by Annie Groves
Con knew another chancer when he met one, and the American had that confidence.
With the cigar clamped between his teeth, Con shuffled the cards several times, and was just about to start dealing them when Ricky leaned towards him, producing two brand-new packs of cards from his own pocket.
‘Would you mind if we use these,’ he asked Con. ‘I’ve got this thing, you see, about using only new packs. It’s kinda a bit of a superstition with me. Seems like I never win unless I’m using a new pack.’
As he spoke, Con caught the grin that Chip was giving him. So the sore loser had been suspicious about his loss, had he? Well, too bad, and as for the new packs of cards … Con shrugged his magnificently broad shoulders.
‘Of course I don’t mind, if you don’t mind if I shuffle them?’
Check them he meant, of course, and Ricky knew it. As Con well knew, a pack could be marked and put back in its box and the box made to lookas though it was sealed and untouched. Old Marvo had known all the tricks there were to making the cards fall in his favour.
‘Sure, you go ahead,’ the American agreed.
It wasn’t just big strong shoulders that Con had, he had big strong hands as well, surprisingly swift and deft big strong hands, certainly skilled enough to palm the aces as he shuffled the pack and then handed it back to Ricky, telling him, ‘You deal.’
Ricky began to deal.
All he had to do now, was to exchange the cards he had been dealt for the aces, and then replace the extra cards in the pack during the course of the game every time he picked up a new card. Easy. He drew on his cigar and sat back, ready to enjoy the evening.
‘Gimme those cards.’
Con had just produced his four aces and had been about to scoop the pot–over two hundred pounds tonight, thanks to Chip’s increasingly wild betting, until he, like the other three soldiers, Stu and Paul, had been knocked out of the game, leaving only Con and Ricky to battle it out between them. But Chip had suddenly got to his feet, lurching towards the table, grabbing the discarded cards as he did so.
‘Hey, kid, calm down,’ Ricky advised him as he too stood and reached across the table to place his hand on the angry young soldier’s arm.
‘He’s cheatin’ us, man. There ain’t no way anyone has that kind of luck. It’s like I told you.’
So he had been right, Con acknowledged. Rickyhad come with them to see if he could catch him out. Well, it would take far more than an undersized American soldier to catch him on the hop, Con thought triumphantly, as he shuffled the pile of fivepound notes and then folded them into his pocket.
‘Now look here,’ Con began, drawing himself up to his full impressive height. Con stood six foot in his socks, taller than anyone else in the room. ‘If you’re trying to accuse me of cheating—’
‘It’s OK, Con, the kid’s just a bit upset at losing so much money. Come on, Chip, Con won fair and square. I watched him deal the cards, and they were both new packs, you know that,’ Ricky assured the younger man, going round to him and putting his hand on his arm.
‘Ain’t no way a man can come up with four aces two games in a row and be playin’ fair and square,’ Chip protested, shaking off Ricky’s hand, and scowling.
‘Well I’m not a man to hold a grudge,’ Con assured them. ‘You’re all welcome to come back to the theatre with me to catch the finale of the show.’
‘What, and get fleeced a second time by those hookers he’s got working there?’ Chip said bitterly–a comment that Con affected not to hear, as he reached for his coat from the back of his chair.
Bella had a splitting headache. It hadn’t been a good morning. They’d had a young mother in a desperate state, her three-year-old in the nursery, and the news just arrived that her husband had been killed inaction. She’d been beside herself, saying there was no point in her going on living, and Bella had had to calm her down and remind her that she had a little boy who needed her and that her dead husband would have expected her to be brave and look after his son.
She’d started to unwrap her sandwiches from their greaseproof paper, but somehow she didn’t have the appetite for them. Her mother had been very difficult over the weekend, insisting that Bella didn’t understand how she felt about her husband leaving her, and practically blaming Bella for what had happened.
