Читать книгу The Hidden Years - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

Spring 1945

‘TODAY I met Kit.’

Just looking at the words made her go dizzy with happiness, Lizzie acknowledged, staring at them, knowing it was impossible to translate into cold, dry print the whole new world of feelings and emotions which had opened up in front of her.

Yesterday her life had been bound and encompassed by the often arduous routine of her work as a nursing aide: long hours, low pay, and all the horrid dirty jobs that real nurses were too valuable to spend their time on.

She would rather have stayed on at school, but, with her parents killed in one of the many bombing raids on London, she had had no option but to accept her great-aunt’s ruling that she must leave school and start to earn her living.

Aunt Vi didn’t mean to be unkind, but she wasn’t a sentimental woman and had never married. She had no children of her own, and, as she was always telling her great-niece, she had only agreed to take Lizzie in out of a sense of family duty. She herself had been sent out to work at thirteen, skivvying in service at the local big house. She had worked hard all her life and had slowly made her way up through the levels of service until she had eventually become housekeeper to Lord and Lady Jeveson.

Lizzie had found it bewildering at first, leaving the untidy but comfortable atmosphere of the cramped terraced house where she had lived with her parents and grandparents, evacuated from the busy, dusty streets so familiar to her to this place called ‘the country’, where everything was strange and where she missed her ma and pa dreadfully, crying in her sleep every night and wishing she were back in London.

Aunt Vi wasn’t like her ma…for a start she didn’t talk the way her ma did. Aunt Vi talked posh and sounded as though her mouth was full of sharp, painful stones. She had made Lizzie speak the same way, endlessly and critically correcting her, until sometimes poor Lizzie felt as though she dared not open her mouth.

That had been four years ago, when she had first come to the country. Now she had almost forgotten what her ma and pa had looked like; her memories of them and the dusty terraced house seemed to belong to another life, another Lizzie. She had grown accustomed to Aunt Vi’s pernickety ways, her sharp manner.

Only yesterday one of the other girls at the hospital, a new girl from another village, had commented on Lizzie’s lack of accent, taunting her about her ‘posh’ speech, making her realise how much she had changed from the awkward, rebellious thirteen-year-old who had arrived on Aunt Vi’s doorstep.

Aunt Vi knew how things should be done. No great-niece of hers was going to grow up with the manners and speech of a kitchen tweeny, she had told Lizzie so many times that she often thought the words were engraved in her heart.

She had hated it at first when her aunt had got her this job at the hospital, but Aunt Vi had firmed up her mouth and eyed her with cold determination when Lizzie had pleaded to be allowed to stay on at school, telling her sharply that she couldn’t afford to have a great lazy girl eating her out of house and home and not bringing in a penny piece.

Besides, she had added acidly, in case Lizzie hadn’t realised it, there was a war on and it was her duty to do what she could to aid her countrymen. Aunt Vi had made up her mind. The matron of the hospital was one of her friends, and, before Lizzie had time to draw breath, she was installed in the hostel not far from the hospital grounds, in a dormitory with a dozen other girls, all of them working the same long, gruelling hours, although the others, unlike Lizzie, spent their free time not on their own but in giggling, excited groups, vying with one another to present the most enticing appearance for their weekly visits to nearby barracks to attend their Saturday night dances.

They made fun of Lizzie, taunting her because she held herself aloof from them, because she was ‘different’, and not just because of the way she spoke.

Aunt Vi was very strict, and, even though Lizzie was no longer living under her jurisdiction, the lessons she had enforced on her made it painfully difficult for Lizzie to throw off her aunt’s warnings about what happened to girls foolish enough to listen to the brash flattery of boys who ‘only wanted one thing’ and who ‘would get a girl into trouble as soon as look at her’.

Aunt Vi had no very high opinion of the male sex, which, in her view, was best kept at a distance by any right-minded female.

She herself had grown up in a harsh world, where a single woman who managed to rise to the position of housekeeper in a wealthy upper-class home was far, far better off than her married sisters, who often had half a dozen dependent children and a husband who might or might not be inclined to support them all.

Men, in her opinion, were not to be trusted, and Lizzie had a natural sensitivity that made her recoil from the often clumsy and always suggestive passes of the few young men she did come into contact with.

This was wartime and young men did not have the time, or the necessity, to waste their energy, and what might only be a very brief life, in coaxing a girl when there were so many who did not want such coaxing.

The only other men Lizzie met were the patients in the hospital, men who had been so badly injured that it was tacitly admitted that nothing more could be done for them, and so they lay here in the huge, decaying old building, economically and clinically nursed by young women who had learned to seal themselves off from human pity and compassion, who had seen so many broken bodies, so many maimed human beings, so many tormented young male minds that they could no longer agonise over what they saw.

