by Annie Groves
‘Exactly. Brandon wanted us to be together, but what about what you want? What I want?’
‘I want you. I love you, Francine. I’ve never stopped loving you.’
‘But you walked away from me. I called out to you but you ignored me.’ The words were like sharp thorns stuck in her heart, a constant source of pain that had festered, poisoning her love for him. A private pain that she couldn’t admit to him because doing so would make her so vulnerable to being hurt all over again. ‘I believe you think that you do, but …’
‘But you don’t think I do?’
‘You are an honourable man, Marcus. In making you a trustee of the foundation, Brandon has laid a claim that will make heavy demands on you. I can’t influence any decisions you may make now or in the future about those demands, but I will not allow you to carry the additional burden of the responsibility for me and my happiness. I know that Brandon meant well, but I’m a woman, not a girl; an adult, not a child. I am the one who is responsible for my happiness. The last thing I want is for you to feel honour-bound to resurrect what you once felt for me for my sake.’
‘There is no question of that. I’ve never stopped loving you.’
‘You can say that, Marcus, but how can I know it? I can’t, and I can’t either spend the rest of my life wondering if you are with me out of pity and duty, or because you do genuinely love me. If Brandon has taught me one thing, it is the importance of integrity.’
‘Very well then, tell me honestly what your feelings are for me.’
She should have anticipated that he would use her own weapon against her, Francine realised.
‘I’ve changed from the person I was in Cairo,’ she sidestepped the question. ‘For me now love is only worthwhile, worth having, when it is mutual and shared, when it is given freely out of itself, not out of duty or as the payment for an imagined debt, and when I know beyond any doubt that it is all of those things. You say you love me, Marcus, but the truth is that what lies behind us has left me too afraid to believe you. Call me a coward if you wish but I would rather not have what you call your love than risk finding out when it is too late that it is not love at all.’
Her words, spiked with her pain, seemed to hang on the air between them. Marcus frowned and looked away from her. He was going to admit that she was right and that his claim to still love her was motivated by guilt and duty. What she was feeling wasn’t pain; she wasn’t going to allow herself to feel any more of that. It was—
‘No!’
The harshness of Marcus’s denial caught her off guard drawing her gaze to him.
‘I’m not giving you up, Francine,’ he told her fiercely. ‘Not this time. Somehow, no matter what it takes, or how long it takes, I shall find a way to convince you that I do love you.’
TWENTY
‘All set, then?’
Lou nodded, her mouth too dry to allow her to speak as she gazed at the small two-seater plane on the runway. She’d been so excited that she’d hardly slept last night, in a fever of impatience and dread in case Verity changed her mind or couldn’t make it, but now that she was here, dressed in her WAAF trousers, the flying jacket they were all issued with for once coming into its own, the helmet and goggles Verity had handed to her firmly in place, along with her parachute, Lou acknowledged that she felt almost as apprehensive as she was excited.
‘Let’s start her up and get going then, shall we?’ Verity invited. Lou had sat in planes before, and not just sat in them but contorted herself to work on various bits of them, so she should have felt perfectly at home in the passenger seat of the small machine, but somehow it was different sitting here knowing that she was actually going to be flying from how it was working in the cockpit when the plane was on the ground.
‘Ready?’ Verity yelled above the noise of the engine, starting to taxi down the runway without waiting for Lou to respond.
It was the most peculiar sensation Lou thought, as suddenly, without warning, the plane started to lift off the ground, the runway falling away beneath them. A feeling of exhilaration danced through her veins as she looked down at the countryside spread out beneath then, the base buildings, like models on a child’s toy farm, set amongst higgledy-piggledy hedged fields of all shapes and sizes.
They were climbing higher, the sound of the engine changing, the pressure on Lou’s ears reminding her to swallow.
Verity’s ‘You OK?’ had Lou nodding in delighted response, although she clutched at the side of her seat when Verity dipped to one side, after levelling off at a thousand feet, taking them in a westerly direction.
