Читать книгу Women on the Home Front: Family Saga 4-Book Collection - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 30

Chapter Nineteen

Dulcie eyed the neat row of lipsticks on the counter in front of her impatiently. It was Monday. They were always quiet on Mondays, her working day seeming to drag, not that there was anything interesting to look forward to for the evening at number 13, not with Olive trying to get them all to give Sally a hand with her vegetable plot. She’d rather go home and listen to her mother praising Edith than do that. And tomorrow night that was what she would be doing, she reminded herself, since tomorrow was her mother’s birthday. She’d got her mother a lipstick for her birthday present, a pretty soft pink, and some powder as well. Her mother never took the trouble to make the best of herself, and having some decent cosmetics was bound to cheer her up. Her present was bound to be more expensive than whatever Edith bought her, Dulcie decided with some triumph. That should show her mother how wrong she was to favour Edith all the time. At least with Rick still at home on his post-Dunkirk leave, there’d be someone there to have a bit of a joke with.

Dulcie frowned as she looked down and noticed a small wrinkle in one of her stockings. Automatically she bent to smooth it away.

As she did so, from the other side of the counter she heard a male voice asking, ‘So what exactly is it you’d want this boyfriend who isn’t a real boyfriend to do?’

The voice and its amused tone were immediately recognisable. They had Dulcie standing up so quickly that she felt dizzy, which was no doubt why her face felt flushed, she decided as she stared up into Raphael Androtti’s brown eyes.

Normally quick off the mark with a retaliatory comment, Dulcie for once was lost for words, finally managing only a defensive. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

‘A joke? I thought we were supposed to be acting as lovebirds, not clowns. Of course, if you’ve changed your mind, and you’ve found someone else to play the role of doting boyfriend . . .’

He was turning to walk away. Caught off guard, Dulcie reached across the counter to stop him, protesting, ‘No. I mean . . .’

‘I’ve missed you.’

The smile and the not-so-softly spoken words were good enough to have come from the lips of any matinée idol worth his salt, as was the way in which he lifted his hand, about to touch her face, and then dropped it again as though realising where they were.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Dulcie demanded.

‘You said you wanted me to.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ she hissed, ‘but . . .’

‘But what?’ His voice became slightly louder as he demanded urgently, ‘Have you changed your mind about me? About us? Please tell me that it isn’t true and that you haven’t.’

Somehow or other he had taken possession of her hand and was clasping it between his own.

He was enjoying this, Dulcie could see. ‘You’re overdoing it,’ she told him. A quick look round the cosmetics floor showed her that the other girls were goggling at them from behind their counters, and that Arlene was looking astounded – astounded and envious!

Oddly, though, Dulcie felt less triumphant than she should have. That was because she liked being in control. She did not like someone else grasping the upper hand and directing the things she had planned to direct herself. It made her feel . . . Dulcie didn’t want to think about how it made her feel or about being taken over by someone else, controlled by someone else. Didn’t he realise that he was going too far? All she’d wanted was for him to come in and give the impression that he was keen on her, not act like they were already an item. Now she’d end up having to come up with a reason for them breaking up.

‘The shop will be closing in couple of minutes,’ she told him, wanting to get rid of him so that she could manage the impression he was giving when the other girls asked her the questions she knew they would ask.

His warm, ‘I’ll be waiting for you outside,’ wasn’t the response she’d wanted, but she couldn’t say anything, not with Lizzie standing within hearing distance.

Now he was giving her an openly languishing look, before turning on his heel and heading for the exit, just as the warning bell to customers to leave the store started to ring.

‘Well!’ Lizzie announced as soon as the bell had stopped. ‘Who is he and why haven’t you said anything about him?’

But before Dulcie could answer her, half a dozen of the girls were clustering round her, demanding, ‘Where did you meet him, Dulcie?’ ‘Has he got any brothers?’ ‘Cousins?’

Then Arlene came and joined in, her nose in the air, malice in the look she gave her, before she said, with what Dulcie knew was mock concern, ‘I don’t want to spoil things for you, Dulcie, but your young man looks awfully foreign.’

‘He’s Italian,’ Dulcie responded with a small shrug of her shoulders, as though she herself had never for a moment shared the thoughts she suspected were going through their heads. ‘So what?’

‘An Italian!’ Arlene pretended to marvel, before adding mockingly, ‘I suppose you met him when he sold you an ice cream.’

One of the other girls began to laugh.

‘And the way he speaks . . .’ Arlene rolled her eyes.

‘He’s from Liverpool,’ Dulcie defended Raphael.

‘An Italian from Liverpool.’ Arlene dissolved into fits of laughter. ‘Poor Dulcie, but then I suppose you won’t mind. Sometimes I do wish that my own standards weren’t quite so high.’

‘Don’t pay any attention to Arlene, Dulcie,’ Lizzie said stoutly after she and the others had gone. ‘I thought your young man looked lovely.’

‘He isn’t my young man. He’s just someone I know,’ Dulcie told her crossly. Her plan seemed to have backfired on her, and that was his fault, not hers. If she did find him waiting for her outside then she’d give him a piece of her mind.

Only when she did find him waiting for her outside the staff entrance to the building, Dulcie discovered to her own surprise that her curiosity about why he had turned up in the first place was stronger than her desire to blame him for Arlene’s mockery of her.

However, when he told her in response to her question, ‘I was at a bit of a loose end, so I thought I might as well do you a favour,’ Dulcie was more incensed than grateful.

