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Chapter Thirteen

Olive was alone in the kitchen when she heard the knock on the front door, Sally having gone out to meet her friends, and Tilly and Agnes still upstairs and very quiet.

Blowing her nose on the handkerchief she retrieved from her sleeve, Olive guessed that her visitor would be Nancy, who sometimes came round on Saturday evening for a chat whilst her husband went down to the pub on the next street. The last thing she wanted was to have Nancy, who was such a gossip, guessing that something was wrong and asking her a lot of questions.

Only it wasn’t Nancy she could see standing outside her front door, when she switched off the hall light to keep the blackout, and then opened the door. It was a man.

Unable to make out his face in the darkness, Olive was wary about opening the door any wider, but whilst she hesitated a slightly nervous and young male voice told her, ‘I’ve come to see if Agnes is all right. She was supposed to be going to the Hammersmith Palais. Agnes and me work together,’ he ploughed on desperately into the silence.

Immediately Olive guessed, ‘You must be Ted then?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Ted was relieved to get a response.

‘And Agnes told you, did she, that you would find her at the Palais tonight?’ Olive’s voice hardened.

‘Oh, no, nothing like that,’ Ted denied. ‘Agnes isn’t the sort to go saying anything like that.’

Softened by this response, Olive opened the door properly. ‘You’d better come in.’

Taking off his cap, Ted stepped into the hall, glad of its warmth. Olive closed the front door and then switched on the light.

‘Agnes is all right, isn’t she? Only, she was a bit upset when she was telling me about what . . .’

‘About what my daughter was planning to do,’ Olive finished for him as she led the way to the kitchen.

‘Well, I didn’t want to say nothing about that,’ Ted told her, ‘’cos it’s none of my business, but I wouldn’t want to think of Agnes getting into trouble, and there not being anyone to stick up for her.’

‘Agnes is upstairs with my daughter,’ Olive told him, going automatically to fill the kettle and then light the gas beneath it, waving Ted into a chair as she did so.

He looked a decent enough sort, and Sergeant Dawson had spoken well of him. Olive liked the fact that he was concerned about Agnes.

‘I found out what Tilly was planning and I refused to let them go. I’m sorry if you are disappointed at not being able to see Agnes there,’ Olive told Ted as she made the tea.

‘No. I mean, I only went there ’cos I was a bit worried about her. I told her it was a daft idea and that they were bound to get found out,’ Ted announced with male scorn for an ill-thought-out female plan. ‘Told her too she should say summat to you about it and get it knocked on the head, but she said she couldn’t on account of her and your Tilly being friends. Ta,’ he added gratefully when Olive poured him a mug of tea and handed it to him.

Wrapping his cold hands round the mug, he told Olive, ‘Once I’d seen that they weren’t at the Palais I remembered how Agnes had said that she was feared that you might send her packing, her being only a lodger here, so I thought I’d come round just to make sure that you knew what was what.’

‘You don’t have to tell me that Agnes isn’t the sort of girl to break the rules, Ted,’ Olive assured him, touched by his obviously genuine concern for her lodger. ‘I’ve made my feelings about what she’s done very plain to Tilly and there’s no doubt in my mind about where the blame lies.’

‘Well, I dare say it’s natural that she wants to go, it being the best place in London for dancing and everyone going there. I was a bit iffy about it meself until I got inside, Hammersmith being what it is, but the management there know what’s what and there wasn’t any trouble going on inside, that I could see.’

‘That’s very reassuring to know, Ted,’ Olive thanked him gravely, hiding a small smile. Sergeant Dawson had said that Ted helped to look after his younger siblings and she could see that sense of responsibility in him when he talked about the Palais.

Ted drained the last of his tea and stood up.

‘I’ll be on my way then now that I know that Agnes is all right. Thanks for the tea.’

Dulcie tapped her foot irritably on the floor as she watched the three other girls dance off yet again with their partners. Not that she’d have wanted to dance with any of them, not for one minute. She could have been up there on the floor dancing. She’d been asked but she certainly wasn’t going to waste her blue silk frock or herself on any of the no-hopers who’d come up asking her for a dance.

It wasn’t in Dulcie’s nature to question her own actions, never mind find fault with them. It was other people’s fault that she wasn’t dancing, not her own – because there was no one there good enough for her to dance with.

