Читать книгу Annie Groves 2-Book Valentine Collection: My Sweet Valentine, Where the Heart Is - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 13

The house in which Dulcie and Sally were staying wasn’t very far from the town centre. Sally had stayed there on her first visit to see George, and she knew that the rooms were clean and the landlady, Mrs Hodges, welcoming. The discovery that Persephone, the upper-class girl from the train, was also staying at the same lodgings had Dulcie pulling a face to Sally as the landlady ushered them into her warm cheerful kitchen with its scrubbed wooden table and welcoming Aga. After Mrs Hodges, who was on her way out to a WI meeting, had announced that she’d left them some cold supper in the larder, Sally turned to George and suggested that they go to the local chip shop and bring back some chips.

‘That’s if you fancy some, Dulcie?’

‘I fancy them more than I do a cold supper,’ Dulcie acknowledged.

‘What about you, Persephone?’ Sally asked.

The other girl immediately coloured up and looked embarrassed as she told them, ‘Daddy doesn’t approve of things like fish and chips.’

‘Poor girl,’ Sally told George ruefully once they were alone together, walking arm in arm the short distance to the chip shop on the high street. ‘I feel a bit guilty leaving her with Dulcie. Dulcie will make mincemeat of her. Which reminds me, do you think it was wise to encourage Dulcie to visit David?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m hoping so,’ George admitted. ‘As I said earlier, physically he’s not mending as well as he should be, and Mr MacIndoe feels that is because he’s been rejected, not just by his wife but his parents as well. But I know I’m taking a risk in encouraging Dulcie to visit him.’

‘A big risk. Surely he needs someone who will be a real and regular support to him? Dulcie isn’t like that, George. Oh, I know that right now she’s all fired up with enthusiasm but that enthusiasm is more about her scoring over David’s wife than generated by any real desire to help David himself, and when it fades—’

‘I know, I know … but we’ve been getting pretty desperate. Mr MacIndoe thinks that we could lose him if we can’t find a way to give him a reason to fight for life. He hates losing patients.’

Sally squeezed George’s arm understandingly.

In the kitchen of their lodgings, Dulcie eyed Persephone. As far as Dulcie was concerned she was a very poor specimen of a girl: too thin, wearing old-fashioned clothes, and with that posh accent that reminded her of Lydia. Not that Persephone had any of Lydia’s high-handed manner about her. Dulcie certainly wouldn’t have tolerated it if she had.

‘So it’s your brother you’re going to see tomorrow then, is it?’ Dulcie asked her.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m going to be visiting a patient as well,’ Dulcie told her. ‘Asked to specially, I’ve bin, on account of me already knowing him and him needing someone who’s got the gumption to visit him, not like that wife of his. I always knew that she wasn’t up to much.’ Dulcie tossed her blond hair. She was enjoying have a justifiable reason to criticise Lydia openly. ‘Turned her back on him now, she has.’

Persephone made a small sound of distress and said in a shocked voice, ‘Oh, poor boy, how awful for him, and how good you are to visit him.’

‘Yes, I am,’ Dulcie agreed. ‘But then that’s me all over, putting myself out for others. Always been like that, I have. Where’s Sally with them chips? Canoodling with that fiancé of hers, I expect. You’d think she’d put a bit of speed on. I’m starving … That’s the trouble with some folk. They are just naturally selfish and don’t ever think of others. So what’s up with him, then, your brother? Got burned, has he? There was plenty on that ward I was just on that had, and plenty with no arms or legs either. And George was saying as how they are the ones that have been operated on and are getting better. If that’s true then I’d hate to see them as haven’t had anything done yet,’ Dulcie told the other girl with the kind of relish that rather belied her words. ‘An ’orrible state, some of them must be in, if you ask me. ’Ere, what’s wrong with you?’ she asked when Persephone lifted a hanky to her eyes to wipe away her tears.

‘I’m sorry. I was just thinking about my brother.’