Bella had tried to occupy her thoughts with other things over the weekend. Since Gavin had been working she had gone round and spent both Saturday and Sunday afternoons with Lena. Janette was almost four months old now, sitting up and showing off the two new teeth she had cut. The minute she had seen Bella she had held out her arms to her to be picked up. The feel of her soft weight and the smell of her baby skin had almost been too much for her, Bella admitted now, bringing back as it had done memories of the baby she had lost and underlining the fact that she would never now hold a child of her own–Jan’s child. The pang of grief that ripped through her was so intense that it made her cry out, a low groan of mortal pain as though her body was crying out in protest.
She mustn’t be like this. It wasn’t right.
She looked towards the window of her small office, removing her handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan as she did so. She must not cry hereat work, sitting behind her desk with the door open. What would everyone think? What—
‘Bella.’
The sound of Jan’s voice gave her such a shock that she almost knocked over her cup of tea as she turned to look at him.
‘I had to come.’
‘No.’ She shook her head fiercely in denial. ‘No.’
‘Yes,’ Jan told her, reaching out to stop her as she pushed back her chair.
Please don’t let this be happening when she felt so weak, so pitifully weak and so much in need of him. She could feel her gaze being drawn to him, famished, desperate, greedily drawing in the familiar sight of him. He had lost weight. His face was thinner, his cheekbones sharper, emphasising his masculinity, giving his features a chiselled maleness that had her heart turning over.
She had retreated as deep into her chair as she could to avoid the hell of self-betrayal that would come with his touch.
‘Yes.’ His voice was as stark with pain as the look in his eyes as he kicked the door shut, isolating them in the dangerous privacy of her office. No one would come to her rescue, to save her from herself. The rule was that no one knocked or came in when the door was closed.
‘You shouldn’t be here.’
‘I had to see you. I can’t stay long. I’ve driven my mother and Bettina back from … back, but I’m due at my base tonight. We’re flying almost nightly missions over the Channel, providing air cover for Bomber Command.’
‘You shouldn’t be telling me that.’ The words were automatic. After all, anything was better, safer, than talking about … that other … his wife … her death … her own pain.
‘Magda’s father was very touched by your letter. My mother showed it to him.’
‘Stop it.’ Her voice was frantic with panic and fear.
‘The doctor was very good. He stated that it was an accident, although she’d threatened to do it–to kill herself–because of me … because …’
‘Because she’d guessed? Because she thought you didn’t love her?’
‘No! My love was the last thing she wanted. She told me that. She told me that she hated men, even her own father, because he hadn’t saved the others. She said that there were voices in her head telling her that she should kill us both, that she should kill all men. I should never have married her. Without marriage she might have had a chance of avoiding sinking into the dreadful confusion that was responsible—’
‘But you did marry her. She was your wife.’
‘I did marry her, but she was never my wife.’
‘You can’t repudiate her now like that. I won’t let you.’
‘I’m not repudiating her. How can I repudiate what I didn’t have?’
‘You should be grieving for her as your wife.’
&n
bsp; ‘I can’t. I can only grieve for what she could have been. I want you, Bella. I need you. I need your sweetness and your warmth. I need your being alive and your love. I need you.’ He wasreaching for her. ‘Come with me, back to your house. Let me love you and be loved by you in return.’
His voice had thickened and she could see, almost feel and smell the desire coming off him.
It would be so easy to do what he wanted, to let him take her, commit to her, knowing that once they had stepped over that barrier and crossed that boundary, there would be no stepping back. Once she had given herself to him Jan would want the banns read and his ring on her finger, she knew. It was so tempting, so much what she wanted–all that she wanted–to be his, to be loved by him, to take him within her body, to have his child, to hold that child to her as she had held baby Janette at the weekend. She wanted all of that so much, but even here in this office, her domain, she could feel that agonised shadow of his dead wife, reminding her of what was owed to her as his wife.
‘No,’ Bella told him. ‘We can’t do that. I won’t do it.’