She felt a tap on her shoulder and braced herself, turning round impatiently, the words of sarcastic rejection dying on her lips, her eyes rounding as she looked up into a familiar face, her heart thudding so hard it took her several seconds to vocalise her recognition in an uncharacteristically stunned voice. She stared at the handsome man wearing an RAF uniform, and said in disbelief, ‘You!’

It was David James-Thompson. For a minute she was as shocked as a naïve girl who knew nothing might have been. But, of course, she wasn’t a naïve girl and she had always known that Lydia’s beau was the sort to break the rules, just as she had always known that eventually he would seek her out, she assured herself.

Suddenly the evening was full of promise and excitement, the glitter from the mirror ball twirling over the dance floor and the spotlights reflected in the sparkle of her eyes.

All she allowed herself to say was, ‘You’re in uniform.’

‘You noticed then,’ he teased her. ‘I signed up for the RAF a week ago. Decided I couldn’t bear to stand on the sidelines any longer. Pilot training begins next week.’

The RAF. Far more exciting than if he had joined the army, Dulcie thought approvingly.

‘Thought I’d come on the off chance that you’d be here so we could celebrate together.’

Dulcie was over her shock now, and that fast beating heart had been firmly restored to its normal beat. There was no way she was going to allow him to know how thrilled she’d been to see him.

‘Shouldn’t that be something you’re doing with your fiancée?’ she taunted him instead.

‘Possibly,’ he agreed, unabashed, as he came to sit down beside her, taking the seat that had been Rita’s and turning it round so that he was sitting facing her, his knees brushing against her thigh. ‘Although at the moment she isn’t very pleased with me for joining up. She and my parents think I should have arranged things so that I claimed exemption from military duty. Awfully boring doing that, though, especially when so many other chaps seem to be having so much fun. We like having fun, don’t we, Dulcie?’ he asked her with a knowing smile, reaching for her hand as he did so and then sliding his fingers through hers so that their hands were laced together with an expertise that told her that this wasn’t the first time he had done something so intimate. The very fact that he knew what he was doing made David all the more of a prize and all the more exciting.

‘We’re two of a kind, you and I,’ he told her, his eyes brimming with amusement and appreciation as though he knew what she was thinking.

David watched the battle going on inside Dulcie’s thoughts and reflected in her gaze as caution fought with triumph. He hadn’t intended to come here, after the row with Lydia about him joining up. He’d planned to have dinner with a couple of other chaps who’d enlisted at the same time, and then go on to a nightclub with them, but then suddenly he’d thought of Dulcie and before he’d really known what he was doing he was on his way over here.

She was a looker all right, and classy too, nothing cheap or common about the way she looked. David toyed with the idea of persuading her to leave the dancehall with him. He could take her to one of the quieter and more discreetly managed clubs he knew, somewhere where they could sit in the darkness together, but before he could say anything Dulcie was standing up and tugging impatiently on his hand as she demanded, ‘Well, now that you’re here we’d better dance, hadn’t we?’

At the other end of the dance floor, on the elevated stage with its red curtains, the Joe Loss Orchestra swung into a waltz, and the lights were dipped.

The floor was packed with dancers, giving them no option but to hold each other close. He was a good dancer, leading her confidently, but then he would be, him being posh, Dulcie thought. Really, the two of them looked so good together that they could have had their photographs in one of those gossip columns in the newspapers, which showed you photographs of lords and ladies and the like. She looked far better with him than Lydia would, with her sallow skin and her bad-tempered face with its thin mouth. She wasn’t surprised that David wanted to escape from his fiancée to be with her.

His fiancée. Dancing with another girl’s fiancé was one thing, especially when she disliked that girl as much as she disliked Lydia, but once David was married to Lydia then things would be different. Girls who went out with married men were putting themselves on the wrong side of the respectability line and Dulcie had no intention of ever doing that.

Tilly couldn’t sleep. She knew her mother had come up to bed. She’d heard her familiar footsteps on the stairs and then the opening and closing of her door, followed by the further equally familiar sounds of her mother going to the bathroom and then returning to her room. She’d also heard Sally coming in, humming some tune under her breath, her firm nurse’s tread on the stairs. Only Dulcie was still out, but it wasn’t because of that that Tilly couldn’t sleep. Unlike Agnes, who was now making the small whuffling sounds she always made in her sleep.