For Lizzie it was different. She had wondered at first when she came to the hospital if she might eventually try to qualify as a nurse, but after a year there, a year when she had seen a constant stream of young men, their minds and bodies destroyed by this thing called war, lying in the wards, when she had seen the hopelessness in their eyes, the anger, the pain, the sheer bitter resentment at their loss of the future they had once anticipated, she had known that she did not have the mental stamina for nursing.

With every familiar patient who left the wards, taken home by a family helpless to cope with the physical and mental burdens of their sons and husbands, and with every new arrival, her heart bled a little more, and she could well understand why the other girls sought relief from the trauma of working with such men by spending their free nights with the healthy, boisterous, whole representatives of manhood they picked up at the dances they attended.

That the Americans were the best was the universal opinion of her colleagues; Americans were generous and fun to be with. There were some stationed on the other side of the village, and once or twice one of them had tried to chat her up when Lizzie walked there to post her weekly duty letter to Aunt Vi.

She always ignored them, steeling her heart against their coaxing smiles and outrageous invitations, but she was only seventeen, and often, once she was safely out of sight, she would wonder wistfully what it would be like to be one half of the kind of perfect whole that was formed when two people loved with the intensity she had envied in her reading.

Lizzie was an avid reader, and a daydreamer. When she had first come to live with Aunt Vi, she had barely opened a book in her life, but, in addition to ceaselessly correcting her speech and her manners, Aunt Vi had also insisted that her great-niece read what she had termed ‘improving books’.

The chance munificence of a large trunkful of books from the vicar’s wife, which had originally belonged to her now adult children, had furnished Lizzie with the ability to escape from Aunt Vi’s strict and sometimes harsh domination into a world she had hitherto not known existed.

From her reading Lizzie discovered the tragedy of the love between Tristan and Iseult, and started to dream of emotions which had nothing in common with the clumsy overtures of the outwardly brash young men with whom she came into contact. Their very brashness, the fact that her sensitive soul cringed from their lack of finesse and from the often unwelcome conversation and revelations of the other girls in her dormitory, made it easy for her to bear in mind Aunt Vi’s strictures that she was to keep herself to herself and not to get up to any ‘funny business’.

By funny business Aunt Vi meant sex, a subject which was never openly referred to in her aunt’s house. As far as Aunt Vi was concerned, sex was something to be ignored as though it did not exist. Lizzie had naïvely assumed that all women shared her aunt’s views, until she had come to work at the hospital. From her peers’ conversations she had learned otherwise, but until now she had felt nothing other than a vague yearning awareness that her life was somehow incomplete… that some vital part of it was missing. She had certainly never contemplated sharing with any of the men she had met the intimacies she heard the other girls discussing so openly and shockingly… Until now…

She stared dreamily at her diary. It had been at Aunt Vi’s insistence that she had first started keeping a diary, not to confide her most private thoughts in, but as a factual record of the achievements of her days.

It was only since she had come to work at the hospital that she had found herself confiding things to her diary that were little more than nebulous thoughts and dreams.

Kit… Even now she was dazzled by the wonder of meeting him…of being able to whisper his name in the secret, private recess of her mind, while her body shivered with nervous joy.

Kit… He was so different…so special, so breathtakingly wonderful.

She had known the moment she saw him. He had turned his head and smiled at her, and suddenly it was as though her world had been flooded with warmth and magic.

And to think, if she hadn’t decided to go and visit poor Edward, she would never have met Kit… She shook with the enormity of how narrowly she had averted such a tragedy.

Edward Danvers had been with them for many months now; a major in the army, he had been badly injured in Normandy… his legs crushed and his spine injured, resulting in the eventual amputation of both his legs.

He had come to them supposedly to recuperate from a second operation, but Lizzie knew, as they all knew, that in fact he had come to them because there was nowhere else for him to go. His parents were dead, he wasn’t married, and privately Lizzie suspected that he himself no longer had any desire to live. He wasn’t like some of the men who came to them: he didn’t rage and rail against his fate; outwardly placid and calm, he seemed to accept it, but Lizzie had seen the way he looked inwards into himself, instead of out into the world, and had known that she was looking at a man who was gradually closing himself off from that world. Willing himself to die, almost.

He never spoke about his injuries. Never complained, as some of the men did, about fictitious limbs that were still there. Outwardly, he seemed to have adjusted well to his amputations, quietly allowing the nurses to get him into a chair, so that Lizzie, or one of the other aides, could wheel him into the gardens.

Lizzie liked him, although she knew that most of the other girls found him poor company, complaining that he never laughed or joked like the other men and that he was a real misery.

Lizzie didn’t mind his silences—she knew that he particularly liked to be wheeled round the gardens. He had told her once that they reminded him of the gardens of his grandparents’ home.