‘Look, there’s the Atlantic,’ she shouted to Lou above the engine noise.
The sea! How blue and pretty it looked beneath the sunny sky, the waves small dancing white crests.
‘Pa gave me Boadicea here for my twenty-first birthday, and I adore her, but it is fun flying Lancasters and the like from the factories to their bases. Some of those poor RAF boys get so het up when they see a woman getting out of the cockpit. The girls in ATA, though, know what they’re doing. We’ve even had some American fly girls joining us. I’ve filed our flight path as being to the aviation factory near Bristol and back, strictly speaking half an hour each way, and a straight flight, but how do you feel about a couple of victory rolls? Shall we give it a go?’
Lou dared to agree.
‘Hold on then, here we go.’
The sensation of the plane rolling over whilst she hung upside down reminded Lou of childhood rides on a funfair, only, of course, this was far, far more exciting.
‘Did you like that?’ Verity asked, and when Lou gave her a thumbs-up she laughed and yelled, ‘Good show. Let’s do it again, shall we?’
Lou had never known an hour pass so quickly or so exhilaratingly. By the time Verity brought the little plane to a halt back at the base, Lou was so dizzy with excitement and victory rolls that she could hardly speak.
‘Thank you. That was wonderful,’ she said to Verity when they were both back on the ground beside the plane and Lou had handed the other girl her borrowed helmet and goggles.
‘It was my pleasure,’ Verity assured her. ‘You’re a natural, and if I was based here I wouldn’t mind betting that I’d pretty soon be able to teach you to fly yourself. Pity you can’t get one of the chaps to let you have a go.’
‘There’s no chance of that,’ Lou sighed. ‘It’s a court-martialling offence for a Waaf if she tries.’
‘Only if she gets found out,’ was Verity’s spirited response.
It was all very well for Verity to shrug off the thought of a court martial and to willingly break the rules, but it was different for girls like her, Lou acknowledged ruefully.
* * *
Bella’s hands were shaking as she signed her name and then read carefully through what she had just written. It had been so hard to stop herself from saying all that she wanted to say, and she had had to stop several times to remind herself that her letter would pass through many hands and be seen by many pairs of eyes before it reached Jan in his German prison, via the Red Cross.
In the end she had simply written that she loved him and was thinking of him and that she would wait for him.
Dear heaven, but it was still so hard for her to let herself believe that he was actually alive. Bella didn’t think she would believe it properly until she had had her first letter from him. Now more than ever she longed for the war to end. It was hard not to let her imagination run away with her, encouraging her to conjure up all manner of dreadful fates overtaking Jan, and to think instead of the war being over and him coming back to her. It was hard, but for Jan’s sake she must do it.
‘I’m sorry, Gina, but I can’t make up a foursome this weekend. I’ve already arranged to meet someone–Luke’s mother. Luke’s sister is to receive a George Cross and the whole family are coming to London. Mind you, I don’t think that Leonard will be in the least bit disappointed at the thought of having you to himself,’ Katie told her friend with a smile.
>
‘Well, perhaps not,’ Gina agreed. ‘I take it that there’s nothing doing with you and Eddie?’
‘No,’ Katie confirmed. ‘I like him as a friend. He’s good fun, but there’s nothing more to it than that. To be honest I feel rather guilty about him spending his leave on me when he could be taking out girls whose company would probably be more to his taste.’
‘Hmm, girls who don’t know where to draw the line, I suppose you mean? Do you want me to tell Leonard and ask him to let him know?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
Jean’s letter had come as a bit of a shock to Katie, but it hadn’t even for one minute occurred to her to refuse to see Luke’s mother–quite the opposite. And somehow, even though Jean had written in her letter that she was sure ‘that you will be as surprised as we were to learn that Lou is to be decorated,’ Katie had not been totally surprised. There had always been that something about Lou that had made Katie feel that she was very courageous, and that she shared Luke’s strength of character.
