A Pair of Blue Eyes

Ivy is seventeen the first time she sees Alec. She and Renee have finished their shift at the cotton mill and are walking home together when they see the crowd of people gathered round a man on a stool in the park. They stop to watch, and Renee lets out a giggle. “He’s having his hair cut, Ivy! Look!”

Sure enough, the large gentleman on the stool is having his hair snipped away by a dashing young man with shiny scissors and the bluest eyes Ivy’s ever seen.

With a flourish, the young man finishes his handiwork and then produces a little brush to remove any stray bits of hair. The crowd claps politely and the young man looks round, beaming. “Any more?” he asks hopefully.

In front of them, a girl nudges her brother. “Go on. I dare you.”

“I’m not wasting my money on a haircut!” the lad says scornfully. “Not when Ma can trim it herself for nothing.”

The man obviously cuts ladies’ hair as well because, as they watch, a girl who looks to be Ivy’s age steps forward and takes the place that the previous client has vacated. Ivy watches them both as the barber’s hands gently pull the girl’s hair from its pins, loosening the softly rolled swirls and letting her burnished locks tumble over her shoulders. In that instant, Ivy feels a sudden pang of desire, imagining what it would be like to feel those long, clever fingers caress her hair, her face. She’s seventeen and as innocent as she was at seven, but that one simple gesture ignites something sinful in her. She turns away, her cheeks flaming with embarrassment.

“He’s not cutting it.” Renee sounds disappointed.

Ivy’s gaze swivels back to the hairdresser and his stool, and at that moment, he looks up and catches her eye. She blushes again and looks away.

“Come on,” Renee says. “Ma will be wondering where we are.”

They’ve started leaving when Ivy feels a hand tug at her sleeve. Whirling round, she’s confronted with the blue-eyed barber. “Was I really that bad?” he asks, grinning. “The way you were watching me, I thought you were going to volunteer to have your hair done.”

“I’m sorry,” Ivy says awkwardly. “You cut hair very well, Mr...”

“Forbes,” he supplies. “Alec Forbes.” He hands her a card. “I don’t just cut hair in the park: I’ve started working in a shop on the High Street. You should come and have a look.”

The card reads simply, “Atkins and Sons. Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Hairdressers.”

“It’s quite respectable,” he assures her as she attempts to hand the card back to him. “The ladies have a separate room to the gentlemen.”

“I’m not a lady,” Ivy says bluntly, “and I can’t afford fancy shop-prices.”

“I’m sorry.” He’s instantly contrite. “I should have thought, Miss...”

“Conway,” Ivy tells him.

He gives a slight bow. “I hope to see you again, Miss Conway. Adieu.”

Alec does see her again – the next day when she’s walking home from the mill. Like her older sisters, Mabel and Evelyn, she started working in the cotton mill at the age of eleven, alternating weeks of school in the morning and the mill in the afternoon with mornings spent working and afternoons spent studying. She has four brothers and sisters and their cobbler father struggles to keep them all fed – even with three of them in full-time employment. Times are hard in 1911, but Alec’s blue eyes promise sunshine and happiness; so when he asks her to go out walking with him on Sunday afternoon, she says yes.

Their wedding takes place on a sunny day in June a month before Ivy’s eighteenth birthday. Despite the fact that she’ll be living under the same roof as her mother-in-law, Ivy’s impatient to leave the poky two-up, two-down where she shares a room with her siblings. (She, Evelyn and Renee squeeze into one bed together, and Harold and Charlie sleep top-to-toe in another, the room divided by a blanket hung over a rope so that the two sexes have some privacy.)

The service begins and Ivy is no longer a bride-to-be but a bride as she stands by Alec’s side and promises to ‘love, honour and obey’. The brass wedding ring he places on her finger gleams as if it is gold and she doesn’t mind that it isn’t. The guests are few; the wedding modest – but it is not pomp and circumstance that are important but love and devotion. She and Alec have promised to be true ‘until death us do part’ and this is what counts.

Leaving the churchyard, the carriage almost runs into a hearse that is entering. Perhaps Ivy should have recognised this as a bad omen; as it is, she and Alec both laugh it off, too starry-eyed with love to see anything further than the wedding breakfast and their first night together as a married couple.

The wedding breakfast is at Alec’s house. His mother’s parlour is dressed for the occasion with bunches of seasonal flowers – poppies, cornflowers and dog-roses – and decorated with white ribbons tied to the chair arms. Meanwhile, the table, bearing a white lace cloth, groans under the weight of Ivy’s mother’s baking – pies and cakes and bread rolls rub shoulders with a cooked chicken and a leg of ham.

All too soon, the party is over and Ivy’s family has departed. She is no longer a Conway, now and forever a Forbes. Her mother-in-law gives her a sour smile once they are alone. “I’ve given the two of you my room,” she says unnecessarily. “There’ll be space for a crib once the bairns come.”