‘Well, you’d better not go crying all over him when you go to see him tomorrow. According to George, this Mr Maclndoe, who’s in charge, doesn’t like it when relatives make a fuss. He says it upsets his patients. He’s even got the hospital to take on pretty nurses and told them to smile at the patients, ’cos he reckons it’s good for them to see a cheerful, pretty girl. I wouldn’t be surprised, if he was to see me talking with David when I see him tomorrow, if doesn’t ask me to smile at the other men there, with me being so pretty meself.’

Having queued up for and got their chips, Sally and George set off back for Sally’s lodgings at a smart pace, linked up closely together, George carrying the chips beneath his coat to make sure that they didn’t get cold, Sally having refused, saying they would make her clothes smell. Although George also lodged in the town, Sally had quite understood when his landlady had told her very politely that she didn’t allow unmarried couples, even engaged couples, to sleep beneath her roof. George wasn’t the sort to push for the kind of favours and intimacies that went with marriage, which in Sally’s view made the sweet sensuality and passion of their shared kisses and the very evident control George had to force on himself to stop him from wanting to take things further, all the more tenderly special. Without even pausing for a single kiss they rushed back.

Not that Dulcie was in the least bit grateful for their sacrifice.

‘What kept you? I’m starving,’ she complained the minute they arrived.

‘There was a queue,’ Sally told her, as they all sat down at the kitchen table and began to unwrap their newspaper parcels.

Persephone had said that she wasn’t hungry but now Sally insisted on coaxing her to share her own fish and chips.

‘Here, take a chip,’ she offered, holding out the parcel to her.

It was obvious from the uncertain way in which Persephone carefully removed a chip that she wasn’t used to eating with her fingers, Sally guessed. Taking pity on her, she put down her food and got up to get a plate and a knife and fork.

When Persephone tried to refuse, she told her firmly, ‘I’m a nurse. You didn’t eat anything on the train, and you need to keep your strength up. I realise that you might not feel like eating, but you must.’

‘Mummy and Daddy are both so upset about Roddy’s accident that we’ve just got out of the habit of … well, with rationing and everything, and then Cook leaving because her married daughter’s had a baby …’

Listening in, Dulcie raised her eyebrows at Sally behind Persephone’s back but Sally firmly ignored her. She felt sorry for the young girl, who looked so worn down and apprehensive.

Of course, once they had all finished their supper, had had a cup of tea and then cleaned up it was time for George to leave. Sally naturally accompanied him to the door and outside into the darkness of the blackout where, beneath the bare branches of the climbing rose that covered the small porch, they were able to exchange a few precious kisses.

‘Come and sit in the car with me for a few minutes,’ George begged Sally, taking hold of her hand.

Uncertainly she looked back towards the closed door to the house. ‘I shouldn’t really,’ she began.

‘Please, Sally. We may not get another chance to be properly alone together, and there’s something I want to say.’

Silently Sally nodded her head.

As George led her towards the car she could almost feel the air of determination that surrounded him, and a responsive tremble of emotion made her own insides feel all fluttery in a way that she considered to be most unlike her normal self.

Mr MacIndoe’s car smelled of good leather and wood, and it was certainly warmer and rather more private than the shelter provided by her landlady’s front door, Sally had to admit. Not that she suspected for a single moment that George had anything improper in mind. George, bless him, simply wasn’t like that. One of the things she liked most about George was his reliability and his decency. Decency in a person meant a lot when you’d experienced a lack of it in someone of whom you’d thought better.

Inside the car, she shook her head when George offered her the warm plaid car rug, but she didn’t turn away when George moved as close to her as the car seats would allow, her knee touching his, her flesh warmed by the comfort of that contact with him.

George reached for her hands and Sally let him hold them.

‘There isn’t room for me to go down on one knee to you here,’ he began ruefully. ‘Sally, you know how much you mean to me, how much I love you and want you to be mine. At Christmas you didn’t want us to become formally engaged because you didn’t want to steal Agnes and Ted’s thunder, but today is Valentine’s Day, even if this isn’t the kind of setting I’d have chosen for my proposal, so please will you agree to be my wife now, Sally? I promise you that I will be the best husband I can be. I love you so very much.’