‘I love you. I need you more than you can know. Time, life, are so precious, and who knows how little of them we may have? Please don’t deny me, Bella; don’t deny us. Let me have the sweetness of your love, let me have that memory.’
He was coming round the desk to her. In another moment he would be touching her, and once he did she would be lost. She wanted to be lost but it was wrong; they could not build their future on his wife’s death. Panic flared and burned inside her. If she couldn’t find the strength to send him away then she must make him go away, but how?
She looked at her desk. Her desk, her office, her nursery, her life, all were dependent on her respectability, her acceptability by her community, and she knew what to say. She took a deep breath and stood up.
‘I can’t and won’t do what you ask, Jan, because, you see, if I did, if I behaved as you want me to behave, it could cost me my job and that is a price I am not prepared to pay.’
‘You said you loved me.’
‘I did, but now I’ve discovered that I love my job more. You surely didn’t really think that I’d be prepared to sit around and think of nothing else but you, did you? You were a married man. I decided that couldn’t allow myself to love you.’
‘So you gave your love to this place instead.’ His voice was harsh with bitterness and disbelief.
‘Yes,’ Bella lied. ‘I really wish that you hadn’t come here like this. We’d agreed that we wouldn’t see one another again. I had hoped that my letter of condolence made my feelings, and the fact that I now see you merely as an acquaintance, plain.’
‘Bella, please don’t do this. Please tell me that you don’t mean any of this. Please tell me that you love me.’
‘I can’t do that. I think you had better leave, Jan. My staff will be wondering what’s going on, and I have an appointment to interview a new nurse in half an hour.’
She took advantage of his stiff disbelieving silence to skirt past him to the door and pull it open.
‘Goodbye.’
‘Bella, I know you love me.’
His face looked gaunt, deep hollows of pain beneath his cheekbones, his eyes sick with pain. Just looking at him made her feel as though someone was tearing out her heart. Jan, Jan, my love, my heart, my life. But if she let him stay, if she let him do what he wanted to do, how might he feel when the urgency of his immediate need had faded, and when he looked back and saw their loving as a betrayal, and her as someone who had aided him in that betrayal? What would that do to their love? For his own sake she could not give in. She knew Jan. She knew his integrity and his honesty; she knew what it would do to him, when this madness of despair and longing and need had lifted. He would hate himself. She said nothing.
‘Very well. If that’s what you want.’
Bella nodded, only when she could see him striding away from her, tall and handsome and strong, giving in to her own need to say a mental prayer for him–that he might be safe, that his heart might be healed, that one day he would understand the sacrifice she had made for him in not allowing their love to be tainted by the betrayal that would have been done if she had given him her hand and let him lead her to the place she really most wanted to be.
Sacrifice. Such an old-fashioned word, a word she herself would once have openly mocked and scorned, but which now went hand in glove with their wartime lives.
NINE
‘Well, the rooms seem to be OK,’ Gina announced with evident relief, as she stood in the open doorway to Katie’s hotel bedroom. They had arrived just over half an hour ago and had been shown up the elegant flight of stairs of the tall four-storey house in the Royal Crescent, the most famous of Bath’s elegant terraces, to their rooms on the second floor, by an ancient porter, who had accepted their tip with an uncommunicative grunt.
‘Too used to desperate men in uniform, oblivi-ous to what they’re tipping, I suppose,’ Gina had whispered to Katie once he had gone, a reference to the fact, as they had been told by their driver, and observed for themselves during their taxi ride from the station, Bath was filled with Admiralty and navel men, evacuated to the city at the beginning of the war.
‘I’ve checked the bathroom. It’s lovely and clean, and there are proper beds with springs–heaven. Doubles, as well–double heaven.’
Katie laughed. It would indeed be ‘heaven’ to sleep in a proper comfortable bed again instead ofher utilitarian single, which felt so hard and resembled a bunk rather than a proper bed.
