by Annie Groves
The cool of the evening was a relief after the enervating heat of the day, and she had only had to endure it for a few hours and in relatively relaxed comfort, not the searing exposure the men had to endure out in the desert in combat conditions, Fran reminded herself. Initially she had felt drained and exhausted, but now with the first half of the show behind her Fran was buoyed up by that fierce surge of adrenalin that hit the veins like a drug the minute she felt a stage floor beneath her feet and saw an audience in front of her.
She’d already sung ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, and had been called back for encore after encore, and in all honesty she was not really surprised that the men had requested that she sing ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’.
There would be tears in more than a few pairs of male eyes by the time she had reached the end of the song, Fran knew, and who could blame the men for longing to see the white cliffs of home and to exchange the desert for England’s green and pleasant land? They were here, after all, to fight to protect that land, and she was here to remind them what they were fighting for.
From somewhere behind her she could hear the major’s familiar voice, and a prickle of awareness sensitised her skin in much the same way as the sand. Fran didn’t like admitting it but it wasn’t hard to understand why Lily had made such a play for him. Major Marcus Linton was a very good-looking man, a very male man. Tall, broad-shouldered, grey-eyed, dark-haired and in his late thirties, he had an air of self-control and command about him that most women would find attractive.
Including her? Hardly. Even if Lily hadn’t openly warned her off within minutes of him being introduced to them, Fran would not have been tempted to attract his attention. Marcus Linton might be a very different sort of man from Con, the theatre producer she had fallen for as a girl, and who had fathered her illegitimate child, but her experience with Con had made her very wary of the male sex.
Fran was an extremely beautiful woman with a lushly curvy body and the kind of features that men found sexually attractive. She couldn’t change the way she looked but she could and did make sure that men understood that the sexuality of her face and body did not mean that she had the kind of nature that meant she was sexually available to them.
Fran knew that she could have had a very big career as a movie star if she had been willing to trade on the image created by her looks and if she had chosen to take the casting couch route to success and fame.
Singing was as much a part of her as breathing, and she would hate not to be able to use her voice in the way that nature had designed it to be used, but she was certainly not going to use her body or allow others to use it so that she could claim the false coin of ‘stardom’.
The comedians were on now; then it would be the turn of the ventriloquist, then the chorus girls. The sound of male laughter rolled in a wave from the audience to reach backstage, where Fran was struggling to change and redo her makeup for the second half.
Fran and Lily were supposed to share a dresser, but typically Lily had appropriated Martha’s services, claiming that her ‘poorly stomach’ meant that she needed someone on hand to minister to her. Since Lily had stayed behind in Cairo comfortably ensconced in the excellent Metropolitan Hotel, which they had been booked into, Fran failed to see exactly why she should need Martha, but Lily’s temper tantrums were so well known and feared that John Woods, the ENSA officer travelling with them, had simply given in to her, begging Fran to manage without Martha.
Fran knew perfectly well that Lily wasn’t above manipulating things to ensure that she not only remained the lead singer, but also to undermine anyone else’s act if she thought they might be in competition with her. Fran wasn’t going to put herself through all the emotional drama that went with that kind of situation just for the sake of being without a dresser for a couple of shows. In fact, Fran rather thought that Lily was hoping that Fran would challenge her and provoke an outright showdown between them.
Fran had far more important things on her mind, though. Today was the anniversary of the day she had met Connor Bryant – Jack’s father – and remembering that brought the loss of Jack unbearably sharply into her thoughts.
She had been thinking about him all day: the hard labour of his birth, with its pain and her own fear, and then the tremendous sense of exhausted pride she had felt when she had given birth to him, followed by such a surge of maternal joy and love that she could feel its echo within her now.
She had been so young – too young – and nothing had prepared her for the intensity of that love: to give birth to a child, to hold it in your arms, a new life, so filled with trust and so dependent on you that the stab of fierce protective love was forever balanced with an edge of fear.
She had sworn that she would do the best she could for him. She had made that promise – that vow – to him, but she had broken it. If only she could go back and right what she had done wrong.
If only … Fran tried to shake away her painful thoughts. She could feel the satin fabric of her frock clinging tackily to her skin. She had lost weight since she had begun this tour and the reflection she could see in the mirror was not one that pleased her. She looked thin and tired, her face slightly gaunt. She opened the flap of the tent that served as her dressing room and stepped out into the familiarity of the backstage bustle, and the velvet darkness of the desert night.
‘Ten, Fran,’ the floor manager called out, holding up ten fingers.
Nodding, Fran headed for the stage, where their compère was already announcing her.
Fran was dripping with sweat as she came offstage, her heart racing and skipping, gripped by the familiar high of knowing that she had reached out to her audience and touched their emotions.
No matter how cynical she might feel when she was not on stage, once she was, her desire to sing to her audience, and their desire to hear her sing, worked like a special magical spell that never failed to reach deep within Fran, to release a poignancy to her singing that drew those listening to her and to call her back for encore after encore. When she was singing Fran became the song, the instrument via which its words and music flowed into the hearts of others. That was her special gift.
