by Marie Joseph
Lee Willis levered himself slightly away from the wall and grinned at the glossy girl fluttering her eyelashes at him. Her head was swathed in a white turban knotted at the front, showing a glimpse of auburn hair. The collar of her white riding mackintosh was turned up, framing a face of chiselled beauty, in which the sharp boniness of her nose added rather than detracted from the classical perfection. They didn’t grow girls shiny as this one in the deep heart of Texas; of that he was certain sure.
‘Well now, ma’am. You might just be able to help me at that.’
Christine’s eyes stretched wide. Oh, my God, an American! Wearing Air Force uniform, too. A more than presentable one, with eyes as blue as cornflowers. Her voice dropped to an even huskier note.
‘You’re a long way from home. The Americans haven’t come into the war without someone telling me, have they?’
‘No, ma’am. I guess I jumped the gun.’ Lee’s eyes slid away to resume his unblinking scrutiny of the building across the road. ‘I’m looking for a girl I met a while back.’ He flipped a raindrop from the end of his nose. ‘I didn’t catch her name, but she’s small and kinda pretty with dark curly hair. She works in the place you just came out of, ma’am.’
With difficulty Christine kept the smile pinned to her face. She allowed her head to fall artlessly to one side. ‘Oh dear, that’s too bad. There’s no one in there now.’ Her expression changed to one of regret. ‘I’m Christine Duckworth.’ She pointed to the brass plate at one side of the main door. ‘That’s my father. If you’d like to … what I mean is … you’d be welcome …’
‘There she is! Thanks, ma’am, thanks a lot.’
‘Shooting across the street as if he’d been fired from a bloody catapult,’ Christine told herself crossly, then watched with narrowed eyes as the American grinned down into Sally Barnes’s astonished face.
The deaf girl who sat at her typewriter as if she was growing from it. Sally Barnes with that look about her as if she’d never been exposed, even to the wind.
Johnnie Barnes’s sister. Christine suddenly swung the red umbrella down to cover her face. Johnnie, no doubt at that moment on a troopship on his way overseas, leaving her with a disbelieving niggle of worry that at times almost stopped her heart with its implications.
Christine stepped from the kerb straight into a gutter awash with a torrent of water. ‘Oh, my God!’ she said furiously, before walking away.
‘So when we got a forty-eight hour pass before being drafted, I knew I had to get the hell out of the camp.’
Lee stood with Sally at the tram stop, grinning with a boyish delight. ‘I’ve done over fifty flying hours, passed my exams, and now I’m going guess where, to complete my flying training?’
‘No?’ Sally’s delight matched his own. ‘Not …?’
‘Yep. Back to real coffee, lights that come on when it’s dark outside.’ He touched her nose with the tip of his finger. ‘Not quite back home, but to Canada – the right side of the Atlantic for me, anyways up.’
‘If you haven’t died of pneumonia before you get there.’ Sally’s rueful glance took in his sodden appearance, from the cap oozing moisture to the trousers clinging black-wet to his legs. Her mouth set in lines of an almost motherly concern. ‘We can be at my house in less than half an hour, then you can take those wet things off. My brother’s things should fit you.’ Gently she pushed him into position in the queue, laughing at him over her shoulder. ‘Both my parents are away for the weekend so what I’ll find for lunch is anybody’s guess. Toasted spam sandwiches most likely.’
Obediently Lee followed her to stand meekly in line. His heart contracted with an emotion he didn’t recognize. This girl, this lovely laughing half-child, with the strange inflections in her voice, she was bloody unique. She just had to be. He climbed onto the tram and followed Sally to a seat at the front, rubbing his chin reflectively. Now take that shiny dame, that Christine Duckworth. If she’d made him a proposition like that he would have got the message right off.
‘Sure your parents won’t mind?’
‘Why should they?’ Sally’s blue-grey eyes brimmed with mischief. ‘But it would look better if I knew your name, I suppose.’
So solemnly they exchanged names and as solemnly shook hands.
‘Okay. Now we’re properly acquainted.’ Lee turned to stare out of the window with interest. The English countryside he had found as pretty as a charming water-colour picture. But the cities were another thing altogether.