The hotel had an air of faded shabby splendour about it, the furniture and the fabrics obviously good quality and equally obviously well worn.
‘We can’t expect too much from the food, I don’t suppose.’ Gina pulled a rueful face, and then looked at her watch. ‘It’s not quite two o’clock yet; what do you say we go out and have a look around and see if we can find a tearoom?’
‘That sounds a good idea,’ Katie agreed. She had already unpacked her small case and put her change of clothes tidily away in the wardrobe and the dressing table drawers. Not that she had brought much with her: a smart but plain dress for the evening ‘just in case’; the mackintosh that she had travelled from London in but now didn’t need as there was a clear sky and sunshine; a change of underwear; a clean blouse; and a cotton dress in case the weather should turn warm, plus her night things and sponge bag.
They had had a dreadfully cold winter, but it was April now so she felt reasonably safe to go out for their exploratory stroll wearing one of the mandatorily only-to-the-knee-length skirts that was all the Government allowed in order to conserve fabric and the time spent making it up. In a soft off-white linen, Katie’s had been made from curtain her mother had found in one of her trunks, and Katie was wearing it with a favourite white silk blouse patterned with black Scottie dogs wearing red bow collars, from before the war, underneath her old blazer, which fortunately steamed up well and still looked respectably smart.
A pretty scarlet scarf with white polka dots knotted at her throat brought a brave touch of colour to her outfit, although Katie would have liked something a bit more delicate than her thick lisle stockings to wear with her white T-strap shoes.
Living in the Campion household had given her an interest in her clothes and a confidence about what suited her that she had never imagined having before she had gone to Liverpool. It had been a shock to find that Jean Campion had parcelled up with her other things, and sent to her parents’ address, the gorgeous silk dress Katie had worn the first time she had danced with Luke–a dress that rightfully belonged to Jean’s sister Francine, but Jean had put in the loveliest little note saying that Katie was to have the dress ‘in memory of happy times’.
Katie knew, though, that she would never ever wear it again. She couldn’t because if she did she would think of Luke and then she wouldn’t be able to bear being without him, and she must not weaken and let that happen. Instead she tried to tell herself that the Luke she had l
oved did not really exist because that Luke would never for a minute have doubted her or her love for him.
Gina was wearing a similar outfit, although Katie felt that Gina, being taller, had a more–and rather enviable–sporty look about her.
By mutual agreement they set off to explore the famous Georgian area of the city first.
‘Oh, isn’t this heaven after poor old London, with its bomb sites?’ Gina enthused as they both stopped to admire the elegance of the Georgian buildings.
‘Yes,’ Katie agreed. ‘I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to be somewhere that hasn’t been bombed.’ She gave a small shiver. ‘Liverpool might have had the heart bombed out of it, but Hitler couldn’t bomb the heart out of its people.’ It was lovely, though, she admitted to herself, to be somewhere that the war hadn’t touched and where there was no destruction, somewhere that was a reminder of how life used to be.
‘This is such a beautiful place,’ she told Gina. ‘I’m so glad we came.’
Gina was an excellent guide, and made no attempt to hide her delight in recognising so many places she knew from Jane Austen’s books. Visiting the Assembly Rooms, which had only been reopened in 1938, after many years of neglect, so they had been told, had been a particular delight, as had Gina’s face when she had said to Katie in an awed whisper, ‘Just imagine, Jane Austen was actually here, in these rooms.’
They’d had afternoon tea at the Assembly Rooms, feeling deliciously self-indulgent although, as Katie had said ruefully, their clothes were rather utilitarian compared with the beautiful gowns of Jane Austen’s era, and tactfully managing to decline without offence the two-pronged approach made on them by a pair of smartly uniformed naval lieutenants.
‘Obviously looking for you-know-what,’ Gina had observed wryly once the lieutenants’ suggestion that they joined up with Katie and Gina ‘to leave a table free for other people’ had been declined.
