Patricia Schultheis

The Gin Bottle War

As if the raindrop he was watching possessed the blessed purity he wished for the whole warring world, the Reverend Mr. Lucien Downs concentrated while the drop slipped down the rectory’s window. He had been rude, he knew, to turn his back on Alice Hilmsley who sat by the parlor’s feeble fire, her clasped hands on her clasped knees. The gin bottle beside her. Her jeremiad droning on and on.

“Not a drop. Never. Not in my house. Not once,” Alice was repeating. “You can’t imagine, Mr. Downs, what a shock it was to find it. I’ve never allowed so much as a drop in my house. My mother had been the same. I was going through my Phillip’s dresser, and there it was. I can’t express how awful finding it made me feel. The boy has got to go. I can’t have him in my house.”

The raindrop splattered itself upon a dusty muntin, and the curate, feeling, if not exactly the hand of God, at least the blush of grace, turned toward the waiting widow.

“Yes. Yes. I understand, Mrs. Hilmsley, quite. What a terrible shock it must have been for you. I’m sorry. Terribly, terribly sorry.”

The label on the gin bottle matched the grosgrain ribbon trickling down the placket of the sweater covering Alice Hilmsley’s narrow torso. Both the label and the ribbon were the Union Jack’s deep red and blue, the brave colors one saw everywhere in those awful days.

“Still, as you say, Mrs. Hilmsley, that the seal is quite unbroken. It doesn’t appear as though he’d actually been drinking it, does it?”

“Merely because the seal is unbroken, Mr. Downs, one mustn’t assume he hasn’t found some way to open it and reseal it. The boy’s actually quite clever, in an intuitive sort of way. I wouldn’t put it past him to have drunk the liquor, poured in some water, and then resealed the whole thing up. I daresay, the lot of them are as deceitful as magpies. Not much better than gypsies. That little girl you placed with Mrs. Fairbough, well poor Mrs. Fairbough caught her eating butter right out of the tub. Right out of the tub! And that one with Mrs. Sands-Gordon. He sleeps with a filthy football. As for what he keeps under his pillow, let’s just say, it makes no difference if it’s a quid or a ha’pence, he’ll help himself to it, thank you very much.”

In the spring, the Reverend Mr. Downs’s idea had seemed like a good one. The blitz was savaging London- whole tenement blocks one April evening - and St. Anselm’s parish in North Barrows was seemingly safe. Why not offer a haven to the children? And St. Anselm’s parishioners had responded warmly, one might say even happily, at first. But by autumn, a twitchy recalcitrance and eerie secretiveness had begun poking through the children’s initial politeness. Alice Hilmsley’s was but the latest in a long, dreary season of complaints to spill into the rectory’s parlor, albeit, her being perhaps the harshest and the most well-founded.

The young curate had been certain that, having raised her own son, Phillip, a remarkable young man by all accounts, Alice Hilmsley would be the perfect match for Michael Hogan who’d lost his mother, his only relative, that April night. At fifteen, Michael Hogan, the curate had hoped, would be old enough to be not too much of a bother. Perhaps, even be of some help to Alice Hilmsley, a widow alone since Phillip had joined the RAF. But, now, here was the gin bottle.

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