Cottingdean, it was called, and when he talked about it Lizzie could tell that it was a place he loved and that, in some way, the memory of it brought him both joy and pain. Sometimes when he mentioned it she would see the bright sheen of tears in his eyes and would wonder why, if he loved it so much, he stayed here, but she was too sensitive to question him, too aware of the deep, raw pain he kept hidden from the others.

She liked him and discovered, as the months went by, that she looked forward to seeing him, to winning from him his fugitive, reluctant smile.

Like her, he enjoyed reading, and when he discovered that she had read, and now reread, everything the vicar’s wife had donated to her he offered to lend her some of his own books. She refused, worrying about the wisdom of leaving them in the dormitory. The other girls would not deliberately damage them, but they were not always as careful with other people’s property as they might have been.

Gradually, a tentative friendship developed between them and often, on her days off, she would spend time with Edward, taking him out in the garden if the weather was fine, sometimes reading aloud to him when it wasn’t, knowing how much the mere effort of holding a book sometimes tired him.

She made no mention of Edward in her letters home to her aunt. Aunt Vi would not have approved. Edward came from a very different world from her own and Aunt Vi did not approve of any mingling of the classes. It always led to trouble, she had warned Lizzie.

It made her blood run cold now to remember that, on this particular Thursday, she had almost decided against spending her precious time off with Edward. She had woken up in an odd, restless, uncomfortable mood, her mind and body filled with vague, unfamiliar yearnings, but then she had reminded herself that Edward would be looking forward to going out. The rhododendrons were in full flower in the park, and he had been looking forward to seeing them for days. The sun was out, the sky a clear, soft blue… No, it wouldn’t be fair to let him down.

And so, suppressing her rebellious yearnings, she had washed in the cold, shabby bathroom which all the girls shared, allowing herself the luxury of washing her hair, and wondering at the same time if she dared to have it cut. She was the only girl in the hostel who wore her hair in such an old-fashioned style, braided into a neat coronet, which Aunt Vi insisted upon. She wondered idly for a moment what she would look like with one of the shoulder-length bobs worn with such suggestive insouciance by some of the other girls, and then sighed as she studied her make-up-free reflection in the spotted mirror.

The other girls wore powder and lipstick, and cheap perfume given to them by their American boyfriends. They curled their hair and darkened their eyelashes with shoe blacking and, if they were lucky enough to own a pair of the coveted nylons, they deliberately wore their skirts short enough to show off their legs.

As she dressed in the serviceable cotton underwear which Aunt Vi’s strict teachings ensured that she spent her precious allowance of soap scrupulously washing until her hands were almost raw and bleeding, to ensure that it stayed white, she admitted that lipstick and fashionably bobbed hair were not for her.

She knew the other girls laughed at her behind her back, mimicking her accent and making fun of her clothes.

Aunt Vi had practised a lifetime of frugality and, as Lizzie had grown out of the clothes she had originally arrived with from London, the older woman had altered garments from the trunks full of clothes she had been given by her employers over the years to fit her great-niece, and, in doing so, had also turned the exercise into lessons in dressmaking and fine plain sewing.

That the skirt she was wearing now had once belonged to Lady Jeveson would have impressed the other girls in the hostel as little as it impressed her, although for different reasons, Lizzie acknowledged. The other girls would have screamed with laughter and derision at the thought of wearing something which had first been worn by a girl who was now a grandmother.

That quality of cloth never wore out, Aunt Vi declared firmly, and indeed it did not, Lizzie reflected wryly, fingering the heavy, pleated tweed.

It was a pity that Lady Jeveson had not favoured the soft pastel colours more suited to her own fair colouring, rather than the dull, horsy tweeds of which she had apparently been so fond. The blouse she was wearing might be silk, but it was a dull beige colour which did nothing for her skin, just like the brown cashmere cardigan she wore over it.

She had seen the other girls, on their days off, going out in bright, summery dresses, with thin floating skirts and the kind of necklines which would have shocked Aunt Vi, and, while she knew that she could never have worn anything so daring, this morning Lizzie found herself wishing that her blouse might have been a similar shade of lavender-grey to her eyes, and that her skirt might have been made out of a fine, soft wool, and not this heavy, itchy stuff, which was a physical weight on her slender hips.

There were no nylons for her. She had to make do either with bare legs, which the rough wool made itch dreadfully, or the thick, hand-knitted stockings her aunt had sent her for Christmas.

She wasn’t sure what had made her opt for bare legs, what particular vanity had decreed that this morning she would not be sensible and wear the hated stockings, knowing that they made her slender ankles look positively thick, even if they were warm and practical.

The hostel was just across the village from the hospital, and Lizzie cycled there on an ancient bicycle. When they were on duty, the girls ate at the hospital; not the same food as the patients, but meals which the others often angrily derided as ‘not fit for pigs’.

Certainly, the meals were stodgy and unappetising, and not a patch on Aunt Vi’s dishes. Her aunt might almost be bordering on the parsimonious, she might make every penny do the work of two, but she was a good cook, and Lizzie missed her appetising meals, the fresh vegetables and fruit in season which she always managed to obtain by some country means of barter.

