by Annie Groves
‘Kit!’
‘Oh God, Di, I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you…’
He had sprung up from the armchair when she opened the door and now she was in his arms and he was kissing her, fiercely, possessively, passionately, in all the ways she had so long remembered and longed for, just as though nothing had happened. No, not as though nothing had happened, Diane recognised dizzily as she tried to focus rationally through the delirious pleasure of being back in his arms.
She had changed and so had he. He even felt different: harder, thinner, his face careworn.
‘My darling, darling girl, I have missed you so much. Please say that it is not too late for us. I’ve been badgering your poor parents for your address and it was only when your father let slip that you were coming home next weekend and I threatened to camp out on their doorstep that he finally relented and told me where you were.’
Her father was a sly old fox, Diane decided giddily, and that ‘slip’ had been no accident, she suspected.
‘Di, say something,’ he demanded emotionally.
‘How can I when you won’t stop kissing me?’ Diane protested.
‘You mean when I can’t stop kissing you,’ Kit corrected her. ‘You don’t know how much I’ve dreamed of your kisses, Di, how much I’ve longed for them and for you. Tell me it isn’t too late for us.’
He had released her now, and Diane stepped back from him.
‘I…I don’t know,’ she told him honestly.
The look on his face echoed the pain in her own heart.
‘I’ve got to be honest, Kit. It wouldn’t be right if I wasn’t.’
‘But you still love me,’ he insisted. ‘You wouldn’t have kissed me like that if you didn’t.’
‘Yes, but…but I’m not sure I believe any more that love on its own is enough. There has to be…trust…and…’ She shook her head. ‘It hurt me so badly when you broke our engagement without any kind of explanation or…or anything, Kit. And now you’re here, telling me…saying…’
‘You’re right,’ he agreed with unfamiliar humility. ‘I’m rushing things and jumping out mid-flight without a parachute, and expecting you to jump with me. That’s because I’m so eager to get back down to earth and be with you, my darling. As for what I did, I can explain if you will listen.’
‘Of course I’ll listen.’ She was forcing herself to smile but inwardly Diane was steeling herself for what she felt sure was to come. Even after her own relationship with Lee it still hurt unbearably to think of Kit rejecting her for someone else, even if now he had decided that that person no longer mattered and he wanted her back. Was that wanting her back enough to build a life together on, or would she always be worrying that ultimately there might come another time when he wanted to break his vows to her and go AWOL for a while?
‘It was that last mission we flew before the prof bought it,’ Kit told her, referring to a member of the squadron who the others had nicknamed ‘the Prof because of his love for crossword puzzles. ‘You remember the one?’
‘Yes.’ Diane did remember it, but she didn’t know why Kit was asking her if she did with almost painful intensity.
‘Well, the thing is, that it wasn’t a Luftwaffe plane that shot him down, it was one of our own, one of the squadron,’ he stressed.
Diane felt that she needed to sit down. ‘But that’s not possible,’ she protested. ‘That couldn’t happen.’
Kit grimaced. ‘That’s the official line but the reality is that we all know that it can happen all too bloody easily, even if we never talk about it. When you’re up there caught up in a dogfight, with the sun shining right down on you and planes everywhere, you see someone coming up behind you and your immediate reaction is to go into the attack. The truth is that it could have happened to any one of us, and in the confusion who’s to know? It just so happened that I was behind the Prof and I saw the whole thing.’ His voice had dropped and he wiped his hand over his eyes.
Diane’s heart ached for him and her immediate instinct was to go to him and hold him, but she sensed that he needed to cleanse what was obviously a festering wound within himself fully, no matter how painful that process, and that she would not be helping him if she rushed in with offers of comfort to hide away what needed to be removed.
‘None of the others in the squadron saw what happened, and…nothing was said when we got back.’
Diane bit her lip. She knew that Kit’s deliberate avoidance of naming the pilot responsible for shooting down his own comrade was to protect that pilot.