Ivy’s nightgown is waiting for her on the pillow. She undresses carefully, struggling with the laces on her stays, then pulls the virginal white cotton over her head. Sitting in front of the dressing table – a luxury that wasn’t present in the room she shared with Evelyn and Renee – she unpins her hair and begins to brush it out.

She’s still busy when Alec enters the room. Without saying anything, he crosses over to her and removes the brush from her hand, then begins to stroke it slowly and sensuously through her hair.

Ivy’s senses tingle. An involuntary spasm of desire ripples through her as her husband’s fingers gently caress the back of her neck. Turning her head, she sees her own raw need mirrored in his eyes and realise that she wants this more than anything she’s ever wanted in her whole life.

“Get into bed,” he says, his voice thick with longing.

The bedsprings creak as he climbs in beside her. Ivy lies still and demure, not knowing what to expect. There have been chaste kisses on the cheek at the end of each of their Sunday walks, but apart from that, she’s as pure as her nightgown.

She’s expecting at least some attempt at romance: some prolonged kissing, some shy, gentle fumbling; but instead, Alec seems overcome by all the repressed sexual tension he’s been holding back for the past six months. His hand grabs at her nightdress, bunching it out of the way as he lowers his weight on top of her, and she’s hit by a distinctly alcoholic aroma which suggests that he’s tried to give himself a little Dutch courage for the task in hand.

In years to come, she’ll realise that Alec can’t function without a drink or four inside him; and when their daughter, Joan is born three years later, Ivy realises that she has to protect both of them from her husband’s drunken rages.

*

Ivy straightens her hat nervously before lifting the heavy, brass knocker and letting it fall with a thud against the smartly painted door. Beside her, eleven-year-old Joan fidgets, shuffling from one foot to the other. It’s partly because of Joan that she’s here now – she wants her daughter to have a better education than she had herself and so she’s travelled hundreds of miles, leaving Hyde and her parents’ house far behind and answering an advertisement from a widower wanting a live-in housekeeper to care for himself and his children. Mr Wood is a headmaster at the boys’ grammar school and he’s promised to put in a good word for Joan at the corresponding girls’ school. She’ll have to take an entrance exam, of course, but Ivy’s confident her clever daughter will meet the requirements. It’s so much easier to find a quiet place to read or study when you’re an only child and not one of six.

The door opens and she starts involuntarily at the sight of the man in front of her. He’s younger than she expected and handsome too, although in a completely different way to Alec. Her estranged husband had charmed her with his brilliant blue eyes and his ready smile, but the demon that surfaced after a few bottles of beer had been a savage brute who’d hit her too many times.

Mr Wood is looking at her expectantly. “Won’t you come in?”

He looks solid and dependable, she decides. His name suits him: Wood. Somehow, she knows that this man will treat her with respect.

Mr Wood has two children, Jessie, a girl of seventeen who’s just begun working as a secretary, and George, two years older than Joan and with a passion for cricket. A bedroom has been set aside for Ivy to share with her daughter. A part of her’s glad about this: George might be only 13, but she doesn’t like the way he was looking at Joan. She can keep her daughter safe if they curl up in the same bed together every night.

She and Joan eat their evening meal in the kitchen while Mr Wood and his children sit in the formal dining room. Ivy’s never lived in a house as grand as this before. After she left Alec, she went back to Ma and Pa and the crowded bedroom; then, when she realised Alec might try to find her there, she and Joan went to live with Ma’s sister in Padfield. She stayed there for the next eight or nine years, learning how to be a farm girl; but she always knew milking cows and feeding chickens wasn’t for her, so when the opportunity arose to go down to Kent and become a housekeeper, she took it.

Over the next few weeks, she and Mr Wood develop a companionable relationship. He must be lonely, she thinks, looking at him over the edge of her teacup as they sit together at the kitchen table, sharing their stories of bereavement. Yes, Ivy’s told him she’s a widow; and Joan was so small when her mother ran away from her father that she doesn’t know any different. To all intents and purposes, Alec Forbes is dead to Ivy; and if a lonely, handsome widower starts taking an interest in her, she’s not going to tell him the truth.

Firelight flickers in the grate as the heavy clock on the mantlepiece strikes eight. Ivy looks at her daughter. “Time for bed.”

No one’s quite sure when the rules changed, but somehow Ivy and Joan have started sitting with Edwin and his children in the sitting room each night and they no longer take their meals at the kitchen table. On Sunday afternoons, Edwin and Ivy walk along the country lanes, admiring the oast houses and talking about poetry. She can still remember all the poems she learned by heart at school: ‘Old Meg she was a gypsy’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘We Are Seven’ trip as easily off her tongue now as they did all those years ago.

Joan dutifully gets up and makes her way towards the door.

“I’ll be up to say goodnight in a few minutes,” Ivy says.