Now, as the night air hit her, the familiar process of her euphoria giving way to exhaustion and emptiness was already taking place.
In her ‘dressing room’ Fran started to remove her stage makeup, though her work for the evening wasn’t over yet. There was still the after-show ‘party’ to attend – a duty more than a pleasure but an important one for the morale of the serving men.
Fran had just removed the last of her makeup, but was still wearing the robe she had pulled on when she had taken off her stage dress, when she heard the major calling her name outside.
‘Yes, I’m here, Major,’ she called back.
The dressing room wasn’t very big, Fran’s precious jar of cold cream was still out on top of the makeshift ‘dressing table’ – an upturned barrel with a pillowcase over it, on which Fran had placed the photograph of Jack that travelled everywhere with her.
‘I’ve just been speaking to the camp’s commanding officer and he’s asked if you will have time to go round the san tent and have a word with the men there who weren’t well enough to see the show?’
It wasn’t an unfamiliar request and Fran responded automatically, ‘Of course.’
The major nodded and turned towards the exit to the tent, but as he did so, somehow or other he caught the edge of the photograph frame, sending it falling to the floor.
They both dived for it together, but the major got there first, apologising as he did so.
‘I’m sorry, clumsy of me.’
Fran’s heart was thudding heavily with a mixture of emotions she didn’t want to analyse, but which were dominated by her fierce need to reach out and hold Jack’s photograph protectively to her body. As she hadn’t done Jack himself. She couldn’t trust herself to speak, not even to make a polite response to the major’s comment, so instead she simply held
out her hand for Jack’s photograph, gripping her bottom lip between her teeth when she saw how badly her hand was trembling.
‘Nice-looking boy – a relative?’ the major asked casually as he handed the photograph back to her.
All she wanted was for him to go, so that she could smooth her fingers over the frame in reassurance, the only reassurance she could give Jack – and herself – now. And yet she also felt a very different and even more desperate need, which she had to struggle to suppress.
‘Yes, he’s my …’ You’d have thought after all the years – ten of them – of saying ‘my nephew’ that the lie would slip easily off her tongue but it never did and tonight, whether through tiredness or the pain of constantly having to deny him, and her own guilt and need, Fran heard herself saying proudly, ‘He’s my son. Or at least he was. He’s dead now. A bomb hit the farmhouse where he’d been evacuated. He was ten.’
The words, hard with pain, cut into her heart like shards of glass, the mere speaking of them emotionally lacerating her throat. It was just as well she couldn’t speak because she didn’t trust herself to say anything else, Francine admitted.
The photograph lay held between them. Tears blurred Fran’s vision.
‘It hurts like hell, doesn’t it?’ The major’s voice was unexpectedly kind and understanding.
Fran looked up at him.
‘I lost my wife and the child we were expecting in the first wave of bombs that dropped on London,’ he told her simply.
They looked at one another, and somehow Francine couldn’t – didn’t want to – look away. Like an invisible bridge stretching across a dangerous chasm the major’s gaze held her own.
A need to talk about her past, about Jack and herself and what had happened, overwhelmed her, coming out of nowhere like a fierce desert storm, unstoppable and overpowering.
Still looking at him, Francine began slowly, ‘Jack was born when I was sixteen.’
His steady regard was still fixed on her.
‘His father was a married man.’ Not a flicker of rejection or disgust. ‘Not that I knew that when I fell for him; plain daft, I was, fancying that we were meant for one another and that he loved me when all he wanted was a bit of fun.’
The bridge was holding steady and she was clinging to that calm uncritical gaze.
‘Of course, the truth came out when his wife got to know and came storming down to the theatre to warn me off. I hadn’t been the first and I won’t have been the last. Poor woman, I pity her being married to him.
‘I didn’t know then that there was to be a child, and when I realised I was that scared. My mother wasn’t well as it was, and my father was already dead. One of my sisters always reckoned that the shame and disgrace of what I’d done killed Mum.’
She was trembling inside with all the emotion, all the things she had never said and had kept inside herself for so long. It was as though once she’d started unburdening herself to him she couldn’t stop, like poison bursting from a painful wound.
She made an effort to check herself, pulling a face and saying in a shaky voice, ‘It isn’t a pretty story, is it?’
‘Life seldom is a pretty story. You paid a heavy price for being young, trusting and naïve.’
‘I dare say if Con hadn’t been married pressure would have been put on him to do the decent thing, but he was married, and when my sister Vi offered to have the baby, and bring him up as her own, it seemed the best thing to do, especially for Jack. Vi and her husband already had two children and Edwin, Vi’s husband, was doing well for himself. Vi said that she and Edwin could give Jack so much more than I could, and that if I kept him everyone would know that I wasn’t married and that he’d suffer because of that. I hated the thought of giving Jack up but I thought I was doing the right thing – the best thing for him. I loved him so much, you see, and I wanted to make it up to him, do something right for him after all that I’d done wrong, so I agreed that Vi should have him, and then I went to America to work, to have a fresh start. But of course you can’t walk away from something like that. I’d left a part of myself behind in Liverpool, literally as well as figuratively. You don’t realise until you have a child just what it means.’