His voice broke over those last words, the simple heartfelt emotion making Sally’s eyes fill with the sting of tender tears.

‘George, darling, yes, of course I will,’ she answered.

His kiss betrayed how much her answer meant to him, her own senses responding both to the moment and to George himself with an answering passion that told her how right her answer was, and how right they would be together.

‘I’ve got the ring.’ George told her gruffly once he had stopped kissing her. ‘It arrived last week. Ma’s sent a letter for you as well, but if you don’t care for it, then …’

The ring to which George was referring was his grandmother’s ring, which she had left to him for his bride-to-be. He had told her about it when he had first asked her to marry him, just as he had also told her all about his family in New Zealand – his doctor father, and his mother, who had been a nurse, and how they would welcome her into the family as his wife.

‘I shall love it,’ Sally told him truthfully. Wasn’t this what life should be all about? The gift of love, and respect for that love passed down through the generations, signifying the importance of family? Wasn’t that what she had once felt she had had in her own family and what she felt so bitterly devastated about losing? When they married, George’s family would become her family, and the children she and George would have would be children of that family, and that mattered very much indeed to Sally.

‘Here’s Ma’s letter,’ George told her, reaching into his inside pocket to pass her a bulky envelope with her name written on it, and then diving into that same pocket again to remove a small dark green leather box.

A small tender kiss, and then he was opening the box and reaching for her ring finger.

How different this occasion was from the one she had imagined the day she had looked into another young man’s eyes and believed she had fallen in love. It was time to put the pain and betrayal of the past behind her for ever now, Sally knew. She owed it to George and their future together to do so. Morag, Callum and her father weren’t worth a single one of her tears and never had been. She looked down at the ring George was sliding onto her finger and knew that the tears that were filming her eyes were not for the past, but instead were tears of happiness.

The ring, with its oblong emerald stone flanked by two small diamonds, was beautiful, and all the more so, Sally truly felt, because of the way the gold ring was worn and thin from its previous use, surely representing the love with which it had originally been given and worn.

‘If you don’t care for it …?’ George was saying.

But Sally shook her head and told him truthfully, ‘I love it.’

It fitted her perfectly, and her first thought when she looked down and saw it on her own ring finger was how much her mother would have loved this moment and all that it represented.

Her, ‘Oh George,’ was soft with love and the emotions inside her heart that Sally rarely allowed other to see.

There was just time for another tender kiss, not so much an ardent kiss of longing and uncertainty this time but rather one of contentment and mutual commitment, and then Sally was opening her letter from George’s mother. It was hard to read it properly in the dim light from George’s torch, but she could look at the photographs that had fallen out of the envelope.

One photograph was of a chubby baby – easily recognisable as George himself, as he had George’s curly hair – held in the arms of his parents: George’s father, so like him that Sally would have recognised him anywhere; his mother standing calmly facing the camera in such a way that Sally knew immediately that they would get on and respect one another. The others were of George as he was growing up: a bungalow with a long low veranda in the background and a dog sitting at George’s feet. Happy photographs of a happy childhood with loving parents. The same kind of childhood she herself had had.

George’s mother’s letter was friendly and welcoming, taking their relationship a step further on from the letters she and Sally had already exchanged, making it plain that she was happy to welcome Sally as her son’s future wife. A nurse herself before her marriage to George’s father, she was, she wrote, looking forward to meeting Sally once the war was over. There was nothing in the letter to suggest that George’s parents expected their son and Sally to make their future lives in New Zealand, but Sally already knew that that would be what they and George himself would want. Without a family of her own to tie her to England any more she knew that she would not want to stand in George’s way, even if right now the thought of that new life felt just a little bit alarming.

‘I’m sorry that this evening hasn’t been as romantic as you deserve,’ George told her.