This morning, since she wasn’t on duty, there would be no breakfast for her at the hostel, and, since the girls were not allowed to cook food in the hostel, that meant either whatever she could buy and eat on the way to the hospital, or an expensive and not very appetising snack in the village’s one and only café.

Trying not to let herself think about her aunt’s porridge, thick and creamy with the top of Farmer Hobson’s milk, Lizzie told herself stoically that she didn’t really want any breakfast.

All the girls were always hungry; their workload was heavy, and no matter how unappetising they found their food it was always eaten.

All of them were a little on the thin side, Lizzie in particular as she was more fine-boned than the rest, with tiny, delicate wrists and ankles that sometimes looked so frail that they might snap.

As she cycled towards the village, she could feel the sun beating down on to the back of her head and smell the fresh warm scent of late spring, mingling with the tantalising suggestion of the summer still to come.

As she rode, wisps of blonde hair escaped from her coronet and curled in feathery tendrils round her face. At first, the other girls had refused to believe her hair was naturally fair, accusing her of dyeing it.

She chose not to ride through the village but to circle round it, using a narrow side-road which meandered towards the rear entrance to the hospital.

Before the war, the hospital had been a grand house, and the lane she was using had originally been that used by the tenants and the tradespeople.

She was cycling happily down the centre of it when she heard the car, the sound so unexpected that at first she made no attempt to move off the crown of the road. The village saw its fair share of wartime traffic; the squire’s wife still drove her car on Red Cross business and Lizzie was used to the imperious sound of car horns demanding the right of way, especially when they were driven by excitable young men in uniform.

She was not, though, used to them being driven down this narrow little lane which led only to the hospital, which was why, lost in her own daydreams, she did not initially react to the sound of this one until it was almost too late.

The realisation that someone was driving up behind her, that the car was one of those expensive, open-topped sporty models driven by a young man with wind-blown thick black hair, bronzed skin, and the dashing uniform of an airforce pilot, hit her in a series of small shocks as she glanced over her shoulder and saw the shiny dark green bonnet of the car, realised that there wasn’t room for both of them on the narrow little road, tried desperately to turn to one side, and lost her balance at the same time. The young man stopped his car with a cacophony of squealing tyres, protesting engine and angrily bellowed complaints about her sanity.

Lying on the dusty road, her knees stinging with pain and her eyes with tears, Lizzie wished devoutly that a large hole would appear beneath her into which she could conveniently disappear.

Her face scarlet with mortification and embarrassment, she struggled to her feet, at the same time as she heard the car door slam.

‘I say, are you OK? That was a nasty tumble you took… I thought you’d heard me…’

‘I did…but I didn’t realise… Well, no one ever drives down this road…’

She was on her feet now, her face still red, a tiny voice inside her deriding her for her vanity in not wearing the woollen stockings which would have protected her now smarting skin from the road, all too conscious of the appearance she must present to this unbelievably handsome young man who was now standing next to her, towering over her, looking at her in a way which made her loathe and castigate Lady Jeveson for ever being stupid enough to choose such unflattering clothes.

Two bright spots of colour burned on her cheekbones as she realised what was happening to her. For the first time in her life she was experiencing the dizzying, dangerous sensation of falling helplessly in love with a stranger—that sensation, that awareness…that feeling which she had heard so often described by the others.

The unexpectedness of it distracted her momentarily, her mouth half parting at the wonder of it, so that Kit Danvers found his attention caught by her, despite the awfulness of her clothes and the hairstyle that made her look like photographs he had seen of his grandmother.

If one really studied her it was possible to see that she was quite a looker, he recognised with the ease of a master long used to seeking out his quarry in the most unexpected of places.

Finding pearls hidden in dull oysters was Kit Danvers’s speciality—the other men in the mess envied him for it, admiringly, if sometimes resentfully, recognising that when it came to women Kit Danvers had something, some unrecognised quality that the female sex found it impossible to resist.

Lizzie knew none of this. She only knew that as she looked into the laughing blue eyes looking back into hers, as she studied the handsome tanned face with its firm male bone-structure and its warm smile, something inside her melted and uncurled, something completely new to her and yet as old as Eve.

‘You’ve got a smudge on your nose… There, it’s gone.’

She held her breath as he leaned towards her and carelessly rubbed his thumb against her skin. A thousand pin-pricks of sensation were born where his touch had been, an odd yearning constricting her breathing, her body suddenly tense and yet languorous at the same time.

‘Look, you can’t ride that thing now… Why don’t I give you a lift to wherever you’re going…?’

‘The hospital—I’m going to the hospital,’ Lizzie told him breathlessly, scarcely conscious of what she was saying, unable to take her wondering gaze off his handsome, smiling face. ‘I work there.’

