The Grafton Girls

by Annie Groves

  In the well at the bottom of the steps a woman with brassy dyed hair was leaning against the brick wall, smoking.

  ‘’Ere,’ she called out to Myra as Myra made to pull open the door. ‘This is my pitch. Tek yourself off and go and find your own.’

  Ignoring her, Myra stepped into the bar.

  Unlike on the other occasions she had been here, this evening it was busy, the air thick with smoke, men crowding round the bar, whilst a couple of women of the same type and profession as the one she had seen outside were sitting at one of the rickety tables. As Myra surveyed the room, a man standing at the bar turned to spit on the floor, catching sight of her as he did and nudging the man standing next to him. Within seconds every man at the bar, or so it seemed to Myra, had stopped talking to turn and look at her, except for the man she had come here to find. He was continuing with his conversation as he kept his back to her. Because he didn’t want to acknowledge her? Myra smothered the anxiety she could feel uncurling deep inside her, and walked quickly over to him. He was wearing civvies instead of his uniform, and the man he was talking to was the same American he had met here once before. He gave her a hard unwelcoming look before nudging Nick and muttering something to him as he slipped him a package.

  ‘What…?’ Nick began tersely as he turned round and saw her, but Myra was determined to have her own way.

  She shook her head, stopping him, then told him, determinedly, ‘I need to talk to you, Nick -but not here.’

  ‘Hey, look, can’t you see that I’m in the middle of a business meeting here?’ was his response.

  Myra had no intention of giving in, though.

  ‘This is important, Nick. It’s about what happened the other Saturday before we went to London…remember?’ she warned him.

  The two men exchanged looks.

  ‘We can’t talk in here,’ Myra told Nick.

  ‘Go ahead, Nick,’ the other man said, still ignoring her. ‘I’ll be in touch – usual place.’

  How quickly he melted into the shadows, Myra noticed. One minute he was there, the next he had gone, or so it seemed.

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t been in touch with me before now,’ she said to Nick as he hurried her out of the club, and up the stone steps, ‘especially seeing as we’re engaged now. I’ve been thinking about that, Nick,’ she added, ‘about me and you being engaged.’

  ‘Well, don’t think about it,’ Nick snarled at her, ‘because there ain’t no point.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Myra demanded, put out. ‘And why are you out of uniform?’

  To her shock he turned on her, winding his fingers tightly into her hair.

  ‘Ouch,’ she protested. ‘You’re hurting me, Nick.’

  ‘Am I? Good. Maybe that will teach you not to come poking your nose in where it isn’t wanted.’

  Myra was outraged. ‘Not wanted! You weren’t saying anything about me not being wanted when you gave me this.’ She waggled her ring finger.

  ‘Did you tell anyone you were coming here?’ he demanded, ignoring her comment.

  ‘No. I would have told Diane, but she was acting all uppity about that Walter going and dying that I didn’t bother,’ Myra sniffed disparagingly. ‘Look, Nick, when you and me are married—’

  ‘Back off, will you?’ he told her.

  Back off? Myra stared at him. ‘You can’t tell me to back off,’ she started to bluster, ‘not with us getting married.’

  Nick started to laugh. ‘Me marry you? Are you crazy?’ he taunted her, looking contemptuously at her. ‘There’s no way I’d tie myself to a dumb broad like you. Broads like you come a dime a dozen in New York, and no way does anyone marry them.’

  Myra’s heartbeat slowed ominously and then started to beat far too fast at what she recognised in his look. Suddenly and very clearly she could see her chance of fulfilling her dream slipping away from her. Nick was her passport to that dream and to the future; without him…She forgot that she was already married and that she wasn’t in a position to marry him; in fact she forgot everything other than the agonising pain she could feel bursting into life inside her as destructively as ignited TNT. ‘But you said—’ she began.

  ‘Said, schpred,’ Nick shrugged dismissively, as he let go of her hair. ‘I ain’t the first guy to spin you a line to get you into bed and don’t try telling me I am. There’s no way a dame, who gives it out like you do, doesn’t know what it’s all about.’

  ‘You don’t mean that…You’ve…you’ve got to marry me,’ she burst out in her panic, ‘otherwise…’

  Nick stopped chewing his gum, his body suddenly completely motionless and emanating such an aura of menace that Myra started to shiver.

  ‘Otherwise what?’ he demanded without taking his gaze off her.

  She wasn’t going to be frightened by Nick, Myra told herself staunchly. If anyone was going to be afraid then it was him.

  ‘Diane’s already been asking me questions about what happened on Saturday. If you want me to keep on lying for you, Nick, then you are going to have to marry me. After all, it’s the only way you can be sure I won’t say anything, isn’t it? It’s against the law for a wife to testify against her husband.’

  Myra was still smiling when Nick closed his hand round her throat and started to squeeze it.