‘Not romantic? Being proposed to here, in this very expensive car, and given this beautiful ring, never mind being kissed so very, very well?’ Sally teased him gently.

‘You know what I mean,’ George protested. ‘I would have liked to have come up to London and taken you out somewhere swish where we could have drunk champagne and danced.’

‘George, I felt far more at home seeing the work being done here at the hospital than I would have done in some expensive nightclub,’ Sally assured him. ‘And we will get to dance together tomorrow evening, even if there isn’t any champagne.’

George smiled lovingly at her. ‘I knew the minute I met you that you were the girl for me,’ he told her, ‘and I was right. I do wish, though, that I could have made tonight a bit more special, taken you somewhere we could have been on our own.’

‘It will be spring soon, and then summer,’ she told him softly. ‘Maybe we’ll be able to arrange to have a few days away together.’

‘Yes,’ George agreed, his voice thickening and then cracking slightly, his arm tightening around her.

They both knew what was being said, what was being offered and promised. There was no need for either of them to spell it out in actual words. She wasn’t a girl, Sally told herself. She was a modern young woman living in a country at war. They had already agreed that they wouldn’t marry until the war was over, and no one knew when that would be.

They looked at one another in the heavy intimate silence they themselves had created with their unspoken feelings.

In the room she was sharing with Sally, whilst Sally was still outside with George, Dulcie undressed quickly with her dressing gown draped round her shoulders to keep out the cold of the chilly bedroom, deciding as she did so, that she was looking forward to seeing David again. George’s comments about David’s parents and his wife had aroused her curiosity. She liked the thought of hearing how badly Lydia had behaved and thus being able to criticise her with justification. The thought that talking about Lydia might be painful for David simply didn’t occur to her. The thought of David’s injuries didn’t put her off, either. He still had his handsome face, after all, and even if he hadn’t, Dulcie wouldn’t have shrunk from him. Her sense of self-preservation protected her from concerning herself about the emotional pain of others. She had decided very young that it was up to her to protect her own emotions because no one else was going to do that for her, especially not her mother. So she had simply cut herself off from thinking about things that were hurtful. She just wasn’t the sort to look beneath the surface of things in order to find out how another person felt.

In Olive’s front room, Ted and Agnes were sitting on the sofa together holding hands, having just finished listening to a romantic play on the wireless that had made Agnes cry. Ted had mopped up her tears, gently reminding her that it was only a play. It was lovely being with Ted, Agnes thought. He always made her feel so safe and happy, and so proud now that she was wearing his engagement ring. Being engaged made her feel like she’d got her own special place in life, a proper place, not just Agnes the orphan, but Ted’s fiancée and wife-to-be.

Agnes smiled at Ted. It was Valentine’s Day evening and she and Ted were together, and later on, after he had had his cocoa and before he left, when she walked with him to the door to say good night to him, Ted would take her in his arms and kiss her and she would kiss him back. Just thinking about kissing Ted and being kissed by him gave Agnes a lovely squidgy happy and excited feeling in her tummy. They wouldn’t kiss here in Olive’s front room, of course; that would not be proper. There was no need for that thought to be put into words. It was understood between them and, like so much of their relationship, did not need to be talked about. It was just the way things were, and accepted by them both.

‘You’ve been out there ages,’ Dulcie complained when Sally eventually came in to the bedroom, ‘and now you’ve gone and woken me up switching on that lamp. What are you doing?’ she demanded, when Sally sat down on her bed and spread the photographs from the letter George had given her on the bedspread, and began to reread George’s mother’s letter. Her mouth dimpled into a warm smile as she recognised again the warmth of George’s mother’s welcome into their family.

‘Looking at these photos,’ she answered Dulcie without taking her gaze off the letter.

About to turn her back and try to get back to sleep, Dulcie suddenly noticed Sally’s ring.

‘You’re engaged?’ she demanded

‘Yes,’ Sally confirmed. ‘George asked me before Christmas but he wanted to wait until his mother had sent him his grandmother’s ring before we made it official.’

