by Annie Groves
‘I wish your mum was still living in Liverpool,’ she told him tenderly. ‘I would have loved to have met her and heard all about when you were a little boy, and about all the little girls who wanted to marry you when they grew up,’ she teased him, hoping to lighten the atmosphere between them, but instead, she could feel him tensing again.
He removed his hand from hers, withdrawing from her physically and emotionally, Sam recognised. Why?
‘That’s daft talk,’ he told her. ‘What’s past is past. It’s us that matter now, Sam. Our future together, us.’
He obviously didn’t want to talk about either his childhood or his family.
‘And talking of us,’ he added in a deeper and far more loving voice, ‘how about I do what I thought we’d come here to the pictures to do in the first place?’
‘Watch the film, you mean?’ Sam enquired, mock innocently.
‘You can watch the film if you want, but what I want to do is this,’ was Johnny’s response as he reached for her, drawing her back into his arms and bending his head to kiss her.
Sam still wasn’t entirely used to the heavenly physical intimacy that being a girlfriend brought, not yet, but she was learning fast!
‘Johnny, why don’t we go back to your billet?’ she whispered against his lips, surprising herself with her own daring. ‘We could be alone there and—’
‘Yes, and we both know what would happen if we were, and that’s exactly why we can’t,’ he stopped her firmly.
Sam fiddled with the button on his coat. ‘Why can’t we? Other couples do.’
And it would mean that they were properly promised to one another, she told herself silently, and then surely those odd niggling little fears she had when he distanced himself from her wouldn’t be there any more.
‘There’s a war on, after all,’ she reminded him, ‘and if anything should happen …’ she gave a tense shiver at the reality of her own words. ‘I don’t want to lose you, Johnny, and I don’t want to die without knowing what it’s like to lie in your arms, knowing that I’m completely yours.’
She could feel his chest lift as he made a small choking sound and then she was being crushed in his arms as he kissed her very hard and for a very long time. Somehow or other his hand was cupping her breast and hers lay against his thigh where the evidence of his desire for her beneath her fingers made her heart thud with excited longing. When he finally released her she had lost all track of what was happening on the screen but she didn’t care one bit.
‘We could go back now,’ she whispered eagerly.
‘Don’t tempt me,’ he answered her thickly.
He was still touching her face, stroking her skin and then playing with the small feathery fronds of her hair where it had grown to curling round her ears, curling them instead around his finger.
‘Why not, when I want to tempt you, Johnny, when I want you so very much?’
A sudden surge of music warned Sam that the film had finished. Soon the cinema lights would be going on, and the National Anthem would be playing and then there would be no privacy for them any more. She wanted desperately to understand why Johnny was blowing so hot and cold with her, but somehow she felt unable to ask him, and now with the film ending it was too late.
Sam’s passionate nature meant that she had given herself over heart and mind to Johnny, and she wanted to give herself over to him with her body as well. Others might say that it was a sign of respect for her that he was holding back, but somehow all she could feel was rejected.
‘You’re quiet,’ he commented later, when they had left the cinema and queued up to buy a bag of chips to share as Johnny walked her to her bus stop. ‘What’s up?’
Here was her chance to tell him how confused she had felt earlier in the evening – and hurt as well – but somehow instead she heard herself voicing another fear as she admitted, ‘I hate it when I see you going down into a bomb shaft.’
‘It’s my job.’
‘Yes, I know.’ She gave a small shiver. ‘You’re so brave, Johnny. I couldn’t do it. Just the thought of being underground scares me silly.’
He gave her a reassuring hug. ‘I’d like to punch that brother of yours on the nose for what he did to you.’
Now thankfully he was her loving protective Johnny again.
A bus was coming down the road towards them, the blue glow of its blackout lights momentarily casting an eerie faint blue glow over their faces.
‘He didn’t mean any harm,’ Sam assured him. ‘We were always falling out as children, but he is my brother, after all, and I love him dearly.’
She bit her bottom lip anxiously as she realised what she had said. She’d really gone and put her foot in it now. She hadn’t deliberately mentioned how close she and Russ were as a way of encouraging Johnny to talk to her about his sister and why he didn’t want them to meet, but she could tell from Johnny’s silence that he was angry with her again.
She tried to snuggle up to him but instead he nodded in the direction of the bus stop several yards away, where half a dozen people were already queuing and told her briskly, ‘Your bus is due any minute. We’d better go and get in the queue. You won’t want to miss it.’
‘Yes, Mrs Beddows, I’ll tell the doctor that you’ve rung and that you want him to call round and see your husband,’ Sally said firmly into the telephone receiver, before replacing it and then carefully checking the message she had written down in the notebook the doctor had given her, showing her how he wanted the caller’s name, telephone number if they had a telephone, and their message recorded, along with the time of their call.
Although she wasn’t fully prepared to admit it, Sally was rather enjoying her new role and the confidence it was giving her. Or at least she was when she managed to stop worrying about those elusive feelings and yearnings that sometimes managed to push through the barriers she had erected against them, reminding her of what it had felt like to play devil’s footsteps, as a little girl, when no matter how quickly you turned you could never catch sight of the ‘thing’ you knew was stalking you. Most of the time it was easy to convince herself that those feelings and yearnings didn’t exist, that she, newly widowed, had no right to have them for anyone, least of all someone like the doctor.