‘I couldn’t say anything myself, but…hell, Di, you know how it is. We were all filing our reports, and the report was that the Prof had been shot down in combat. I had to go along with that, but I also had to fly in the same squadron as the chap who had shot him down. I began to think that there’d be another accident but this time it would be me. I couldn’t think about anything else. Apart from the poor old Prof. He shouldn’t have died. He should still have been alive. I kept thinking that he might do it again and that I should say something if only to protect the rest of the squadron, but then I kept thinking about him and how it was a mistake anyone could make. I didn’t know what to do. It ate into me. I started thinking that the reason I’d seen it was because I was going to be next. Every time I went up I believed I wasn’t going to be coming back. I kept thinking about you and how it was unfair of me to keep you tied to me when I was a goner – a dead man – and so I did what I thought was best for you. I gave you your freedom. I couldn’t tell you the truth, you know that. I couldn’t.’
Yes, she knew that he could not have betrayed a fellow squadron member by revealing the truth, and she knew too that she did understand how he must have felt, how tortured and afraid and how very alone.
‘I knew you wouldn’t accept that I wanted to break our engagement without a reason so I…I started acting like the fool I would have had to have been to have thought any other girl could come anywhere near rivalling you.’
‘I understand what you’re saying,’ Diane told him. Of course she did. The loyalty between members of a squadron was intense and sacrosanct. It had to be because their lives depended on one another. So when one of them was responsible for the death of another, then the clash of loyalties had to be unendurable. ‘But what’s changed?’ she asked. ‘Why are you telling me now what you couldn’t tell me before?’
‘The pilot concerned came forward and spilled the beans. Told the Wing Co that he couldn’t go on any longer carrying the guilt,’ he told her simply. ‘He’s been discharged – full honours. There’s no point in muck-raking and, poor sod, he’s punished himself enough without anyone else doing it for him.
‘His going brought me to my senses and made me see what had happened for what it was – an accident, not a warning that I was going to be next. All I want now is to get back to where I was with you, Di. That and for us to get married as soon as it can be arranged. No more being sensible and waiting until the war is over. I’ve spent too many days and hours without you now not to want to cherish every single minute we can spend together and to want us to share them as man and wife. If you’ll have me back, that is?’
Diane took a deep breath. ‘There’s been someone else,’ she told him, striving to keep her voice light. ‘He…I…He is married and so, because of that and because…because I couldn’t bring myself to share with him what somehow I still felt belonged only to you, we didn’t go through with it. But I planned to, Kit, and I wanted to,’ she told him with painful honesty. ‘And I’d be lying if I said anything else. Kit,’ she protested as he crossed the space between them and took hold of her, wrapping his arms around her.
‘Now I’ll tell you something,’ he said hoarsely. ‘All those other girls – it was all just a great big sham, Di, a lot of talk and noise in public but nothing in private, because, like you, I just couldn’t, not with anyone who wasn’t you. Please tell me you’ll take me back.’
For her answer Diane laced her hands either side of his face and held it ten
derly whilst she raised herself up on her tiptoes and kissed him.
For a few seconds he let her, and then he took the control from her, holding her and kissing her with fiercely thrilling sweetness that melted her bones and dissolved all of her pain.
‘My landlady will be back in a few minutes,’ she warned him breathlessly, half an hour later.
‘Good. She can be the first to congratulate me on our re-engagement,’ he teased her. ‘Which reminds me. Your mother said to tell you that she’s had a word with the vicar and he’s said he’ll have a talk with us on Sunday about a date for the wedding.’
‘A date for the wedding. Is that all? I thought she’d have had the wedding dress, the cake and the whole thing sorted out by now,’ Diane laughed.
As he bent his head to kiss her, Kit told her softly, ‘She has.’
EPILOGUE
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Jess marvelled, easing off her shoes and wriggling her toes in front of Ruthie’s mother’s parlour fire. ‘Who’d have thought that first time me and Ruthie met up wi’ you at the Grafton, Diane, that we’d all be here now wi’ all three of us getting wed before Christmas?’
‘It just goes to prove that you never can know what’s round the corner,’ Diane agreed. ‘Especially in wartime. You’ll be the first of us to be married, Ruthie.’
With only a week to go before Ruthie and Glen’s marriage, the three girls had been busy all day checking all the arrangements, and now they were relaxing over the much-needed cup of tea and some toast, which Ruthie’s mother had made for them, before going round to spend the evening with her neighbour.