‘Well, for myself I’d rather have me own ring and not an old one that someone else has worn,’ Dulcie sniffed, ‘but if you’re happy with it then I suppose it doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m very happy with it,’ Sally assured her, lifting her gaze from George’s mother’s letter to look down at her left hand. Her ring was special to her because it was special to George. She knew how much it meant to him to give her his grandmother’s ring, and how much he loved her.

So now Sally and Agnes were both engaged, Dulcie thought when Sally had eventually turned off the bedside lamp. And anyone could see that Tilly was head over heels with Drew. Who would ever have thought that the three of them would be spoken for before her? Not that she couldn’t have been spoken for if she’d wanted to be. There was John, who had always had a soft spot for her, and Wilder, of course. Dulcie didn’t want to settle down with anyone at the moment, but by rights Wilder ought to have recognised that a girl like her needed to be treated a bit special, like. He could have proposed just so that she could have told the others that he had, even though she’d have turned him down. He was going to have to pull his socks up a bit if he wanted to keep her, Dulcie decided. Mind, if she were ever to wear an engagement ring it would have to be a lot better than Agnes’s, and Sally’s. She’d want diamonds, three of them all together like she’d seen on the ring fingers of the rich women who came into Selfridges to shop. Women like Lydia …

Tilly had had the most wonderful evening. She had felt a little bit out of her depth at first when she had realised that Drew had brought her to the Savoy for their evening out, but Drew had soon seen to it that she recovered her confidence, telling her that she looked far far prettier than any other woman there, and that he far preferred the sparkle in her eyes to the glitter of the expensive jewellery other women were wearing.

In no time at all they had been ensconced in their very private table in the restaurant, chosen by Drew so that they could watch what was going on all around them whilst remaining relatively private themselves, and within half an hour of their being seated, Tilly was thoroughly enjoying herself as she and Drew playfully fought to see who could recognise and identify the most VIPs.

There was nothing she and Drew enjoyed more than people-watching, Tilly thought happily as they sat together at their little table, and if the meal they were being served – a rather thin soup followed by a fish dish followed by the promise of a ‘truly romantic’ pudding, was probably rather a long way from the Savoy’s famed pre-war standards, Tilly was far too much in love and far too happy to care.

In between courses they got up to dance, joining other diners on the floor, Tilly feeling so very proud to be with Drew, whom she believed was the kindest and the very best man there, making her quite the luckiest girl.

In between talking about themselves and the wonder of their love for one another they talked about Drew’s book and about the war.

‘Are you still planning to write about the gangs that go around looting after the bombs have fallen?’ Tilly asked him as she sipped her wine and felt very grown up and sophisticated.

‘Oh, yes,’ Drew confirmed. ‘I’ve found out that some of the looters are so well organised that they don’t even wait until the all clear sound. Instead they follow the emergency services and are even breaking windows themselves under cover of the falling bombs in order to get into shops and homes.’

‘That’s terrible,’ Tilly told him, both shocked and angered.

‘The trouble is that most of these looters are so quick and so good at using emergencies that it’s next to impossible to catch them red-handed, and so they get away with it. There are even stories of looters actually removing not just watches and jewellery but also clothing from the bodies of the dead.’

Tilly shuddered, and Drew reached across the table to hold her hand.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that.’

‘Of course you should,’ Tilly defended him. ‘And I’m glad that you did. I want you to share your work with me, Drew. I don’t want to be protected from what’s happening. I just wish that you could find some way to actually catch these people in the act and then unmask them in your articles. They should be punished for doing anything so dreadful.’

She sounded so passionately indignant, but looked so enchantingly pretty, that Drew immediately wanted to kiss her. He loved her so much, his brave strong-hearted Tilly.

Happily the musicians had struck up for a slow waltz and they were still waiting for their ‘romantic pudding’ so he was able to suggest that they get up to dance.