  ‘You stupid broad,’ he snarled savagely, ignoring her attempts to claw his hand away. ‘Do you really think I’d let you do that? And as for me marrying you,’ he turned his head to one side and spat out his gum, releasing his hold on her throat just enough for her to be able to breath properly. ‘There ain’t no way I could marry you, sugar. You see, I’ve already got a wife. Yeah, and she knows her place and how to keep her mouth shut when she’s told, which is a hell of a lot more than you do.’

  Nick was married! Myra didn’t want to believe it but she could see that he was telling the truth. The bitterness of her disappointment boiled up inside her like raw acid eating into her pride and her self-control.

  ‘So I guess that leaves only one way for me to shut you up now, doesn’t it, sweetness?’

  Nick’s voice had become as softly caressing as the fingers he was stroking down her bare throat, but Myra wasn’t deceived. She started to shiver violently with sick fear, trying to push him away, but he was far too strong for her.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he told her silkily. ‘I ain’t letting go.’

  ‘If you hurt me then that will get you into even more trouble,’ Myra warned him desperately.

  Nick laughed. ‘No way! I’ll be out of the country before they find you, sugar. It’s all arranged. In fact, Carlo is waiting for me a couple of streets away right now.’

  Myra looked at him, only now realising the significance of his being in civvies, and then remembering the man he had been with when she had walked into the bar, and the package she had seen exchanging hands.

  ‘No, Nick, please,’ she begged him. She could hear the sound of people leaving the bar and she prayed that they would look up the alleyway and see them.

  ‘You’ll be just another dame who got too friendly with the wrong guy,’ he told her, smiling. ‘A good dame gone bad who gets what she deserves…’

  He was squeezing her neck so tightly that she couldn’t breath. She tried desperately to claw at his hands but he kept on squeezing, and then suddenly he banged her head back against the wall so hard that the last of her breath escaped from her lungs in a tiny sigh like a punctured tyre. He let her go, watching as she slid down the wall, leaving a thin smear of sticky blood behind her as she did so, before he turned and walked away.

  * * *

  ‘Well, it isn’t exactly the Ritz.’

  Diane looked at Lee across the small room with its sloping eaves.

  Down below them was the taproom of the pub and the conversation from it drifted upwards through the floorboards in a muted hum of male voices. Just off the bedroom was an even smaller room containing a wash basin, whilst the lavatory was along the corridor and down a flig
ht of stairs. The bed itself looked comfortable enough, though: high, and so wide it almost filled the room, its patchwork quilt faded and soft to the touch.

  ‘We’ve got everything we need here,’ she answered him quietly, and was rewarded with a fierce glow of passion illuminating his gaze at her.

  ‘A room, a bed and thou,’ he misquoted ruefully. ‘Have you any idea just how special you are, Di?’

  ‘I’m no more special than any other girl,’ she denied.

  He shook his head. ‘You do not begin to know just how different you are. For a start, you haven’t complained yet about the room not having a closet, or a bathroom, you haven’t told me that you need to go visit a beauty parlour before you can do anything else, nor have you suggested that it would have been better if I’d booked two rooms, so that you’d be spared the discomfort of having to share a room, never mind a bed, with a sweaty, uncouth soldier. And that’s just for starters.’

  ‘Oh, Lee.’ Instinctively she went to him, leaning her head against his chest and putting her hand on his arm, wanting to comfort him.

  ‘Are you really sure you don’t mind about this place?’ he pressed her. ‘It seemed kinda romantic when I planned it, but I guess I might as well have offered you a night in a hayrick,’ he grimaced, as he looked up at the thatched roof.

  ‘This is romantic,’ Diane assured him. ‘You’re here and so am I. We’re alone, with a bed. What could be more romantic than that?’

  ‘The kind of hotel that can provide a large steak, a bottle of good red, a sprung dance floor and a decent dance band?’ he suggested.

  ‘Trimmings,’ Diane scoffed. ‘And you’d probably have found that someone you knew was staying in the same hotel, and that they wanted you to join them, and that—’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Lee grinned, wrapping his arms around her. ‘You win. We’re in the right place; the best place; the only place we could possibly want to be…’

  As he spoke he started to kiss her, slow lazy kisses strung out along her jaw and then her throat as he walked her backwards towards the bed until she could feel it behind her.

  ‘God, but I want you,’ he groaned as he stopped playing and cupped her face, kissing her fiercely and possessively.

  This was what she had wanted and yearned for, Diane told herself as she closed her eyes and clung to him, kissing him back. As she leaned into him she could feel the thick ridge of his erection and her body quivered. Not with the nervous apprehension with which it had quivered when she had first permitted this intimacy with Kit, but rather with eagerness and impatience.

  Lee was sliding his hands inside her jacket, caressing her body over the top of her blouse. She could feel the callused heat of his palms against her breasts through her clothes. Her nipples tightened with the tiny quivers of sensation sensitising them, that same sensation miraculously mirrored deep down inside her body, making her want to melt into him and press herself up against him just as hard and close as she could. She arched her neck, inviting the caress of his kisses, wanting to moan out her pleasure but careful of the reality of the bar downstairs. Would the bed squeak like the one she and Kit had once had, and which had made them collapse with laughter after their third attempt to defeat its giveaway springs. In the end they had put the eiderdown down on the floor along with the pillows, and made love there rather than risk the ribald comments they knew they would have to face if they went ahead in the bed. Kit swore that one of his friends had put the landlord up to giving them that particular room.