People treated you with proper respect when they realised you were a doctor’s receptionist. Sally thought she might ask Doris if her Frank could come round and carry down a little table from upstairs so that she could put her notebook on it and a chair behind it for when she needed to record messages.
Christmas would be on them before they knew it. People were talking about it when they went shopping, worrying about what might be available and what would not. Sally, with her five guineas a week coming in, had put in an early order with Molly’s aunt in Nantwich for a nice plump farm-reared goose for Christmas dinner, and the weight of the doctor’s name on those accounts he had opened at the local shops in Wavertree had meant that she had been able to get in a few precious extras – all legal and proper, mind – none of that black market stuff, not after what had happened to Tommy.
She looked at her watch. Just gone midday. The doctor had said he would be coming home for his dinner today because he had patients to see in the afternoon. She had managed to get a nice bit of fish, which she had poached for him in some of the extra milk allowance she got for the boys. Her own mother may not have been much of a cook but Doris was, and Sally had not been too proud to learn from her.
She started to sing softly to herself as she ran up the stairs to check on the boys. Tommy was coming out with all sorts of big words now, and Harry had grown a full inch since she had last measured him not so long ago. She’d have to start letting down his little romper suits and knit them both some new pairs of mittens.
She’d have to get those old medicine bottles that patients had brought back washed out an’ all, now that the doctor had checked through them.
She was still singing a few minutes later as she hurried back downstairs to
check on the doctor’s dinner, or ‘lunch’, as he called it, having reassured herself that the boys were all right, oblivious to the fact that the doctor had returned and was standing in the open doorway to his office until she was almost in the hall.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Doctor,’ she began. ‘I didn’t know you’d come in.’
‘There’s no need to stop singing on my account, Sally. In fact I hope that you don’t.’
He’d gone back into his office before Sally had time to react to what he had said and the fact that he had called her Sally and not Mrs Walker, and not for the first time!
She was acutely conscious of that, though, half an hour later when she knocked on the now closed door, waiting for him to call out ‘Come in’ before she opened it.
‘I just came to tell you that your dinner … I mean your lunch is ready, Doctor.’
This was the first time he’d come back at dinnertime to eat and Sally had taken great care to polish the mahogany dining table before laying it.
‘I’ll be through in a minute,’ he told her.
Sally hurried back to the kitchen, quickly serving the boys their own fish pie dinner, before carefully placing the doctor’s lunch on the plates she had already warmed, ready to take through to the dining room.
When he opened the kitchen door, and commented cheerfully to the boys, ‘Hello, you two. Started without me, have you?’ Sally was so taken aback she could only stare at him before starting to stammer defensively, ‘I’ve laid out the table in the dining room for you to have your lunch there.’
He was frowning now, the smile he had given the boys gone. ‘I see,’ he said curtly, making Sally feel that she had offended him.
‘I thought that was what you would want,’ she told him.
‘What I would want? What would you know or care about what I wanted?’
Sally stared at him. ‘I … it wouldn’t be right, you having to eat here in the kitchen with us… People would think I was taking advantage, and getting above meself …’
‘People would think …?’
Was that anger or contempt she could hear in his voice, or was it a bit of both? Sally didn’t know and she certainly couldn’t ask him.
Without waiting for her to make any response he turned on his heel and strode out of the kitchen, leaving her on her own to answer Tommy’s accusatory, ‘Mummy make my doctor cross.’
‘My, Sally, you must have worked like a regular Trojan to get this place looking so spick and span.’
Sally forced herself to smile back at Doris. The doctor’s anger towards her at dinnertime still rankled and had destroyed her sunny mood.
‘Well, it’s thanks to you more than anyone else that I know how a house should be kept, Doris.’ Sally told her truthfully. ‘Been more like a mother to me than my own, you have, teaching me what’s what after I had Tommy. Couldn’t cook so much as a meat and tatty pie then, I couldn’t.’
‘Don’t give me all the credit, Sally. You’re a good hard worker and a willing learner, and me not having a daughter, and our Frank being married to June in them early days, and the two of us not getting on – not like me and Molly do – well, you gave me back as much as I gave you.’
‘I’ll put the kettle on and make us both a cup of tea,’ Sally offered.
Doris had called round just after the doctor had gone out on some calls, and so Sally had offered to show her around her new quarters.
‘Smells lovely of lavender polish. You were lucky to get your hands on some of that. I haven’t seen any since they brought in rationing.’
‘I found a load of stuff right at the back of one of the cupboards. I reckon someone must have put it there and then gone and moved and forgot about it. I’d give you a tin, Doris, only properly speaking it belongs to the doctor. I could ask him if he minds, perhaps,’ she offered, seeing the look of longing on Doris’s face. The smell of the polish had lifted her own spirits this morning when she had been polishing the heavily carved wooden banister rail. ‘Funny how something as simple as a tin of polish can cheer you up, when you think we never used to give it a thought.’