‘Rows and rows of identical houses in sooty brick,’ he had written in his letters back home. ‘Shabby grimy shops with long queues snaking along grey pavements. Gaps where buildings once stood. It’s enough to scare the pants off you.’
‘We had a bomb down our road,’ Sally told him. ‘You remember I told you I’d just missed seeing my friend at the station? Well, his mother was killed, and the whole of his house destroyed.’
‘Holy Joe! But that’s terrible!’ Lee stretched out a big square hand and squeezed Sally’s knee. ‘That sure was tough luck. What will he do now, your friend? Has he got family to visit with when his furloughs come round?’
Sally’s expression was bleak. ‘I don’t think so. His mother was a kind of recluse, you know? And David … well, the Air Force was his career before the war started. He hasn’t got any relatives that I know of, and his friends are all in the Air Force. He’s very much alone.’
Lee saw the shadows on her face, and to distract her he wiggled his fingers at a small boy sitting in front, kneeling up on the seat and staring with eyes narrowed into suspicious slits.
‘Hi there!’ he grinned.
‘Are you on the films, mister?’ The boy’s voice was hoarse with excitement.
His mother turned round and smiled an apology. ‘He heard you talking in the queue. He thinks you might be Errol Flynn.’
Lee shook his head. ‘Nope. I never even got to meet Errol Flynn. He don’t have much truck with cowboys like me.’
The boy’s eyes stretched wide. ‘A real cowboy? Shooting Red Indians, mister?’
‘Nope. Now how can I shoot Red Indians when my grandma’s an old Indian squaw? I can’t shoot up my own family. That would be real mean, young guy, wouldn’t you say so?’
‘Did you mean it when you told the boy on the tram your grandma was an Indian squaw?’
They were in the garden, sitting side by side in deckchairs in the pale afternoon sun. Sally’s house had proved a revelation to Lee. The rooms were so small, the neighbours so close, and the garden, which he called a yard, no more than apron-sized. Now that the rain had stopped the air was fresh and clean-smelling. He had talked until his jaw ached, realizing for perhaps the first time how much of a loner he had become back at the camp. He had got used to the way Sally’s eyes never once left his face as he talked. She seemed able to read his slow Texan drawl easily, and he marvelled at her expertise.
‘Sure,’ he told her. ‘My momma’s momma was a real honest-to-goodness squaw, but I take after my pa. He was raised in Oklahoma. They’re a crazy pair. They work that old farm all by themselves now I’m gone, and out of the fifteen acres at least seven are cultivated. We have five black cows, one brown bull, three pigs, chickens, ducks and geese. The yard will be beautiful right now. There’s a dark red amaryllis right by the porch, and roses and honeysuckle. And I swear those old beans grow like crazy right before your eyes.’
‘It sounds wonderful.’ Sally breathed deeply and closed her eyes. She opened them again and caught him staring at her, the bright blue eyes taking in every detail of her face. Acutely embarrassed, she jumped up and began to walk back to the house, moving stiffly in case her bottom wiggled. He was like no man she had ever known. He was different, vital, lifting her out of herself, making her feel as if she herself was somehow different, prettier, more vivacious, able to make him laugh at almost everything she said. Just looking at him was exhilarating because he was so … so alive, with his big hands and his strong, broad body. And his hair –
cut so short, showing a strip of skin above his small ears. Bright gold hair like a baby’s, making her want to stretch out a hand and run her fingers through it.
When he came up behind her and touched her shoulder she blushed, and it seemed as if a tide of emotion flowed between them. She moved away, facing him from a safer distance, suddenly unsure of herself.
‘Is there anywhere round here we can go dancing, honey?’ He snapped his fingers. ‘I don’t have to leave till late. I sure would like to take you dancing, Sally.’
Her blush deepened so that it seemed her eyes sparkled with tears. ‘There’s always a dance on at the church hall down the road on Saturday evenings, but it wouldn’t be any good. I’ve never danced.’
Suddenly he leaned towards her, took her face between his hands and kissed her lightly on her mouth. ‘Then tonight you dance. With me. Okay?’