  This bed was blissfully silent, though, she acknowledged when Lee lowered her back onto it and she sank into its delicious softness.

  He undressed her slowly and tenderly, kissing her in all the right ways and places, not hurrying things, but at the same time not drawing them out too long either. She liked the way he moved so efficiently and naturally, familiar enough with female clothes not to fumble, but not so used to the female form that he didn’t register a flattering appreciation at each freshly revealed bit of her.

  She liked it even more that he undressed himself when she wanted him to do so, whilst encouraging her to make as free with his body as she wished.

  He was more heavily built than Kit, but then of course he was older, with more flesh padding his muscles, and more body hair, but she liked it that he was different, she told herself. It meant that she wouldn’t be thinking about Kit whilst she was with him.

  Was her own high-breasted, narrow-waisted, pale-skinned body different from that of his wife? Was he looking at her full, creamy-fleshed breasts with their dark nipples and imagining another woman’s breasts? Diane pushed away her disturbing thoughts. They had no place here in this bed with them, just as those other partners had no place here. Here in this room, this bed, it was just them and the way they felt about one another; the way Lee made her feel when he lay next to her and cupped her breasts in his hands, looking down at them as though he thought he was observing a small miracle; the way she felt about the fact that they were sharing an intimacy that once she had thought belonged and would always belong exclusively to Kit.

  A huge lump suddenly and inexplicably formed in her throat. How had she managed to travel so far down this road, which prior to the war would have been one she would never have imagined would have any place in her life?

  Kit had wept the first time they had made love. For the men who had not come back with him, for the beauty of her body and for the perfection of their love, he had told her. And she had wept too, just listening to him.

  Kit. Out of nowhere the pain came and slammed into her, taking her breath, numbing her body and then ripping it apart with fresh pain.

  Lee was leaning forward to kiss her breasts. Abruptly she wriggled away and then sat up.

  ‘I can’t,’ she told him bleakly, filled with too much guilt to be able to look directly at him. ‘I can’t do it, Lee. I’m sorry. Please take me back.’

  For a moment she thought he was going to argue or, even worse, actually try to force her. She held her breath and his searching gaze, and then exhaled as he gave a brusque nod.

  Ten minutes later they were dressed and ready to leave.

  ‘Which of them was it?’ he asked her heavily, breaking the silence. ‘My wife, or your ex?’

  ‘It was Kit,’ Diane admitted, uncomfortably aware that, having come this far, the existence of Lee’s wife would not have been enough to stop her. Facing up to the truth about oneself with such brutal honesty wasn’t easy, but she owed Lee that much at least.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you but I’ve had the offer of a transfer. I guess now I’ll accept it,’ he informed her.

  Tears stung her eyes. Even now, a part of her wanted to turn back and tell him that she had changed her mind. The question she had to ask herself, though, was how was she going to feel when all this was over and she looked back? Which would she regret most – having an affair with him or not having one?

  Only time could give her the answer to that, she told herself as Lee held open the door for her.

  ‘’Ere, Cedric, hang on a sec’

  The two men had been the last to leave the bar, and now one of them turned into the alleyway, drunkenly intent on taking advantage of the blackout to relieve himself. He staggered forward and then recoiled as he almost stumbled over Myra’s body.

  ‘Ruddy hell, Cedric, bring that ruddy torch, will yer?’ he called out shakily. ‘There’s summat here.’

  His companion shone the torch down the alleyway onto Myra.

  ‘’Ere, I don’t like this. Let’s scarper.’

  ‘We can’t do that. She’s still alive – look, she’s breathing. You wait here, I’ll go and get help,’ Cedric, abruptly sobering up, told his companion.

  ‘I can’t see no breathing. She looks like she’s a goner to me. Why don’t we—’

  ‘Stay here,’ Cedric repeated.

  Half an hour later, when the ambulance arrived, summoned by the ARP unit Cedric had alerted, one of the ambulance crew gave a low shocked whistle.<
br />
  ‘She might be breathing now,’ he said, ‘but from the looks of her it’s the morgue we’ll be taking her to. Someone’s really laid into her, and no mistake.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  ‘They’ll be putting the clocks back in another couple of weeks. I’m not looking forward to them dark nights with this blackout still going on, I can tell you.’

  Diane smiled sympathetically as she listened to her landlady.

  ‘Going down the hospital later on to see Myra, are you?’ Mrs Lawson asked.

  ‘I expect so.’

  Over the last few weeks, following on from the shocking news that Myra had been found up a back alley behind a seedy bar, unconscious and so badly beaten up that initially the doctors hadn’t thought she would live, they had been taking it in turns to visit Myra as often as they could.