‘That’s what war does for you,’ Doris told her. ‘Boys settled in all right, have they? What is it, Sally? What’s wrong?’ Doris pressed when Sally didn’t reply.
Sally gave a small sigh, then told her grimly, ‘They’ve settled in fine, especially Tommy, and that’s what I’m worried about really. He’s getting old enough now to recognise how much bigger this house is and all the things that go with that, and I don’t want him getting too used to it, and having ideas above his station, Doris. His dad and me could never have afforded to be living somewhere like this. When I was at the grocer’s yesterday I heard him telling another kiddie as bold as you please, “We live at my doctor’s house now.”’
Doris laughed. ‘I shouldn’t worry about it, Sally. You’ve got your feet on the ground firmly enough, and Tommy and Harry will look to you to tell them what’s what.’
Sally tried to look convinced as she made the tea and poured her old neighbour a cup.
‘China cups,’ Doris sighed approvingly. ‘My old matron when I was first training always used to say that you should drink tea out of a china cup and water out of a glass.’
‘Doctor said to use them. Me own are still packed up, just in case we end up having to find somewhere else. I don’t really like taking chances. You never know what might happen. It’s all very well you and Molly saying that it’s the best thing that could have happened to me, the doctor giving me this job, but if it doesn’t work out and we have to leave then I’m going to be in a real old mess.’
‘Give over, Sally, anyone can see what a difference you’ve made to this place. It will do the doctor no end of good having you and the boys around. I don’t hold with a man like the doctor living on his own. It’s not healthy for someone in his kind of work. He needs to come home to a decent meal and a properly aired bed. You’re a good lass, Sally, and a strong one too, but don’t you go being too hard on yourself. I’d better go, I promised Molly I’d call round. Oh, I almost forgot, Frank said to tell you that he’d seen a chap hanging round your old house the other night.’
Sally was glad she had her back to her so that Doris couldn’t see her expression.
‘It was too dark for him to get a proper look at him and he went off when he saw our Frank. If it’s that chap that was making a nuisance of himself …’
‘It won’t be him. It was probably someone thinking of renting the house and having a look at it,’ Sally told her, but she knew that the man Frank had seen would have been the debt collector. She also knew why he had been looking for her, and it wasn’t because of the money she owed to the Boss, after all, as he had told her himself that Sally could have a bit of a break from making any payments if she wanted to do so. No, what he had gone round to the house for had been to try to ‘persuade’ her to give in to him and let him into her bed. Sally gave a shudder of revulsion. Here under the doctor’s roof, no matter what private doubts she might have about being here, she was safe from him in that respect. She knew Sid’s type. They feared anything to do with ‘authority’ and kept away from it.
There was still the matter of the money she owed, though. Only last night she had been looking at the little book in which she had meticulously kept a record of the amount Ronnie had borrowed and what she had paid back. It seemed so unfair that the interest she was forced to pay meant that she had already repaid the full amount twice over but still owed more now than Ronnie had originally borrowed. At least now, with what the doctor was paying her, she could afford to pay back more. Not through Sid, though. No. She’d rather save up the whole lot and pay it back in one go, so that she could get the whole thing over and done with for ever. What a weight off her shoulders that would be.
‘Is everything all right, Sam?’ Hazel asked, falling into step beside Sam as they left the parade ground before breakfast. It still wasn’t quite light, and whilst the nip in the wind blowing off the sea might have b
rought roses to Sam’s cheeks, it had also left her fingers tingling with cold. ‘Only you’re very quiet,’ Hazel continued. ‘You haven’t had words with that chap of yours or something, have you?’
Hazel’s sympathy brought a quick surge of tears to Sam’s eyes, which she hurriedly blinked away.
‘Not words, no.’
‘But something’s been said that’s upset you?’ Hazel pressed her as they crossed the road to walk back to the house.
‘Johnny didn’t mean to upset me, I know that,’ Sam defended him. ‘It’s just that we had a few words over his sister. She’s living right here in Liverpool but when I said that I’d like to meet her …’ she gave a small shake of her head, ‘well, I could tell that he didn’t want me to. I suppose I’m being silly.’
‘You aren’t being silly at all,’ Hazel told her. ‘And if you want my opinion, Sam, there’s only one reason why a chap doesn’t want to introduce a girl to his family and that’s because they know things about him he doesn’t want her to know.’
Sam was taken aback. ‘Things? What kind of things?’
‘Things like him having a different girl for every day of the week – or worse!’
‘That’s impossible,’ Sam told her. ‘I’d know if Johnny was seeing anyone else.’
‘That’s what I thought about my ex,’ Hazel said grimly. ‘Look, Sam,’ she added more gently, ‘if he hasn’t got something to hide then why doesn’t he want you to meet his sister? It doesn’t make sense. There’s something fishy going on, and you must think so yourself, otherwise you wouldn’t be feeling so glum.’
Did she? Surely not. She loved Johnny and she trusted him. But his way of blowing hot and then cold was confusing her and leaving her feeling unhappy.
‘I thought they might just have fallen out,’ she told Hazel.
‘Then why didn’t he say so?’
They had stopped walking as they talked, and now Sam realised that the other girls were well ahead of them.