‘You do? Now, there’s a coincidence. I’m on my way there too. They told me in the place where I’m staying that this road would get me there quietly and discreetly. Not supposed to be running this job really, you know,’ he told her, patting the bonnet of his car. ‘And she’s a thirsty lady. But when you’re in the forefront of a war you’re entitled to a few perks. Luckily the Yanks aren’t as parsimonious with their petrol as our people, and I know this Yank…’ He broke off and smiled winsomely at her. ‘Boring you to death, I expect. A pretty girl like you doesn’t want…’

A pretty girl… Lizzie gazed adoringly at him. He thought her pretty…her heart raced and sang, and then she remembered all Aunt Vi’s stern teachings and turned her head away from the dangerous potency of that warm smile, saying shakily, as she tried to pick up her cycle, ‘I really must go… I’m sorry I didn’t hear you coming…’

‘Going to be late for work, are you? What do you do up there… nurse?’

‘No, actually, I’m a nursing aide,’ Lizzie told him and for some reason the surprise in his eyes hurt her a little. It had never mattered when other people spoke derisively about the lowly status of her work, but now, suddenly, for this handsome laughing young man, she ached to be able to announce that she did something very important…

‘Well, we don’t want you getting into trouble for being late. Not when it was really my fault. Hop in… I’ll strap your cycle to the back.’

‘I’m not actually working,’ Lizzie told him, hesitating beside the car. It would be breaking all Aunt Vi’s rules and her own to accept his offer of a lift, but she wanted to do so more than she had wanted anything else in her life. ‘I’m going to visit someone…’

Immediately his glance sharpened. ‘Boyfriend?’ he questioned her, making her blush and shake her head.

‘No, it’s one of the patients… I promised him I’d wheel him out to see the rhododendrons now they’re in flower. He says they remind him of his grandparents’ home when he was a little boy…’

‘Sensitive little thing, aren’t you? A no-hoper, is he?’

Something in the careless way he spoke jarred on Lizzie’s tender conscience; even though she knew that for Edward Danvers life could never ever be anything other than painful and lonely, she said quickly, ‘No—no, of course not…’

Perhaps it was the stark contrast between the two men: Edward so pale and thin, old before his time, his body wasted, his manhood destroyed by the same terrible injuries which had necessitated the amputation of his legs.

It had happened in the frantic push to land on the Normandy beaches. He had been helping to organise the disembarkation, standing chest-deep in the icy cold water. Someone had got into difficulty in the water—a young private who couldn’t swim—Edward had dived down to help him, and had been crushed beneath some landing equipment in the rush to get the troops ashore.

Edward’s life had been saved but not his legs, and even now in his nightmares he cursed God for that cruel mercy.

In her mind’s eye Lizzie saw him, so thin and wasted in his wheelchair, and compared him to this man, so fit and healthy, so insolently cheerful and careless of whatever dangers fate had in store for him, and suddenly and unexpectedly she was overwhelmed by a swift surge of protective, possessive fear, by a need to take him to herself and keep him safe… It was the first time she had ever experienced such an emotion and it stunned her, leaving her feeling too vulnerable and weak to object when he insisted on helping her into his car, and fastening her bike across its boot.

The space inside the car was so tiny that when he got in she was immediately conscious of the heat of his body, of its warm male scent, of all the differences of sex that separated them and stirred exciting frissons of sensation in every corner of her body, in her blood, under her skin, a tingling dangerous wave of heat that made her cheeks burn and her heart pound.

He set the car in motion, driving it with a careless recklessness that excited her even while it frightened her.

‘I take it you don’t have any people living locally—any family,’ he enlarged, taking his attention off the road to turn and look at her. She made him feel a rare curiosity about her with her lack of any regional accent, her shyness, her total air not just of being unawakened but also of being completely unaware. He doubted that any man had ever kissed her, never mind…

‘No. No, I don’t,’ Lizzie told him huskily. ‘My…my aunt.’

‘So what brought you to this part of the country, then?’

He was an expert in knowing how to approach a woman, and this one, this woman, child, green as she was, was going to drop into his arms as easily as ripe soft fruit.

All it needed was a little care, a little flattery, a little coaxing.

Lizzie gave him a surprised look. She was not used to people being interested enough in her to ask her questions. A warm glow began to spread through her body, bringing with it a dizzying surge of self-confidence and bravery.

‘My…my aunt sent me here. She knows the matron in charge of the hospital.’

‘Your aunt, you say… You don’t have any other family, then?’