‘Your mam’s come on ever such a lot just recently, Ruthie,’ Jess commented. ‘You’d never know her for the same person now.’
‘No, I know. Our doctor says it’s a little miracle. He reckons that having Glen around, and me and him getting married, has done her the world of good. Time was when I was that worried about her, I even got to thinking that she might try to do away wi’ herself or summat.’
‘Well, you don’t need to worry any more,’ Diane to her gently. ‘Not now you’ve got Glen.’
‘I still can’t believe my own good luck,’ Ruthie smiled happily, before adding, ‘It’s ever so nice of you to put off taking up your transfer back down to where your Kit’s stationed so that you can come to me and Glen’s wedding.’
‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ Diane assured her. ‘It was really kind of you and Glen to include Kit. He’s going to come up on Friday, and then we can travel back down to Cambridgeshire together afterwards. Don’t forget, will you, that Kit and I want you all to come down to our wedding?’
‘And then you’ll have to come back up here for mine,’ Jess reminded her, before turning to Ruthie to say, ‘I’m going to miss you when you go off to America.’
‘That won’t be until after the war is over, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to be any time soon. Glen says that I mustn’t worry about it, because his family will make me and Mum really welcome, and, of course, I’ll have him.’
‘Aye, and probably a baby bouncing on your knee as well by then,’ Jess laughed. ‘You should hear my Billy. You know what he’s like.’ She rolled her eyes and laughed. ‘He keeps on saying that he reckons we should have a honeymoon baby. I can’t say as I’d mind. I haven’t got the stomach for working on munitions any more, and there’s no work conscription for mothers with young kiddies.’
Diane listened to them without making any comment. There were those who said that they couldn’t think of bringing a new life into the world in such perilous times; women who said practically that they did not want to face bringing up a fatherless child as a widow, but she suspected that Ruthie and Jess felt as she did herself – that with the coming of a new life there also came hope for the future. For her there was also the matter of her duty to the uniform she wore, and the work she was trained to do. She and Kit both had roles to play in the war and they had agreed that they would try to wait to start a family if they could.
‘Have you heard anything from that Myra?’ Jess was asking her. ‘That husband of hers is a fool for tekin’ her back, if you ask me.’
Diane could see the way Ruthie was looking away. She certainly didn’t blame her for not feeling sympathetic towards Myra after what she had done.
‘He loves her and I think that Myra recognises now how lucky she is to have him. What happened to her has changed her.’
‘Well, she certainly needed to do some changing,’ Jess broke in.
‘Yes, she did,’ Diane agreed. She couldn’t help feeling glad for Myra’s sake, and that of the child she was carrying, that Jim was prepared to stand by her, even if she sensed that the other two thought she had been undeservedly lucky.
‘Come on, girls,’ Jess announced determinedly, refilling their teacups. ‘Let’s have a toast.’
‘What to?’ Diane asked her.
‘To the future, and the end of the war, and, of course, the Grafton,’ Jess grinned. ‘And to us, the Grafton Girls.’
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for their invaluable help:
Teresa Chris, my agent.
Harper editors Maxine Hitchcock and Susan Opie, who has now kindly taken me under her wing.
Yvonne Holland, for making sure I got my facts right.
Everyone at HarperCollins who contributed to the publication of this book.
Tony, who as always has helped enormously with the research process.
About the Author
THE GRAFTON GIRLS
Annie Groves lives in the North-West of England and has done so all her life. She is the author of Ellie Pride, Connie’s Courage and Hettie of Hope Street, a series of novels for which she drew upon her own family’s history, picked up from listening to her grandmother’s stories when she was a child. She has also written a new series of novels, Goodnight Sweetheart and Some Sunny Day and now The Grafton Girls, which is based on Annie’s extensive research of the Italian community in Liverpool during the war as well as wartime recollections from members of her family who come from the city. Annie Groves also writes under the name Penny Jordan and has written over 130 books and sold over 67 million copies.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.co.uk for exclusive information about Annie Groves.
By the same author:
Ellie Pride
Connie’s Courage
Hettie of Hope Street
Some Sunny Day
Goodnight Sweetheart
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © Annie Groves 2007
Annie Groves asserts the moral right to
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A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
ePub Edition June 2008 ISBN-9780007279517
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