It was wonderful being held tightly in Drew’s arms whilst they swayed slowly together, the top of her head resting against Drew’s jaw, Tilly thought dreamily as the lights dimmed and the warmth of Drew’s hand on her back brought her even closer to him so that they could steal a lingering kiss, after which Tilly decided that a visit to the ladies’ room to repair her lipstick might be a good idea before she returned to the full light of their table.

When she pushed open the door to the powder room, another girl was already seated at one of the satin-covered stools, in front of the individual dressing tables, looking into the mirror in front of her, only it wasn’t her lipstick she was gazing at, but the very pretty diamond ring sparkling on her ring finger.

Seeing Tilly looking at it, she told her in obvious excitement, ‘My boy has just given it to me. I’m so thrilled. He’s in the RAF and I had wondered … well, I’d hoped, but he hadn’t said so much as a word, other than to promise me that he wanted to make tonight very special for both of us.’

The powder room was empty apart from the two of them, with no cloakroom staff in attendance to overhear them. But even so, Tilly was surprised when the other girl – a pretty strawberry blonde wearing a deep pink satin dress – confided, her cheeks flushing almost the same colour as her frock, ‘I’m just so glad now that I agreed to spend the night here in London … with him, so that we can really be together. My parents think I’m staying at an all-girls’ hostel, but Rory has booked us a room here.’

When Tilly’s eyes rounded the other girl asked fiercely, ‘You don’t approve?’

‘It isn’t that,’ Tilly assured her. ‘I was just thinking how brave you are.’

‘Rory is the one who is brave,’ the other girl told her softly. ‘He’s flown fifty missions now. Every time he flies I wonder if this will be the night he doesn’t come back. Now, if that should happen, then at least I will have had tonight. It’s the least we can do for them, isn’t it?’ She paused, reapplying her lipstick carefully. ‘Give them what we can of ourselves to cherish and to fight and live for, don’t you think?’

She was standing up before Tilly could do anything more than nod, and then watch her enviously as she left the powder room.

‘You’re very quiet,’ Drew commented several minutes after she had rejoined him.

Tilly quickly told him about the girl in the powder room.

‘I wish so much that was us, Drew,’ she told him passionately.

‘What? You wish that I was a fly boy?’ Drew teased her, deliberately choosing to misunderstand her. Tilly, though, knew him far too well to fall for his ploy.

‘You know I don’t mean that. And you know too what I do mean.’ She broke off when they were served with what looked like a very small pink heart-shaped blancmange with a fanfare that it didn’t really deserve.

‘Yes, I do know what you mean,’ Drew agreed once their waiter had withdrawn from earshot. ‘I understand too why you’re saying it.’ He reached for her hand as he had done earlier in the evening, holding it firmly within his own. ‘I feel privileged and honoured to have your love, Tilly, and to know that you’d do that for me.’

‘For us,’ Tilly insisted fiercely. ‘For both of us, Drew. I want—’

A small shake of his head, accompanied by a gentle squeeze of her hand, had her pausing for breath and allowing him to say into that silence, ‘There is nothing I want more than for us to be together properly, Tilly, but I have a responsibility to you, and I have given an assurance to your mother. I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the eye if I dishonoured that responsibility and that assurance. I don’t want …’ Drew paused, his conscience stabbing him as he told her truthfully, ‘I don’t want our love to be blighted or sullied by lies and deceit. It and you are worthy of better than that.’ It was the truth, Drew assured himself, even if for now there were other deceits that he couldn’t own up to. For Tilly’s own sake. He would have willingly told her everything if he didn’t know that doing so would threaten their love. One day he would tell her, of course. One day, but not yet.

‘Oh, Drew …’ Oblivious to what Drew was thinking, Tilly was overwhelmed by a flood of pride and love for him. He was so honest and decent, so trustworthy.

‘Come on,’ Drew coaxed her. ‘We’d better eat this so-called romantic pudding. They’ll be playing the last waltz of the evening soon, and we don’t want to miss it.’