‘No…not now…’ Her voice dropped, her eyes darkening as she relived the shock of hearing of her parents’ death. ‘There was a bomb…’

While he nodded his head and made sympathetic noises, he was congratulating himself on having picked a real winner. No family to speak of apart from an aunt who, by the sound of it, didn’t give a damn and anyway was too far away to be of any concern to him. He had a couple of days’ leave owing to him. There was no reason why he shouldn’t spend them here… Any longer than that and he would be bored out of his mind with her. As he made light conversation with her he amused himself by imagining what she would be like. She would be nervous but malleable; she would give him whatever he asked of her, just as long as he told her he loved her. He smiled cynically to himself. He was well aware of the effect his handsome face had on susceptible female hearts. He had seen that bemused, adoring look in too many pairs of feminine eyes before not to have recognised it.

Women were such fools. Tell them you loved them and they’d give you anything…everything…

‘What a pity we can’t pretend that you don’t have to go in here,’ he murmured softly to her, as the hospital came in sight. ‘Then we could just keep on driving…run away together and never, ever come back. Would you like that, my sweet? Would you like to spend the rest of your life with me?’

Lizzie’s heart thumped frantically with a mixture of shock and delight.

She heard him laugh and knew that she was blushing… knew that he must be able to read her feelings in her eyes.

‘Shall we do that?’ he continued to tease her. ‘Shall I steal you away, take you somewhere where it would be just the two of us…?’

His voice had developed a deep, caressing, almost mesmeric quality. Totally unable to take her eyes off his face, Lizzie discovered that she had virtually forgotten to breathe and that suddenly her lungs were labouring desperately to take in air.

Taking advantage of her bemused state, he allowed the tone of his voice to change, to deepen with regret as he told her, ‘How I wish I could do just that, but I can’t, can I…? There’s a war to be won.’ He allowed his eyes to darken, his whole manner to become subtly infused with purposefulness; he had discovered very early on in the war that if there was one thing women fell for even more than being told he loved them, it was the suggestion that he as a man of honour had to put his country before his feelings. This one, he could see, was no exception.

Lizzie was aching inside. Soon they would be going their separate ways, and she doubted that she would ever see him again, despite what he had said. A tearing, sharp pain splintered inside her, making her catch her breath and lose her colour.

‘I think you’d better drop me off here,’ she told him as they approached the gate. The matron had very strict views about the girls keeping their distance both from the men and from their visitors.

‘Fraternisation forbidden, is it?’ he guessed, understanding at once and stopping the car.

Lizzie couldn’t open the door and she watched breathlessly as he leapt over his own and came round to help her out, not opening the door for her as she had expected, but instead leaning down inside the car to lift her out bodily, so that for a brief, dazzling moment of time she was held against him, body to body, looking down into those teasing blue eyes, feeling her chest tighten and her muscles coil in heady excitement as he slowly lowered her to her feet, holding her tantalisingly and dangerously just off the ground, while he looked at her mouth and whispered to her.

‘Tiny little thing, aren’t you, just made to fit into a man’s arms, with a mouth just made for a man to kiss? Has anyone kissed you before, sweetheart, or have you been saving yourself for me?’

Her heart was pounding so heavily, so noisily that she could barely hear what he was saying. She felt both light-headed and yet at the same time as though everything around her had somehow become dazzlingly clear and sharp, as though she was seeing the whole world with new eyes.

‘You know what’s happening to us, don’t you?’ he pressed. ‘You know that you and I…’ He broke off, his face suddenly tense and fierce, his hands gripping her so tightly that it almost hurt. ‘I’ve got to see you again,’ he told her with an urgency that thrilled her. ‘When will you be free?’

Free… She struggled to hold on to her sanity, to reason, but they had both been swept away and were no longer of any force in her life.

This was what mattered, this sweet sharp bliss, this delirious sensation of floating above the ground, of suddenly living life to the full, of knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt that she had met the man who embodied every single facet of all her yearning daydreams, that she had in fact fallen headily and instantly in love.

‘I…after lunch,’ she heard herself telling him in a thick, unfamiliar voice. ‘I was going to write to my aunt. I write to her every week. She has arthritis and so she can’t always write back…’

‘I’ll pick you up here at half-past two,’ he told her softly, ignoring her flurried, strangled words.

And then, as he lowered her to the ground, his lips brushed lightly against her own, the merest touch—a touch which another and more aware girl would have recognised as deliberate provocation, but which to Lizzie appeared to be a gesture of the deepest reverence and respect, the most chaste kind of embrace, as though he hardly dared to do more than merely allow his lips to touch hers. So, in her reading, had the heroes hardly dared to sully their adored ones with the male carnality of their desires, cherishing their purity, even while they ached to possess it.

Lizzie knew nothing of the real world of real emotions, of the careless urgency with which men like Kit Danvers physically possessed her sex, claiming their compliance as their right as men who daily, hourly faced death.

