to let staff go. Why shouldn’t Jim take the decision for them?

The afternoon dragged. It more than dragged, it positively limped towards five thirty and going-home time.

At last the final customer had left, the department was tidy, and Lily could make her escape. Jim had returned to his department mid-afternoon, and her plan was to intercept him before he got to the back stairs and gave her the slip. She’d spent the hours since dinner, when she was pretending to listen to Miss Temple, formulating her plan. She might not have any hope of persuading Jim out of this notion of leaving, but she could at least urge him not to do anything hasty. It was her only hope.

But it was not her day. Before she was halfway across the sales floor, she saw Mr Simmonds approaching. Like an avenging angel he bore down on Jim, his famous clipboard turned, in Lily’s mind, into a flaming sword. She couldn’t tell from that distance whether he had a particularly shark-like look in his eye – which would have sat rather oddly on an avenging angel, she realised.

But whether he had or not, could Lily trust Jim not to take the chance to blurt out that he was thinking of resigning? Surely Mr Simmonds, ex-Army as he was, would heartily endorse it. The mood Jim was in, he’d probably convinced himself that Simmonds thought he was ducking his duty anyway.

Whatever, it was too late. Mr Simmonds steered Jim through the double doors to the stairs – and Lily’s chance was gone.

Miserably she trudged home. Even the first catkins on the alder trees in the park couldn’t cheer her, nor the blackbird chirping from a chimney pot as she turned into their street.

Inside the house, she found her mother pinning on her hat in readiness for another evening of rolling bandages. Wordlessly, but smiling, Dora nodded towards a postcard on the mantelpiece.

Standard Forces’ issue – and Sid’s writing!

Lily snatched it up.