Jean had put in her letter that they would all be staying at the Savoy, thanks to Francine, and had suggested that Katie meet her there on Saturday 24 October, which was the day before the investiture.
Katie’s heart had given a silly little leap of hope when she had first opened her mother’s letter to find Jean’s letter inside it. And of course it had been a foolish hope because if Luke had really wanted to tell her that he still loved her he would have written to tell her so himself, not asked his mother to write on his behalf.
Now, as much as she was looking forward to seeing Jean and as delighted as she was for Lou, Katie was also painfully aware that being with Luke’s mother could only remind her of everything that had happened and how much Luke had hurt her.
It would have been much better for her if she had been the kind of girl who could have got over her heartache with a fling with someone like Eddie, Katie admitted. Eddie was the perfect antidote for a broken heart, provided one was the kind of girl who believed that having fun was more important than sharing love. Sometimes Katie wished that she were that kind of girl, because London certainly abounded with opportunities to have that kind of fun, with so many young men in uniform heading for the capital to let off steam when they were on leave.
Con was in trouble. A hell of a lot of trouble. He paced his small office moodily. It had all started when Ricky had told him that his unit was being posted to Lincolnshire to work on a new American airbase that was being built there.
‘So who’s going to take over from you here in our partnership?’ Con had asked him.
‘No one.’
Con was taken aback, but before he had been able to say anything Ricky had informed him, ‘Word’s gone out round the camp that there’s a rigged card game outfit in town, and the boys are being warned to keep away from you unless they want to lose their money. See, the thing is, Con, some of the boys are starting getting a bit hot under the collar about the fact that you always win and they always lose. I did warn you that you’d have to lose a few games and find a new face to teach your tricks to if we were going to keep the boys sweet.’
Ricky had said something to that effect but Con hadn’t been about to share his forty per cent, or his sleight of hand expertise with anyone else, so he had ignored Ricky’s warning.
After Ricky had gone Con had soon convinced himself that the American had been exaggerating, no doubt suffering from jealousy because he was being posted away from Liverpool and the gold mine he and Con had created together. Of course the Americans would still come. How could they not when he, Con, was going to the trouble of setting up a private members’ club for them, not to mention the amount of money it had already cost him? Money that he could only recoup from future gambling wins.
Only they hadn’t come, and now, several weeks down the line, Con was being pressed for money: first of all by the landlord of the run-down property just off Hope Street that Con had been having fitted out as a club when Ricky had given him his news; next, by the spivs he’d been dealing with. The one who’d supplied him with the Jaguar he’d been paying for in instalments had repossessed it, and another, whom he’d asked to source him the fabric for another new suit, had come over quite ugly when Con had told him that he hadn’t got the money. Even worse, Con had got Ed Mulligan, who’d been as friendly as anything with him the last time Con had seen him, claiming that Con was in arrears with his protection money.
And if all that wasn’t bad enough he’d even got Eva insisting that he’d promised to marry her, and throwing jealous tantrums every time he so much as looked at any of the girls, fingering that knife of hers, and telling him how she was going to stab him with it if she ever found him with another woman again. Looking at pretty girls had always been Con’s major source of solace when times were bad, and now, thanks to Eva’s jealousy–and his fear of her father’s knife–he was even being deprived of that. God knows what Eva would do if she ever found out that he was already married.
He had to get his hands on some money, and fast, but how?
Abruptly Con stopped pacing. The answer to his problems had been staring him in the face! Emily. His wife. She had money and plenty of it. It was all wrong the way she’d taken herself off with that ruddy kid she’d taken in, leaving him, her husband, to fend for himself. Conveniently Con forgot how much having an absent wife had suited him.
Knowing Emily had the money he needed was one thing. Getting it out of her was another. He’d have to go and see her. Where was it she’d gone? Some place in Cheshire; he’d got the address she’d given him somewhere.
It wasn’t in Con’s nature to worry about anything for very long. Except perhaps now Eva’s temper and her constant threats that she would use her father’s knife against him.