‘And, sweetheart…’

As she looked up at him, mute and adoring, he touched her braided hair and said, ‘Wear this loose, and something pretty. I like my girls to look pretty…’

Just for a moment a cloud seemed to obscure the sun, chilling her skin. His girls, he had said… She frowned, her dizzying, bemusing dream suddenly darkened with reality, but then he touched her face, tracing the delicacy of its bone-structure, and the clouds were burned away in the intensity of the heat that shook her…

As she waited for him to unstrap her bike, Lizzie found herself wishing that it were already half-past two, that there were no long, tense hours to wait before she could see him again…hours which would be shadowed with fears that he might change his mind…that he might meet some prettier, more appealing girl whom he might favour with his smiles instead of her, and already, though she didn’t know it, she had taken her first step into a dangerous and unfamiliar new world.

She found Edward ready and waiting for her, his face set and tense.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she apologised. Some instinct that was beginning to grow with her own maturity gave her an insight into the feelings of others which she often wished she did not have. It was hardly less painful to be so receptive to the emotional pain of others at second hand than it was for them to experience it themselves. Today she was particularly receptive to Edward’s pain, her own emotional nerve-endings curling back in sensitive reaction to his anxiety.

‘I thought perhaps you’d changed your mind. You shouldn’t be spending your free time with me… Pretty girl like you should be out having fun.’

That was the second time in one morning a man had described her as pretty, but this time she felt none of the soaring joy she had experienced when he had described her thus, only a sharp anguished knowledge of Edward’s own awareness that, while a woman might feel compassion for him, she could never feel desire.

As she wheeled him outside, she saw him lift his face towards the warmth of the sun. His skin had a grey, sickly undertone, the bones slightly shrunken under his flesh. He had lost weight in the long months he had been with them and her heart ached compassionately for him, as she contrasted him again with him.

The rhododendrons were set on a sloping bank just outside the formal gardens, and Lizzie, who had genuinely wanted to foster the tiny spark of interest she had seen in Edward’s eyes the last time she had taken him there, had discovered that they had originally been planted by an owner of the house who had travelled extensively in China before the Boxer uprising. A keen botanist, he had collected various specimens in the wild and created this special area for them.

Where the formal gardens of the house had now gone to make way for vegetable plots, the rhododendrons had been allowed to remain.

Lizzie was slightly out of breath by the time she had pushed the wheelchair up the overgrown path that led to them, but her efforts were well rewarded when she turned a corner and stopped the wheelchair so that Edward could take in the full glory of the scene in front of them.

She heard him catch his breath, and, when she quickly kneeled down to look at him, she discovered that there were tears running down his face.

‘They’re beautiful,’ he told her quietly. ‘So very much like those at Cottingdean… My grandmother adored her garden.’

‘Who lives there now?’ Lizzie asked him, more because she sensed his need to talk about the house he obviously loved so much than out of any real curiosity.

‘No one. It was requisitioned during the early part of the war, but it’s empty now. It’s too remote to be of any real use—on the edge of a tiny village tucked away in the Wiltshire hills. Ultimately, I suppose, it belongs now to my cousin. His father was the elder son, mine the younger. Sometimes during the night I dream that I’m back there…’ A bitter smile twisted his face. ‘Pure escapism. If I do go back, it won’t be as a boy free to run around but as a useless cripple…’

Lizzie bit her lip, wondering if she had done the right thing in bringing him out here…wondering if she had perhaps not been kind in stirring up memories of his childhood.

Without saying a word, she turned the wheelchair round. She knew from experience that when these moods of deep despair came down on him it was best to simply let Edward speak. Rather like letting poison drain out of a wound, only for his particular wound there could never be any total cleansing and healing.

They were halfway back to the hospital when she saw the man walking down the path towards them. She recognised him immediately, her heart giving a tremendous bound of pleasure and shock. He was walking with the sun behind him, so that his dark hair had a golden nimbus, his easy, long-legged stride so male, so unconsciously arrogant that her heart bled a little for Edward, whom she could see gripping the arms of his wheelchair.

Such was her incandescent joy at the sight of him that there was no time, no room in her mind to question what he was doing. All she wanted to do was to fly towards him, to feel his arms tighten around her, his man’s body press close to hers, his mouth find hers to possess and cherish it until the tremulous joy flooding through her burst into a wild surge.

But it wasn’t her he addressed—he seemed not to notice her at all, speaking instead to Edward, saying casually, ‘Ah, there you are, old boy. They told me I’d find you down here somewhere…’

‘Christopher…’

Christopher… His name was Christopher… It suited him somehow… She savoured it silently, tasting it, rolling it around her mouth, marvelling at the foresight of parents able instinctively to choose a name so fitting.

‘I’ll push this for you, shall I?’

Engrossed in her bemusement, she hadn’t seen him move, and now suddenly he was standing beside her, her body instantly aware of his, so that she longed to move closer to him, to bathe in his body heat, to breathe in his special scent.