For the first time the steady gaze flickered. Remorse filled her, but she sensed that he didn’t want her to say anything, so instead of apologising to him she continued unsteadily, ‘I never stopped missing Jack or loving him, and in the end it got too much for me. I’d been working in America but when I got the chance to go home to Liverpool I did. When I found out how unhappy Jack was, and how badly he was being treated by my sister and her husband, it broke my heart. I felt so guilty. I thought I’d given Jack the best chance of a future I could give him but instead … I’ll never forgive myself for what happened to him.’
The major took the photograph from her and stood it gently on her ‘dressing table’, before placing his free hand comfortingly on her shoulder.
‘I feel the much the same about my wife.’
It was her turn to hold the bridge for him now, her gaze every bit as steady for him as his had been for her.
‘She’d wanted to leave London, but she was so close to her time I was worried about her travelling. I begged her to wait until after the baby. They were both killed three days later when a bomb made a direct hit on the friend’s house where she was staying.’
Francine could hear the rawness in his voice and her heart ached for him.
‘Do you think it ever ends – the pain and the guilt, I mean?’ she asked him.
The major shook his head. ‘Perhaps if you want it to, but something tells me that you don’t.’
‘Do you?’ Fran challenged him.
This time he didn’t answer her.
THIRTEEN
Katie had been so worried about going dancing with Luke that it had pushed all her earlier concern about the letter right out of her thoughts.
For a start there was the problem of what she was going to wear, but Jean had obviously remembered what had happened before Christmas because she had announced at Saturday dinnertime, before Katie had had time to say anything, that she had been through her sister’s things and had put a dress on Katie’s bed that she had thought she might want to borrow for the dance.
The minute Katie had seen it she had fallen in love with it. Yellow silk and full-skirted, with a neat waist, the dress also had a matching shawl to cover the shoulders.
However, as soon as Katie had seen that the label inside the frock said Molyneux, she had guessed that the dress had come from the famous London designer of the same name and she had known that she could not possibly wear it.
‘Why on earth not?’ Jean had demanded. ‘That yellow will suit you perfectly.’
‘Your sister has some lovely clothes, but they are far too expensive for me,’ Katie had said honestly but Jean would have none of it.
‘Well, Fran left them here and said that we were to use them, and I reckon it would be a sin not to do so,’ she said firmly.
Of course, in the end Katie had given in, which was how she came to be standing beside Luke, who looked so smart and handsome in his uniform, feeling very self-conscious indeed now that she had handed her coat over to the cloakroom assistant.
‘Katie looks ever so nice, doesn’t she, Luke?’ Grace demanded.
‘Very,’ Luke agreed warmly.
‘Well, the dress really belongs to your aunt, the one that left her clothes behind when she joined ENSA. Your mother said it would be all right for me to borrow it since I haven’t got any dance frocks of my own.’
They were walking towards one of the tables now, and Luke and Katie had fallen behind Grace and Seb in the crush of people, so only Katie saw the surprised look Luke gave her in response to her comment.
‘I should have thought you would have a wardrobe full of dance dresses, with your dad being a band leader, and you working with him, as the twins told me that you did,’ Luke explained.
‘Well, yes, I did, but not fr
ont of house, as they say. Goodness, the Grafton is busy tonight, isn’t it?’
‘A bit different from the last time we were here,’ Luke agreed. ‘The Grafton holds close on a thousand couples,’ he told her, ‘and Saturday night is always popular, especially when they’ve got a good band on, like tonight. You’ll know of them, I expect.’
One of the country’s most popular bands, the Joe Dempsey Swing Band, was playing.
‘Yes,’ Katie agreed, ‘and they are very good. They’ve played at the Savoy and the Ritz.’
There was no sign now of the damage that had been caused in the bomb blast. The roof had naturally been repaired to protect the building, but the ceiling and the floor had both also been restored to their original state, and with the lights on and the ballroom filling up it was hard to equate it with the candlelit, bomb-damaged, almost empty room in which they had all danced so determinedly at Christmas, refusing to let Hitler’s bombers destroy their evening.
‘Come on, you two.’ Grace turned round to beckon them over to the table she and Seb had secured.
‘That colour really does suit you,’ Grace complimented Katie a few minutes later when the two men had gone to the bar.
‘Your dress is lovely,’ Katie returned the compliment generously.
Grace was wearing a beautifully elegant gown in green silk.
‘There’s a real story attached to this dress,’ Grace told her. ‘One day I’ll tell you all about it.’
‘Oh, please, tell me now,’ Katie begged her.
Grace looked self-conscious and shook her head, and then said, ‘Oh, go on then. Mum will have told you that I used to work at Lewis’s, in the Gown Salon, I expect.’
‘Yes,’ Katie confirmed.
‘Well I’d been invited to a Tennis Club dance, by my cousin Bella, who’s a bit of a snob.’ Grace gave a sigh. ‘Anyway, this girl who I worked with sneaked this frock out of the salon, and persuaded me to borrow it for the dance. I knew it was wrong, but I did.
