Vanda paraded “women’s fashion items,” words, she said, that covered “a multitude of sins” from boleros to sweater dresses to matronly cardigans. Babies and toddlers were short-changed, although Vanda occasionally carried a large doll in full matinée fig. The doll appeared mysteriously from nowhere—too big, surely, for Adele’s suitcase. It was called Dorothy. “Nearest I’ll ever get to being a mother,” Vanda said, in triumph rather than sorrow, as she adjusted the ribbons on the inanimate Dorothy’s bonnet.
Unlike her mother, more ramshackle by the month, Freda was an exceptionally neat and tidy child. (“Fastidious,” Duncan said.) Every night before bed she tied her hair in rags and rubbed bicarb on her freckles as someone had told her once that it would make them fade. Before getting into bed, a bed often shared with Vanda, she would fold all her clothes and place them pyramidically on a chair—skirt at the bottom up to knickers at the top, coped by her socks, all ready for the next day when the pyramid was dismantled in reverse. “Aren’t you good!” Vanda said admiringly. They shared a bedroom in a variety of boarding houses. Vanda, like Freda’s mother, was slovenly, clothes dropped where they were removed, face powder spilt everywhere. Freda made no judgements. She was learning about womanhood. You take it where you can, as Duncan would say.
Freda was very good at packing, too, she could get twice as much in her little suitcase as Vanda did in her big one. Sometimes she took over Vanda’s packing for her. It was all in the folding. Like geometry, Duncan said. Freda’s understanding of geometry, or any branch of mathematics, was lamentable. Sometimes she wondered if she shouldn’t be in school more often.
“Don’t worry, pet, you only need to be able to count to eight if you’re going to be a dancer,” Vanda said.
Vanda owned a coat that she claimed had been given to her by an admirer and was stitched from the pelts of thirty-six ermine. It was like a great snowy cloud and Freda often found herself asleep on Vanda’s fur-clad shoulder in one train carriage or another. It was made from rabbits, not ermines, Duncan said. Freda had no idea what an ermine was. An animal, she knew that much, although her acquaintance with any kind of animal was limited. She had never owned a pet, never visited a farm or a zoo. Cows and sheep were merely ornaments that dotted the landscape of the north as it rolled past the train window. Although embarrassed by her ignorance now, she had been astonished when Vanda explained that sheep were the origin of the Knits.
In the evenings, in the boarding houses, Duncan would take a bottle out from his suitcase. He was never without one. He always offered Freda a “tipple.” She always refused. She had tried it once and it had made her insides heave. “Old Navy rum,” Duncan said. “Strip the paint off a battleship. That’s where I got a taste for it—in the rum old Royal Navy.”
Sometimes on these occasions, Vanda (who preferred port) said, “Tell us some of your war stories, then, Duncan,” with a strangely vulgar leer on her face, and Duncan would laugh and say, “Oo, will I buggery, love?” but then would proceed to regale them with the tale of how he’d gone down on HMS Formidable in 1915 in the English Channel before “popping back up again like a cork.” What was vulgar about that?, Freda wondered. She presumed that the cork story was a joke of some kind, or a magic trick. Duncan rarely mentioned the five hundred or so sailors who didn’t pop back up with him. The war was history, and history didn’t interest Freda, she’d had no part in it. She was vibrant with the present and hungry for the future.
Vanda had “lost her man” early in the war. Freda thought he must have been killed in battle, but Duncan said he’d run off to Barnsley with a barmaid. “Alliterative adultery,” he said.
“Big word,” Vanda said.
“Which one?” Duncan said.
On these companionable boarding-house evenings, sometimes in “the public lounge” in front of a hissing gas fire, but more often than not in the bedroom that Vanda and Freda shared, Duncan taught Freda to play cards, the pack laid out on the bedspread. He taught her how to cheat as well, which was even better—“cold stacking” and the “third card deal” as well as many other “tricks,” as he called them. She was a natural, apparently.
“Nimble little fingers,” Duncan said appreciatively. Freda was precocious, he told Vanda. Freda thought he meant “precious.” They played for matches. By the time they all parted company for the last time Duncan was heavily in debt to Freda. He would need to raid one of Kreuger’s warehouses to pay her back, he said. Kreuger was the Match King, he said. If she married the Match King, Freda wondered, would she become the Match Queen?
Vanda was skilled with cards, too, having learnt all kinds of tricks from her time as the magician’s assistant. She was willing to explain to Freda how you went about sawing someone in half (usually a woman) and also how you made someone disappear (also usually a woman). Very useful knowledge, in Freda’s opinion. “Misdirection,” Vanda said. “That’s the key.”
Vanda was happy to be a traitor to the secrets of the Magic Circle—“Punishable by death, probably,” she said cheerfully—but wild horses could not have made her divulge her age. (“A lady’s prerogative.”) Twenty-five, Freda guessed, although not to her face. “Double that and take away ten,” Duncan said.
And where was Freda’s mother in all this? More often than not, she could be seen teetering out to the Co-op with a jug and coming back with it filled with sherry “from the wood,” which makes it sound refined, when it was just a barrel with a spigot at the back of the shop.
Freda’s father, much older than her mother, died (“keeled over”) one day at work. He’d managed to sidestep the war because of his eyesight but was caught out by his heart when Freda was only five. “He was an old fuddy-duddy,” Gladys said, “all pipes and slippers, I don’t know what I was thinking,” although in fact she knew very well that she had been thinking about not having to trudge to work every day in Rowntree’s offices, which was where she had met Freda’s father, a widower “in management.” “Management” sounded rather grand to Freda’s ears. When she thought about her father, she smelt chocolate and tweed and tobacco. He used to bring home a bag of misshapen chocolates every week, a supply that was tragically cut off with his death.
Freda’s father was rarely awarded a name by Gladys now that he was in the afterlife. He was simply “your father” when Gladys spoke about him to Freda, or quite often “a pig,” awarding him in Freda’s eyes a mythic quality, as if he had come down from Mount Olympus especially to impregnate Gladys before absconding back to the divine regions. In Freda’s book of Greek myths, girls seemed to be in almost continual danger from being taken unaware by an over-eager Zeus in the form of a swan or a bull. Even an ant. Why not a pig?
In the real world, Freda’s father had simply been foolishly flattered by the attentions of a younger woman. At first, Gladys had made him feel young, and then within a short time she made him feel old. A story as ancient as the Greek gods themselves.
Why did Zeus need to put on a disguise?, Vanda mused, leafing through the pages of Freda’s book in a railway carriage in the no-man’s-land between Rotherham and Sheffield. “Surely you’d rather be tupped by the king of the gods than an ant? And how on earth would it work with an ant anyway? The size difference would be ridiculous.”
“Tupped?” Duncan snorted. “What are you? Little Bo-Peep? Call a fuck a fuck, Vanda, dear heart.”
This entire conversation was, fortunately, held in Freda’s absence, as she was in the corridor, hanging out of the window, getting smuts in her eye from the engine and putting herself in danger of decapitation. She was not averse to the thrill of danger.
In the face of parental dereliction of duty, both voluntary and involuntary, Vanda and Duncan were the nearest thing to a chaperone for Freda. Not Adele. Adele was all timetables.
“We’re a funny little family, aren’t we?” Vanda said.
“You take it where you can,” Duncan said.
* * *
—
And then Adele had taken Freda to one side and told her she had grown “too womanly” for the kiddies’ Knits and her service was no longer required.