‘You overdid things,’ she said, ‘and now I’ve had to put up with the Miss Snotty Nose looking down on me even more because of you being Italian.’

They had been walking away from the building as she delivered this attack but now he had stopped walking so that Dulcie was forced to do the same, and the look in his eyes was far from warm as he demanded, ‘Why should the fact that I’m Italian make her look down on you?’

‘Because you aren’t British,’ Dulcie replied irritably. Surely it was obvious to him that him being Italian and foreign, an immigrant, meant that he could never be considered as good as someone who was really British. After all, everyone knew that was how things were.

‘Actually I am British,’ he informed her. ‘I was born in this country, to parents who were also born here, and who, whilst being part of Liverpool’s Italian community, have taken British nationality.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Dulcie said dismissively. ‘You look Italian, and you were with Italians when I saw you.’

‘So I can’t look Italian but be British is that what you are saying?’

Dulcie gave an exasperated sigh. ‘This is boring and I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘It isn’t boring to me,’ he told her grimly. ‘This is my country, a country I have enlisted to fight for and to die for, if necessary, but according to you because of my Italian ancestry I am not good enough for Britain – or for you? My grandfather would enjoy listening to you. It would validate and vindicate everything he believes.’

They had to stop walking for a minute to allow the crowd of people coming the other way to surge past them, giving Dulcie the chance to demand, ‘Your grandfather?’

‘Yes. It is to see him that I am here in London, to see if I can mend a family feud. You see, he abhors the thought of me being British just as much as you abhor the thought of me being Italian.’

‘I don’t abhor it,’ Dulcie defended herself. She’d never heard the word ‘abhor’ before, but she could guess what it meant and she certainly wasn’t going to let him know that it was new to her, she decided. She had to hurry to catch up with him as he strode off. ‘But everyone knows that a girl who isn’t Italian would be plain daft to get involved with an Italian chap when they always marry their own kind. Why doesn’t your grandfather want you to be British?’

A shaft of sunlight beaming down as they crossed a road, highlighted the warm olive tint of Raphael’s skin, catching Dulcie’s attention. Here in the city, its buildings shutting out the sunlight, its dust filling her nose and its war-ready grimness all around her to be seen, that sudden glimpse of healthy vitally alive male flesh brought her an emotion she didn’t understand. And because she didn’t understand it, Dulcie refused to countenance it.

‘Because he believes, as so many of his generation do, that our presence here in Britain is temporary,’ Raphael told her. ‘When he came here it was to work and send money home, to save up so that one day he too could return home. That was his belief and his dream. He and his contempararies do not consider Britain to be their home and their country because in their hearts Italy is that. They are fiercely proud of being Italian and they cling together in their communities because they are afraid if they do not, that they might forget and lose their traditions and their way of life. To Italians, family is all important, and family means not just husband and wife and children, but their whole community, to which they owe their loyalty along with their loyalty to Italy itself.’

He paused as a bus that had stopped to pick up passengers set off noisily, disgorging fumes that made Dulcie fan the air with her hand, continuing once it had gone, ‘When my father decided to become a British national my grandfather disowned him. He wanted my father to do as he had done and work to send money home to Italy but my father wanted to build a life here for my mother and for me. My father doesn’t say so, but my grandfather’s disowning of him hurts him. I would like to see them reconciled.’

‘It won’t please your grandfather to know that you’ve enlisted then, will it?’ Dulcie pointed out practically.

‘No,’ Raphael agreed. There were deeper and more complex reasons why he wanted to speak to his grandfather, but he didn’t intend to discuss those with Dulcie. He and his father had had several concerned discussions about the Italian Fascist movement in Britain, to which so many Italians belonged without really understanding the position in which it could put them in the eyes of the British Government, especially now with the country at war with Germany.

They had to stop to cross another road, the warmth of the sun making Dulcie begin to feel hot, hemmed in by the press of people on the busy street.

The movement provided Italian lessons for the children of Italians born in Britain, it provided meeting halls, schools, a place for Italian communities to be together, a small part of Italy and home in a foreign land. Only a small proportion of those who belonged to the movement were politically motivated and true fascists, and Raphael wanted to warn his grandfather against placing himself in that small group, especially as increasingly it looked as though Mussolini was about to ally himself to Hitler, and thus declare war on Britain.

He wasn’t sure himself why he had elected to do what he had done with regard to Dulcie. It was true that he had had time on his hands, but he could have filled that time doing other things. It had surprised him to discover how much his pride had stung to hear Dulcie announce that he wasn’t good enough for her, when her comment should have amused him. She was a shop girl, sharp enough when it came to her own wants, and ambitions, but oblivious to the political and social situations that were so important to him. If one of them should look down on the other then he should be the one looking down on her.

He stopped walking as they came to another crossroads.

‘I’m sorry but I must leave you here.’

It was only after they had gone their separate ways and Dulcie was almost ‘home’ that she allowed herself to give vent to her feelings. Of all the cheek, him apologising to her for leaving her as though he thought that she had actually wanted his company, and would be disappointed at being deprived of it. Well, she wasn’t. She didn’t need anyone’s company, much less that of a ruddy Eyetie. She was forced to admit to herself, however, for all that Arlene had affected to sneer at him, she’d seen the look in her eyes when they’d first clocked him. Eyetie or not, he was still a well set up and good-looking chap.