Edwin glances at George. “You should be going to bed soon too,” he tells him. Ivy shoots him a warning glance. “Ten more minutes, then,” Edwin says.

When they are finally alone, Edwin clears his throat. He has known this woman for only a few short months, but he can’t conceive of anyone better to help him bring up his children. Besides, with her long brown hair twisted into a modest bun and her large grey eyes, she’s ignited something inside him: a spark he thought had long gone out. He knows it’s too soon – his wife’s been dead only a year – but sometimes you have to snatch at happiness where you can and so he finds himself kneeling at Ivy’s feet and professing his love for her.

Ivy’s slightly surprised by this – but only slightly. After all, she and Edwin are both still young enough to have urges. Alec was drunk on their wedding night and on every other night it happened; but Edwin joined the Temperance society as a boy and hasn’t looked back since. She feels sure that his bedroom behaviour would be civil and courteous; and after so long on her own, she finds herself longing for the touch of a hand on her face or a pair of strong arms holding her close.

Edwin glances at the clock. Jessie went off to a dance in the village, promising to be home by ten. More than anything, he wants to kiss Ivy; but the idea of his daughter’s disapproval, were she to walk in now and catch them at it, tempers his desire and instead he contents himself with a kiss on the cheek.

Ivy lies in bed that night, her heart beating fast as she wonders what to do. Edwin loves her; and being the respectable sort of man that he is, she knows he won’t contemplate anything other than marriage. Alec is a husband in name only; what harm could it possibly do if she marries Edwin? But the uneasy feeling in her gut tells her she’s only fooling herself. Bigamy is a sin and she’ll be condemning them both to hell. But how can she turn round now and tell Edwin her husband is still alive? Worse still, how can she explain that Alec refuses to divorce her, wanting to keep their contract legal and binding so he can have a claim to her parents’ property when they die?

The tiny chapel is filled with sunlight as the happy couple stand before God and pledge their vows to each other. On a pew near the front sit their three children, Joan in a floppy hat like her mother’s and George and Jessie hoping their father is doing the right thing. Edwin thinks he has never seen Ivy look more beautiful. Coloured beams of light bounce off her white hat and calf length frock as he places his ring on her finger. When Matilda died, he thought he would never be happy again; but Ivy has crept into his heart like her namesake, pulling him close, entwining him in a contentment that makes him feel ten years younger.

Later, he follows her up the stairs to the bedroom that’s seemed cold and empty for the past two years. She removes her dress and he unlaces her stays, almost reverentially, before carrying her to the wrought iron bedstead and letting her know how pleased he is to be her husband.

It’s another letter from Renee. “I can’t believe you haven’t told him!” Ivy rereads the words, then folds the smooth white paper carefully and places it in the small tin trunk where she keeps most of her correspondence.

She knows her sister’s right: it isn’t fair to let Edwin keep on living in ignorance; but once he knows of Alec’s existence, what then? Will she and Joan be cast out on the streets as a punishment for her lie?

More weeks pass before she broaches the subject, albeit in a roundabout way, expressing surprise at a tale she’s heard in the village of a woman who thought her husband had been killed in the Great War and who had subsequently remarried only to find her first husband appearing out of the blue, miraculously alive, sometime later.

“The more fool her!” is Edwin’s comment. “She shouldn’t have acted like a widow until she was certain that she was one.”

Ivy knows then that she’ll never be able to tell him. If he’s condemned an imaginary woman for innocently committing bigamy, what will he say when he finds Ivy knew all along that Alec wasn’t dead?

*

The nursing home is shrouded in silence. “Every time there’s a power cut,” Renee says, her voice hoarse from a lifetime of cigarettes, “they carry out the dead bodies.”

Ivy doubts this is true. Renee’s always been prone to melodrama – like that fuss she made about Ivy marrying Edwin.

“It worked out in the end, didn’t it?” Ivy says, not needing to elucidate.

Renee undergoes a prolonged bout of coughing before she makes her reply. “Did you ever regret marrying him?”

Ivy’s silent for a while, remembering. Edwin had been a good husband. Solid. Dependable. He’d been a good father for Joan.

“I think I made the right choice,” she says eventually. “He took care of us both.”

Renee snorts. “Not him. The other one.”

Ivy thinks of a pair of blue eyes and a pair of angry fists. She’d been a child, not knowing what lay ahead. But if there had been no Alec, there would have been no Joan, and Ivy loves her daughter more than anything else in the world.

“He came looking for you once,” Renee says. “After you’d gone to Padfield. Ma and Pa weren’t there: I was the only one in the house.”

Ivy’s heart stands still. “What did you tell him?” she asks at last.

Renee gives a twisted grin. “I told him you were both dead. Enough people died of Spanish flu to make it believable. He went away and didn’t come back.”

And Ivy nods, knowing what it is to lie to protect someone you love.