TWENTY-ONE
They’d all known when Monty had arrived, and then Churchill, that something was brewing. Then the word had gone round that there was no way British soldiers were going to surrender or cross the Suez Canal. Then had come the preparation for a big offensive, using dummy models of tanks and trucks to deceive the enemy and move the men. Last night their battalion, like all the others, had received its full briefing and told what positions it had to take. As experienced desert fighters they had been given command of a strategic position–and the danger that went with it.
Now they’d got a ruddy full moon to deal with on top of ruddy Rommel and his tanks, Luke thought grimly as he went round speaking to his men, checking as he did so that they were well dug in to their positions, ready for what was to come. El Alamein it was called, this train stop in the desert that they’d been pushed back to and somehow hung on to, and from which they were now to mount a huge all-out assault on Rommel’s forces.
The Royal Engineers had cleared the mines the Germans had laid to allow the units to pass through and now all they had to do was wait.
Once he’d checked up on his men Luke crawled back to his own position, next to Andy.
‘Gawd, I’d give anything for a fag,’ Andy said.
‘A fag, did you say, and or a shag?’ one of the other men demanded with the bawdy licence of men at war.
‘Doesn’t matter much either way,’ someone else chimed in, ‘'cos he won’t be getting either.’
No sooner had he finished speaking than a huge barrage began lighting up the night sky with the flames from the specially placed burning petrol dumps littering the desert.
A lone Stuka dropped its bombs, clearly visible in the moonlit sky. And then it began: the work they had trained for. A skirl of bagpipes from the 51st Highland Division announced the commencement of the infantry’s advance.
‘Come on, men,’ Luke ordered, and soon they too were moving forward at a steady seventy-five strides a minute, bayonets fixed, their task to clear the way for the waiting armoured divisions.
‘The ruddy pipe’s stopped playing,’ Andy yelled in Luke’s ear above the cacophony of war.
‘Keep going,’ Luke told him. He too had registered
the burst of machine-gun fire that had silenced the piper’s ‘The Road to the Isles', but it didn’t do to think of such things.
Katie spotted Jean the minute she walked into the elegant room where the Savoy served its afternoon teas. Her ex-landlady was sitting at a table on her own on the velvet-covered banquette facing the doorway. She was wearing what Katie knew to be her ‘best’ coat and she was sitting bolt upright, her ‘good’ leather handbag clasped tightly on her lap. She had obviously had her hair newly done for the trip to London and, standing observing Jean, a wave of love for her filled Katie, drowning out the discomfort she had been feeling on her way here.
Far more familiar with the Savoy than Jean could ever be, Katie felt no self-consciousness about being here. She had, after all, virtually grown up in the hotel, she had accompanied her father there so often. The refined upper-class voices of some of the women taking tea, the obviously expensive if somewhat war-worn clothes many of them were wearing, the preponderance of uniforms bristling with gold braid, high-status-officer pips and the like, couldn’t daunt her or make her feel out of place. To Katie the Savoy was familiar territory, somewhere that she felt completely at home.
Unlike Jean, who Katie could see was looking uncomfortable and ill at ease. Another surge of emotion swept through her: tenderness, this time, for this woman who had welcomed her into her home and been so kind to her. Smiling, Katie hurried over to the table, her smile widening when she saw Jean’s look of relief when she spotted her.
The two women hugged one another, and then Jean held Katie at arm’s length as she looked at her for a moment before she released her so that they could both sit down.
‘Grace and Seb have taken the others to Madame Tussauds. Lou and Bobby both wanted to go, although Sasha wasn’t so keen. I said that I wanted to have a bit of a rest. We’ve done that much sightseeing since we got here last night that I feel as though I’ve been walked off me feet. It’s ever such a big place this, Katie. A boarding house would have suited us fine just as long as it was clean, but Francine said that she wanted to give us a bit of a treat. She’s lost Brandon … not that it wasn’t expected,’ Jean added after Katie had immediately offered her sympathy.