Had those really been tears she had seen in her mother’s eyes earlier? Tears caused by her? The weight of Tilly’s guilt oppressed her. Being grown up wasn’t just about doing what you wanted to do, she was beginning to recognise; it wasn’t all about good things, it was about the consequences of those things as well. She had made her mother cry, and now that mattered far more to her than the fact that they had been found out and prevented from going dancing. There was a tight miserable pain inside Tilly’s chest, and with it a fear. Previously she had believed that whatever happened in her life to upset her – like when the Benson sisters at school had started lying in wait for her and making fun of her – her mother could and would make everything all right again. But that had been before she had seen her mother’s tears, before she had known that her mother was vulnerable.

The pain and guilt was too much for her. Throwing back the bedclothes, and trying not to shiver in the room’s chill, Tilly felt in the darkness with her feet for her slippers, burrowing her toes into their warmth in relief. She didn’t want to turn on the lamp in case she woke Agnes, but she was still able to retrieve her dressing gown from the post at the foot of the bed, quickly pulling it on and wrapping its cord round her. Her mother had been talking about making her and Agnes proper siren suits with hoods on them, to protect them from the cold should the air-raid siren go off and they had to spend the night in the Anderson shelter. Tilly had seen one of the suits in the window of Swan and Edgar. Bright red, its hood trimmed with swansdown, it had looked very warm and Christmassy, the pretty cosy image it portrayed very different from the reality of war rationing looming, and the increasing shortages of everything. All the best shops had their Christmas displays in their windows now: hampers with their lids thrown back to show what was inside in Fortnum and Mason; toys, of course, in Hamley’s; women’s clothes in the expensive dress shops in muted shades to tone with men’s uniforms. Christmas had always been such a special time at number 13. Her mother had made sure of that. Quietly and quickly Tilly made her way from her own bedroom to her mother’s.

Olive heard her bedroom door open. She had come to bed in the hope that sleep would stop her from brooding on the events of the evening, but sleep had proved to be impossible. Tonight, for the first time since she had been able to wrap her baby arms round her, Tilly had not kissed her good night. Olive had wept silently over that.

Tilly’s mother’s bedroom was filled with the familiar scents, which, blended together, became the scent that to Tilly was her mother: Pear’s soap, freshly ironed laundry, the smell of clean rooms and a warm kitchen, lavender polish, and baking – her mother’s scents. Tears of guilt and shame blurred Tilly’s eyes but she didn’t need to be able to see to find her way across the room.

‘Mum, are you awake?’ she asked hesitantly.

Olive turned to her daughter. ‘Yes, Tilly.’ She felt her bed depress under Tilly’s weight.

‘I’m sorry about what I said earlier, and about what I was going to do. It was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have done.’

The wretchedness in Tilly’s voice tore at Olive’s heart. Sitting up in bed, she reached for her daughter and put her arms round her, her cheek resting on Tilly’s downbent head.

‘I’m sorry too, Tilly. Sorry that I haven’t treated you, trusted you, as I should.’

Her mother’s apology made Tilly feel even worse. Turning, she flung her arms round Olive and told her fiercely, ‘You don’t have anything to feel sorry for. It was me who . . . who lied.’

Stroking her hair back from Tilly’s forehead, Olive told her sadly, ‘I’ve been selfish, Tilly, trying to keep you as a little girl, when you aren’t. I never wanted to stop you having fun, I just wanted to protect you. War makes people anxious to take what happiness they can, Tilly, when they can, especially the young. When we think someone we care for might be snatched from us, and with them our future happiness, it makes us all do things and take risks we wouldn’t normally take. For young people that often means falling in love, being hurt.’

‘I just wanted to go out dancing, but you’re afraid that I might meet someone and fall in love and that they might be killed and then . . . I’d be like you were when Dad died. Oh, Mum . . .’

They held each other tightly.

‘Sally has offered to go with you and Agnes to the Palais, just to help you find your feet there the first time you go.’

‘You mean . . .’ Tilly swallowed hard. This generosity on the part of her mother was too much for her to bear. Fresh tears fell.

‘You’ll have to take care of Agnes, Tilly. She isn’t as used to thinking for herself as you are.’

‘Can I stay here with you tonight?’ Tilly asked.

Olive smiled in the darkness and drew back the bedcovers.

