THE GOOD OVEN *Wattpad Featured* (aka 'Re Ply')

Waiting for Fred Astaire

On Saturdays you walked past the shop, the haberdasher, poised primly on the edge of a street corner, waiting to catch you on your way back from church (the Benediction), or prompt you as you scurried just in time to the pictures, to catch the Pathe news and Fred Astaire.

On Saturdays, when you had done your hair, and sat in front of your tired mother's fire to dry it, all eyes on your finery, you dreamed of one more feather. Crimping the waves of your strong hair, you shaped it to fit that longed for hat. A different one you put on now, nice and neat, fitted to your station, keeping house for the doctor. Your dress and coat were the best you would ever have, and fine to impress that unknown someone, in church pews or at dances. You smoothed them out, and turned your back, to let your mother see if all was right, not creased or dusty. One more brush, she gave, and sighing, stepped back.

There had been eleven younger ones, most married and gone. One had died at the Somme, buried in some grave no-one had seen. Two more boys, with no friends left from the 1914 pals battalions, had gone to war with the devil, in priests uniforms.

So the youngest of them all watched your elegance with teenager eyes, twenty years your junior, like your own child. She had come back, not from the war in France, but the home front of that old disease, poverty. Forty days in isolation with a tramp, quarantined for scarlet fever. Another sister there to comfort her, at first.

Blooming in her teens tonight, your youngest sister watched you, touching her hair in the same way, biting her lips to redden a wide engaging smile, using spent matches to darken the lashes around her bright blue eyes. Spoiled now, and always, she would try to justify her survival. Try to prove that she was worth saving, while not grasping how the older sister was not saved, and the older brother had not returned, and were mourned, so deeply and silently. So she would cover that guilt, and never name them. A rock in her soul.

Except that one day, with you.

Margaret.

She had named her with you.

Only because you were remembering your weddings.Together at eighty and a hundred, you reminisced about your weddings, that happened almost at the same time. How was it you married him? she had asked.

Oh, he was always there. When Margaret died, he just kept coming round. We were used to him.

But how was it you married him, though?

Oh, he used to watch me getting dressed up and spruced up in my finery, to go to dances, and not be treated right. There was this one night, this one night, I went out and waited on the corner. I'd saved up and spent every penny on a really fine hat, and I stood there in the dark and waited, and my beau never came.

When I realised, I just had to go home. I was heart-broken. But he was there. He never went out. He just spent Saturday nights at our kitchen table, as if Margaret was getting ready and would come down in a minute. Well, he just looked at me and said, 'He's not good enough for you. Stop hanging around waiting for him. I'll take you.' And that was that!

Wasn't he younger than you then?

Well, yes he was. You see, there weren't any my age. They didn't come back you see. More or less the whole village died in France. There was only the ones that were too young to go, and they were too young for me, or so I thought. But when he lost Margaret, well, it was right.

But I hadn't realised he was there. I think I'd been waiting for Fred Astaire. That night, I came to my senses. Those hats! I never bothered about a hat again! He loved me. And every day for the rest of his life, he loved me. And I loved him. And I loved the girl he'd lost, you see. We'd all loved Margaret. So he didn't need to hide it.

We fell silent, suddenly realising for the first time, that all the boys you grew up with, and their big brothers and cousins, and some of their fathers, all had set off to fight and be home by Christmas. It wasn't just your brother you prayed for still, at a hundred years of age. It was every man of the village over sixteen, and one or two under. And there must have been one special one. Your special one, held so softly in your silence here, now. That's why he had married you. That's why you had married him. Because you both knew what it was, to love, and to lose, and to go on in duty, and in faith, keeping on keeping on, looking for the light.

Like geese in flight, you called to each other, never losing touch, holding that formation, an arrow carving flight to your resting.