When they walked into the hall the trio on the dais were playing a spirited version of ‘Roll out the Barrel’. Lee grinned delightedly at the peanut-sized guy on the drums waving his arms about in a frenzy. He was sure he could feel the soles of his feet beginning to itch. He guessed that Sally could feel the floor vibrating, yet when he looked at her there was a frightened stillness about her face that touched some inner core of sensitivity inside him he hadn’t known about. With difficulty he suppressed the desire to pull her with him onto the floor to mingle with the dancers.
‘There’s a coupla seats over there.’ He smiled at her, and as she smiled back he saw that her short upper lip was glistening with perspiration.
‘Tell me some more about where you live,’ she said when they were seated close together on two little hard chairs. ‘The weather,’ she added feverishly. ‘Are the winters cold in Texas?’
The music stopped and two by two the couples left the floor, girls in flowered print dresses, soldiers, airmen, sailors, and the odd ones in civilian suits.
Lee laughed. ‘Okay. The weather. Well, the winters back home can be pretty mean. My parents have a big wood-burning stove in their bedroom, and in the winter they go to bed early and stay there till it starts to come light. There’s a sort of lake I haven’t told you about. It’s outside the front of the house and we have a boat. Ouchita she’s called. That’s the name of an Indian tribe, and most times there’s some mighty good fishing.’
Suddenly he got up and jerked Sally to her feet. The band was playing a tortured version of the song on everyone’s lips at the end of that second year of the war, a song about a married couple who spent a blissful leave in ‘Room Five Hundred and Four’. Feet were moving slowly to the rhythm, cheeks pressed to cheeks, and as Lee pulled Sally into his arms he pressed a hand tightly against her back, guiding her into the steps, willing her to follow. For a moment she seemed to relax against him, then she stumbled, and when he looked into her eyes the blind panic mirrored there made him catch his breath.
‘Please! I can’t do it! Lee! People are staring at me!’
Her lips were trembling, her grey eyes wide and pleading. She was so devastatingly pretty in her pink dress with its V-neckline edged with white frilling, that Lee gave into temptation, bent his head and kissed her. It was a tender, fleeting caress, meant to calm, but she pushed him from her with a violence that rocked him back on his heels before she rushed away through the black-out curtain over the door into the entrance hall.
He found her outside, leaning against the wall, staring into the pale darkness over the spare land to where a sloping row of terraced houses wound its way down to the canal. Reaching for her hand he felt it balled into a tight fist, the nails digging into her palm. Bewildered, he jiggled it up and down.
‘Sally? Honey? I didn’t mean no disrespect.’ His wide grin showed the gleam of strong white teeth. ‘C’mon now. We’ve been alone in your house for most of the day, so why should I want to …’ he searched for the right word ‘… ravish you on the dance floor, with Glen Miller in there doing his nut on the saxophone?’
To his relief he felt her fingers uncurl into his hand. ‘What’s wrong, honey?’ He made a move to draw her to him, then stopped as he felt her whole body stiffen in his grasp.
Sally gave a deep sigh. How could she ever explain to this carefree boy with the laughing eyes that back there in the warm darkness, the hand pressing her firmly against him, the mouth suddenly covering her own, had been for a terrifying moment David Turner’s hand and mouth, the politeness changed so that he became a stranger with burning face and groping tearing fingers?
‘I’m sorry, Lee.’ She smiled. ‘I was just being stupid. I’m stupid about a lot of things. I’m pretty damn foolish altogether, really.’ Then, surprising him, she kissed his face, softly at the side of his mouth. ‘Okay. Let’s go back inside and try again. Huh?’
And now, back in the hall, as they danced, Sally realized with a sudden upsurge of delight that she was feeling the music in her toes. She was anticipating Lee’s movements, matching her steps to his.
‘Do you come here often?’ he asked, his blue eyes twinkling. ‘You dance like Ginger Rogers.’
‘I taught Ginger Rogers,’ she said.
‘We must come again.’
‘When you come back.’
‘When I come back.’
He laid his cheek against hers and they moved as one person. When a small blonde girl stepped up onto the platform and sang in a throaty voice Lee joined in and was delighted when Sally whispered the words softly, following his lips as easily as she followed his steps.
‘The girls at work sing it,’ she explained, as Lee swung her round before they clapped for an encore.