They were almost the last to leave the Palais and now, in the foggy darkness outside the dancehall, they stood facing one another on the pavement.

‘Next time,’ David told Dulcie, ‘I’ll take you somewhere a bit more exciting than this.’

So there was going to be a next time. A thrill of pleasure surged through Dulcie; not that she was going to let him see how she felt. Instead she demanded, ‘Who says there’s going to be a next time?’

‘Not who but what,’ David answered, ‘and this is what says there will be.’

When he cupped her face in both his hands and gently drew his thumbs along her cheekbones, gazing down into her eyes as he did so, Dulcie could only gaze back at him. She’d been kissed before but never like this, like she’d seen people kissing in films, and no cheeky fumbling with her clothes either. David was a true gentleman. And awfully good at kissing. The only thing that could make right now any better would be being able to boast to Lizzie about it, but of course she could never do that.

‘There’ll be no seeing me again after you get married to Lydia,’ Dulcie felt bound to warn him, but David merely laughed.

‘Giving Lydia a wedding ring isn’t going to stop me enjoying life, Dulcie.’

Deep down inside, Dulcie felt unexpectedly shocked. She knew that David didn’t love Lydia, but to hear him speak so casually and uncaring made her wonder how serious he could ever be about any girl.

‘It might not stop you enjoying life, but it will stop me from going out with you,’ Dulcie insisted.

David was frowning now. ‘If you’re trying to persuade me not to marry Lydia, then I should tell you—’

‘I’m not trying to persuade you to do anything,’ Dulcie defended herself heatedly, not letting him finish. ‘What I’m doing is telling you that I won’t cheapen myself by providing a bit of fun for a married man. I think more of myself than to do that, even if you don’t.’

David looked crestfallen. ‘I’m sorry, Dulcie,’ he said immediately. ‘I didn’t mean . . . That is, you know how it is with me and Lydia. She doesn’t want me, she just wants who I am. You and I, we’re two of a kind, I know it.’

‘We aren’t two of anything, and we aren’t going to be.’

She meant it, David could see, and part of him admired her for her determination, even whilst most of him wished that she was more malleable. He might not have spent much time with her, but there was a quality about Dulcie that touched something in him that Lydia would never be able to reach. Perhaps it was a trait he had inherited from his Gaiety Girl grandmother that made him feel so at home with Dulcie, and if things had been different . . . But his parents, and especially his mother, would never accept Dulcie. And it was through his mother that ultimately he would inherit his wealth, just as it was his mother who was insisting on him marrying Lydia. David gave a brief inner shrug. Dulcie was a pretty girl but London was full of pretty girls. It wasn’t in his nature to fight for what he wanted; it was easier instead to want something else, and more within reach, so he gave Dulcie another smile, and nodded in acceptance of Dulcie’s decree before telling her, ‘I’ll get us a taxi,’ and then stepping out into the road.

Almost by magic a taxi materialised through the fog, and within seconds David was helping her into it, whilst Dulcie battled against the dangerous temptation to wish that she hadn’t closed the door quite so firmly on she and David getting together again.

She wasn’t in any danger of falling for him, Dulcie assured herself as she let herself into number 13 – she’d made David tell the taxi to stop at the entrance to the Row because she didn’t want Olive to hear the taxi and look out of her window to see what was going on – she wasn’t that daft, or that soft. And she’d meant what she said about not seeing him again.

When she reached the top landing she saw that the door to Sally’s room was open, a narrow oblong of light thrown by the bedside lamp. Then Sally appeared in the open doorway, wearing her dressing gown.

‘I just thought I’d warn you that Olive caught Tilly and Agnes trying to sneak out earlier this evening,’ she told her quietly

‘So what if she did?’ Dulcie hissed back. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me what Tilly does.’

‘Except that you encouraged her. Olive was very upset, Dulcie. It wasn’t a very nice thing to do. Olive is a decent sort and this is a good billet.’

‘Look, it’s not my fault if Tilly wants to go dancing. Serves Olive right, if you ask me, the way she carries on, fussing over that Agnes and treating me as though I’m something the cat brought in.’

Sally gave a small sigh. She’d only stayed up to warn Dulcie, thinking that the other girl might want to prepare an apology for Olive, but far from being remorseful Dulcie seemed to relish the trouble she had caused.