She tried to look at him and couldn’t, paralysed by unexpected, awkward shyness. In front of her she heard Edward saying, ‘Lizzie…this is Christopher Danvers… My cousin… Christopher, Lizzie is—’

‘I know. Lizzie and I have already met… This morning when I practically ran her down…’

He held out his hand and gripped hers. The pressure of his fingers against her own made her quiver with delight.

‘Call me Kit,’ he told her softly, while his blue eyes laughed dangerously into hers.

She was so bemused, so entranced by him that it wasn’t until several seconds after he had released her hand and she had turned away from him that she became aware of Edward’s tension.

And then, hypersensitive to a point where she almost felt as though she had stepped inside his skin, she could feel the pressure he was placing on his fragile muscles and instinctively moved towards him and then stopped, confused by her own actions.

For a moment she had wanted to place herself protectively between Edward and Kit. But why…? And why to protect Edward…? Kit was his cousin…

She was in love with him. He was wonderful, perfect. She couldn’t understand Edward’s antagonism towards him.

‘You always did drive too damn fast,’ Edward was saying curtly.

‘Well, luckily there was no harm done, and when your ministering angel told me that she was spending her time off charitably entertaining one of her patients I had no idea she meant you.’

‘What are you doing here, Kit?’

The way Edward Danvers asked the question was brusque, almost as though he disliked the other man, which startled Lizzie.

‘Felt I ought to, old chap, now that the old man’s finally gone. Duty. Head of the family and all that. Came to see how you were getting on. What plans you’ve got for when all this is over…’

‘I won’t be burdening you with my presence at Cottingdean, if that’s what’s worrying you,’ Edward said stiffly.

Lizzie was beginning to feel uncomfortable. There was something here between the two men which she felt instinctively should not be aired in front of a third party.

‘I… I think I’d better go,’ she began uncertainly, and appealed to Kit, ‘You’ve obviously got private family business to discuss…’

She started to move away down the path, but Kit followed her, standing between her and Edward and blocking her view of the wheelchair as he bent his head and murmured, ‘You haven’t forgotten about our date, have you? I shouldn’t be too long with old Edward… Half-past two, remember.’

Her heart gave a tremendous thud as happiness burst into a million tiny effervescent fragments inside her.

‘Half-past two,’ she agreed shakily.

Both men watched her walk out of sight, and then Kit drawled, ‘Pretty little thing for a skivvy.’

‘She is not a skivvy, she is a nursing aide… By rights she ought to have done more years at school. She’s far too bright for this kind of work.’ Edward moved restlessly in his chair and cursed bitterly, ‘Damn this war… Damn it to hell…’

‘Steady on, old chap. Can’t say I blame you, though. Tied to that thing and not able to do a thing about it, while you’ve got a pretty little bit like that fluttering round you. Must say, I’d feel pretty frustrated myself.’ He watched in cynical amusement as he saw his cousin’s skin turn dark red.

Edward always had been over-prudish, which was perhaps just as well in all the circumstances when you thought about it. Kit hadn’t been looking forward to this visit. While his father had been alive he had carelessly pushed the thought of his cousin and his plight out of his mind; he had more important things to think about, such as winning a war and in the process laying as many pretty girls as he could… One of the perks of being one of Britain’s bravest. As a pilot, it was virtually expected of him. Not that he found it any hardship… But now his father was dead, and his CO had made one too many comments about Edward’s plight, so that he had felt obliged to drive down here and see how he was doing, and to make it plain to Edward that once this war was over they would both have their own separate lives to lead.

‘You leave her alone,’ he heard Edward saying grimly. ‘She’s still little more than a child. She doesn’t understand the kind of rules you play by, Kit. She’s an innocent…’ He broke off, realising that he was only affording the other amusement, and asked instead, ‘I take it you are still engaged to Lillian?’

‘Of course. All that money, you know… Besides, I don’t have much option, do I?’

‘If you don’t love her—’

‘Love? What a fool you are, Edward. You’ve been spending too much time on your own,’ he added derisively. ‘I need a wife like Lillian, but that doesn’t mean I can’t amuse myself in other directions.’

‘You haven’t changed, Kit. You never did care about people’s feelings and you never will.’

‘While you always cared too much, which is why you’re in that wheelchair. If you hadn’t been so damned heroic, you’d still be a whole man, instead of a helpless cripple,’ Kit taunted him. ‘You’re a fool, Edward, you always were and you always will be… And by the way, old man, once Lillian and I are married, don’t expect to find yourself a billet at Cottingdean, will you? I dare say I shall sell the old place anyway. Lillian wants a flat in London, and I dare say by the time this is over Cottingdean will only be fit for knocking down.’

Kit always had had a cruel streak, Edward reflected silently; as a boy he had been inclined to bully and torment. That hadn’t bothered him then… He suddenly realised how tired and sick he felt, how helpless and vulnerable. He felt his eyes mist with the helpless tears of impotence and frustration, and he wished, as he had wished so many times before, that he had the strength and the courage to put an end to it all.