It was nearly two o’clock when their taxi pulled up outside number 13. Tilly had had a delightful ride back, snuggled up in the back of the cab in Drew’s arms. Not that he had done anything more than simply hold her, but being held safely in Drew’s arms was a perfect way to end what had been a very special evening, Tilly acknowledged, as Drew paid off the taxi and they hurried to the front door.

In number 13’s kitchen, Olive heard Tilly’s key in the front door and stood up. Agnes had gone up to bed nearly an hour ago, but Olive hadn’t felt able to follow her up to her own bed. Not with the weight of so much anxiety hanging over her.

‘Mum, you shouldn’t have waited up for us,’ Tilly protested when she opened the kitchen door and saw Olive seated at the kitchen table.

‘I’m sorry if we kept you up late, Mrs Robbins,’ Drew apologised, adding, ‘I won’t stay and keep you up even longer.’

‘Oh, Drew, we were going to have a cup of cocoa together,’ Tilly reminded him.

But Drew shook his head, telling her gently, ‘I think it’s late enough,’ before adding a polite, ‘good night, Mrs Robbins.’

‘Good night, Drew,’ Olive said politely back.

Whatever doubts she might have about Tilly’s behaviour, she couldn’t fault Drew’s good manners – or his trustworthiness. A young man as deeply in love as Drew so obviously was with Tilly might find that his desire to be trustworthy could be all too easily overwhelmed by her passionate rebelliousness. Olive felt the now-familiar ache of anxiety and despair tighten around her heart.

Of course Tilly had to see Drew to the door and of course once there it was several minutes before she came back, her lipstick having rather obviously been quickly reapplied in the hallway before she re-entered the kitchen.

‘Poor Drew. I promised him a cup of cocoa and now—’

‘Tilly, before we go to bed there’s something I need to talk to you about,’ Olive interrupted her.

It couldn’t be put off any longer. She’d had all evening to think about what she must say, and a very long evening it had been as well, sitting here in the kitchen, on her own for the last hour, wondering about the true nature of that stolen hour Tilly had spent at the Simpsons’ with Drew and what it might have led to.

Tilly stifled a yawn. ‘If it’s the fire-watching here on Article Row—’ she began

‘No it isn’t,’ Olive stopped her. ‘It’s about you going back to the Simpsons’ tonight with Drew and the pair of you staying alone there for over an hour.’

Olive watched with a sinking heart as the colour came and went in Tilly’s face before guilt gave way to a very definite look of defiance. Only now could she admit how much she had been hoping against hope that her daughter would be able to tell her that Nancy had been mistaken. Instead, Tilly was confirming all Olive’s own secret fears and doubts by demanding instead, ‘Who told you about that? Oh, I know. Nancy, of course.’

‘So it’s true then?’ Olive asked, unable to conceal her distress. ‘Instead of going out, as you had told me you were doing, you and Drew went back to the Simpsons’? You have let me down, Tilly, and not only that, you deceived me as well. I know how you feel about Drew—’

‘No, you don’t,’ Tilly stopped her mother bitterly. ‘If you did you’d let us get married. That’s what I want, it’s what we both want, it’s all I want. You had what you wanted, Mum. You married Dad. You had your time together, and you had me, but you won’t let me and Drew have our love, and that’s not fair.’ Angrily Tilly began to turn away from her mother, and then stopped.

‘And as for me deceiving you, I wasn’t and I didn’t. We only went back to the Simpsons’ because Drew had forgotten the chocolates he’d bought me. We went to collect them, that’s all. We started talking, about … about Drew’s work, and we forgot about the time, so yes, we probably were in the Simpsons’ for an hour, but we weren’t doing anything wrong. Drew gave you his word about that,’ Tilly reminded her mother proudly, ‘and as he keeps telling me, nothing is going to make him break it.’

Tilly was shaking inside but she didn’t want to let Olive see how let down and upset her mother’s attitude made her feel.

As for Olive, instinctively she knew that Tilly was telling her the truth. She made a small conciliatory movement towards her daughter, but Tilly stepped back rejecting it and rejecting her.