And this time the fair-haired girl sang about a nightingale in Berkeley Square, but Lee was silent. He was seeing the London square as he had seen it on one of his last leaves, battered and torn by a landmine, with no tiny bird singing its heart out in the leafy splendour of the trees.
There was only a brief moment of panic when a soldier with freckles dotting his face like brown measles excused Sally, but they managed. She managed. With the pride of an indulgent father Lee watched her, and then it was the two of them dancing dreamily through the last waltz, and standing to attention for ‘God Save the King’ before going out into the blacked-out streets for the short walk home.
‘I ought to be going,’ Lee said later in the living room of Sally’s house. ‘But let’s sit in the firelight. I don’t want to leave you.’
‘Then don’t.’
‘You mean …?’ Lee held his breath. Her grey eyes were unbearably young. He pulled her down onto the rug by the fire, trembling as she made no protest.
‘You can sleep in John’s room, then tomorrow we’ll … I know what we’ll do. We’ll go out into the country if it’s fine. You can ride a bicycle, can’t you? There are two in the shed. I can show you a bluebell wood not far from here.’
‘I’ve never seen a bluebell wood.’
‘Well, tomorrow you will. They have long juicy stems and they smell of summer.’
‘You smell of summer.’
She smiled, then as he held her face still for his kiss he saw her eyes close and the long dark lashes fan out on her rounded cheeks. When he ran his finger-tips over her breasts she lay still, then when he began to unbutton her dress she sat up suddenly and he saw with surprise that her eyes were wet with tears.
‘That was the first time I’ve ever enjoyed being kissed,’ she assured him solemnly. ‘I never knew either that happiness could make you cry.’
‘I think it’s time you went up to bed.’ Lee smiled at her, tucking a wayward strand of curly hair behind her ear. He could feel his heart hammering and the ache of desire like a physical pain.
But a voice somewhere in his head was saying: ‘You can’t. It’s all set up for you, Lee Willis, but you can’t. An’ you know why? Because her eyes are too young, that’s goddamned why!’
With his head on John Barnes’s pillow and his arms stretched out on John Barnes’s dark green taffeta eiderdown, Lee found himself thinking for no good r
eason he could fathom about the Presbyterian church he attended back home.
No fancy doctrine there, just a plain wood pulpit and the stars and stripes flag in the corner, the preacher in his best Sunday suit, and the hymns set to a swinging rhythm. His momma in her go-to-Chapel hat, and his pa in a checked tuxedo, the love of a munificent God, and His wrath for the wrongdoers.
‘You’d have been mighty proud of your wandering boy tonight, momma.’ He whispered the words aloud, then his thoughts switched off abruptly as he heard the sirens wail, followed almost at once by the ponderous drone of planes.
Jumping out of bed he went over to the window and drew back the lined curtains, opened the casement window and leaned far out, his eyes searching the night sky. It was the roar, it seemed, of hundreds trundling over the rooftops like massive steamrollers, filling the air with a continuous pulsating thunder. He imagined the German aircrews hours back being briefed, saw the hurry and bustle on that far-off airfield with a gasoline lorry chugging around filling tanks. He imagined the men struggling into flying suits, strapping on their parachutes. He thought about the incongruity of it all.
Then he went across the landing into Sally’s room.
There was no air-raid warning at Morecambe. The Lancashire holiday resort slept beneath a peaceful sky. Bill Green, Glasgow born, bull-necked and ruddy of complexion, with two small sons built on the same sturdy lines and a wife he loved in his own fashion, woke from a deep sleep and turned his head to stare at the platinum-blonde head on his pillow.
The extent of Josie’s passion had delighted him at first, then dismayed him.
‘I love you, love you,’ she had moaned, nipping his flesh with her teeth, kissing him all over in a way his wife would have thought disgusting and abandoned. ‘Bill, oh Bill, my own sweet love,’ she had groaned, twisting her sweat-drenched head from side to side on the pillow. ‘Oh no, no, no, not yet! Please, oh please …’
Now she was sleeping, her face small and pinched beneath the pale halo of her candy-floss hair, her lips slightly open and a purr of a snore irritating and preventing him from going back to sleep again.