She should never have listened to Nancy and let her get under her skin, Olive berated herself. She had let the other woman’s unkind words play on her own secret anxieties and now this was the result. Tilly had become angry with her and even more protective about Drew and their relationship.

Olive felt so tired and alone. If Jim had lived, things would have been so different. He’d have been able to speak to Tilly as a father. But he wasn’t. Tilly didn’t have a father, and she, Olive, didn’t have a husband.

Olive knew that she couldn’t let Tilly go without at least attempting to sort things out between them. She took a deep breath. It was so important that she find a way of getting her headstrong daughter to understand how cruel and hard life could be to those who broke society’s rules. And the truth was that Olive was beginning to suspect that Tilly – her Tilly, whom she had shielded and protected from babyhood – was headstrong enough to do exactly that, because she felt so strongly about Drew and her love for him. How could she find the words to discuss so difficult a subject? Olive wasn’t like Tilly. She didn’t have and never had had Tilly’s fiercely passionate nature. She had loved Jim. She had enjoyed the tenderness of their lovemaking. But there had never ever been a time when they had been courting when she had been tempted to break those rules that said what a girl could and should and could not and should not allow a young man.

‘Tilly, I’m sorry you feel that I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t,’ Tilly told her fiercely. ‘You keep saying that you do, but you don’t. You can’t. This is our war, Mum, not yours. It’s my generation of young men and young women who will suffer the most from this war. You forget that. We are the ones whose sweethearts could be lost, whose lives will be empty. We’ve seen what happened to your generation. We’ve seen all those women whose men never came back. We’ve grown up watching them live alone. Do you really blame us for wanting to have what we can whilst we can? That’s what you don’t and won’t understand. You had Dad in your life, Mum. You and he were married, you had me, but you want to deny me those things because you’re afraid for me. You had some happiness but you can’t see that I want mine too, even if it is short-lived. In fact, that only makes me want it all the more, just in case I do lose it. Just in case I do lose Drew.’

Tilly was trembling, shaking with the intensity of her emotions, Olive could see, and she herself felt as though she were drowning in the darkness of her own pain. Tilly spoke so passionately about what she needed now, and so lightly about enduring future loss. She had no idea, no awareness of how swiftly and permanently the pain of that loss could make it feel as though the happiness that had gone before it had never been. All she wanted to do was protect her daughter, but Tilly was behaving as though she, Olive, was trying to hurt her, by denying her her chance of happiness.

Without giving her the opportunity to respond, Tilly had gone, the sound of her heels on the stairs making what seemed to Olive to be an angrily rejecting noise that deliberately distanced her from her mother.

Olive closed her eyes. To squeeze back her tears? As a young mother, a young widow, she hadn’t allowed herself to feel sorry for herself, and she certainly wasn’t going to do so now.

With quiet resolve she began the familiar task of leaving the kitchen ready for the morning. One day, please God, Tilly would have children of her own and then perhaps she would understand how she felt right now, Olive tried to comfort herself.

In their shared bedroom Agnes was already asleep. With the room so familiar to her, Tilly didn’t need to disturb Agnes by switching on the light in order to get ready for bed. Despite the shortages that rationing was forcing on everyone, the bedroom was as cosy as Olive could make it, with warm rag rugs beside both beds and a square of carpet that covered most of the floor and protected the girls’ feet from the cold linoleum. No winter night went by without Olive ensuring that every bed had its hot-water bottle, and automatically, as she burrowed beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, Tilly placed her feet on the blissful warmth of her own.

As always, though, the last thing she did before settling down for the night was to reach for Drew’s ring, where it swung from her neck on its chain. Holding Drew’s ring wasn’t, of course, as wonderful as holding Drew himself would have been, and Tilly blamed her mother for that. Why wouldn’t she understand that in trying to protect her from being hurt if she should lose Drew, her mother was in reality denying her the chance to have what she could have of him and their love? Arguing with her mother wasn’t going to bring her round, though, Tilly knew. She would have to find another way to convince her.