by Annie Groves
Then, without waiting for Bella to respond, he went to his mother and said gently, ‘Come, Mama, lean on me. Yes, that’s it. Now we will go upstairs and you will rest, and then tonight I shall take you both out for a meal.’
Now the three of them were behaving as though she didn’t exist, Bella saw wrathfully. If anyone needed helping upstairs for a rest it was her, not their mother, because she really did feel very odd all of a sudden. Very odd indeed.
‘Look.’ Gently but very firmly Teddy put his hands on Grace’s shoulders and gave her a small shake. ‘Stop worrying about me, please. Everything’s fine. I’m fine. The thing you should be worrying about is this war, not me, Grace.’
‘It’s easy for you to say that. How can I stop worrying when I know …?’ Too late Grace realised what she had said. Of course it wasn’t easy for him. How could it be?
‘I shouldn’t have told you.’ Teddy sounded weary and his smile had gone.
They’d taken the ferry across to New Brighton because Teddy had said that it was a shame not to enjoy the spring sunshine even if they couldn’t walk on the beach because of its fortifications against enemy landings, and now Grace felt guilty because she’d spoiled what should have been a happy day out.
‘You mustn’t say that,’ she told him, fishing in her pocket for her handkerchief in case she disgraced herself by starting to cry. The beaches looked so ugly and frightening with the defences in place. She wished passionately that things were different, that there was no war and that Teddy could be well.
‘I’m glad you told me, I really am.’ It was the truth. ‘I would have hated it if … if I hadn’t known,’ she finished lamely.
‘I told you because I wanted there to be honesty between us, Grace, and because, selfishly, I wanted you to be the one I could turn to and talk to.’
‘You can talk to me, Teddy,’ insisted Grace.
Teddy shook his head, the soft floppiness of his hair already tangled slightly by the sea breeze. ‘No I can’t. Not as I want to. Just then you were going to say you’d have hated it afterwards if you hadn’t known, but you didn’t say it. That isn’t being straight about things, Grace. That is not what I want. I know it’s hard for you, and I know I’m asking a lot of you, things that I don’t have any right to ask. I don’t want you fussing like me mum, or thinking the worst every time you don’t see me for a few days. What I want more than anything else is to live whilst I can. I want to share that living with you, Grace, but what I don’t want when I’m gone is … One day, Gracie, you’ll meet someone and fall in love.’
Grace made a small murmur of distress but Teddy shook his head again.
‘Of course you will, and it’s only right that you should. You and me aren’t sweethearts, Grace. We’re friends. I’m not saying that if things had been different we couldn’t have been different, but they aren’t. When you do fall in love, I hope you’ll tell him about me and when you do I don’t want him feeling or thinking that I did badly by you. By that I mean that I don’t want to feel I’m leaving you with a burden of guilt – for anything.
‘When you look back at this time I want you to look back with happiness, not pain. What I want more than anything else, Gracie, is for you to remember that we laughed and had fun. I want the time we spent together to be as if nothing was going to happen. Even when we die, a part of us lives on in the hearts and the minds of those who’ve known us. I know I’m asking a lot of you, asking you to carry me with you into the future, but I know you can do it. I don’t want you clinging to the past, and when you and this chap you’re going to fall in love talk about me, I want him to think what a decent sort I was, and I want you to know that your happiness is the future I want for both of us. I won’t be here for that future, Gracie, so you have to be happy and live it a little bit for me.’
I can’t do that. The words would be so easy to say but Grace knew she mustn’t. She felt older and more grown up than she had ever imagined she could feel.
‘I want you to promise me that you will do that, Gracie.’
‘I promise.’
As though by magic, just as she spoke, the wind dropped so that instead of being carried away out to sea her words hung softly on the air between.
Teddy didn’t kiss her and Grace was glad in a way that he had not done so, because that made the moment and her promise somehow more sacred.
He did kiss her later, though, after they had competed with one another to see who could skim the flat pebbles they had picked up from what was accessible of the beach over the flat sea as it waited for the tide to turn.
It was a bittersweet kiss. Both tender and fierce. A kiss that she knew instinctively was both a taste of what could have been and a reminder of what must not be.
Bella could hear the laughter coming from the kitchen the minute she opened the front door, and for a moment it held her immobile in the hallway, her face warmed by the shaft of sunlight coming in through the window and catching motes of dust in the air, gripped by an unfamiliar piercing sense of loss and pain and a feeling of being excluded and unwanted, an outsider.
Just as she had been at school; just as she was now at the Tennis Club.
That was ridiculous. She had been the most popular girl at school and the prettiest, just as she was at the Tennis Club. And as for being an outsider, this was her home.
She walked down the hall and pushed open the kitchen door. They were sitting round the kitchen table, with the back door open to let in the sunshine and the fresh air. There was a bottle of wine on the table and three now almost empty glasses, and the air was rich with the smell of something cooking that was alien and spicy.
The mother looked apprehensive when she saw her, but the other two simply looked at her. Both of them were smoking, and Bettina’s expression was both mocking and defiant, whilst Jan’s somehow made her feel … Bella didn’t know really what she actually felt but she knew that she hated it just as much as she hated him.
She was still furious that despite her refusal to allow him to stay he had done so. When she had complained to Alan about it when he had eventually come in he had simply shrugged and ignored her.
Bella wasn’t used to having her wishes ignored and nor was she used to feeling helpless.
‘Cigarette?’
The drawled offer caught her off guard. She looked down at the packet Jan was extending towards her. His fingers were long and lean, and something about them quickened her heartbeat although she had no idea why.
Without answering him, Bella turned on her heel and left the kitchen.
Halfway up the stairs she heard the sound of his laughter following her and mocking her.
Alone in her bedroom she lay down on the bed. Her head was swimming and she felt dreadfully tired. For the first time in her life as she lay on her bed, listening to the sound of voices and laughter drifting upstairs, Bella knew what it was to feel completely alone and isolated from other people. A feeling, a mixture of panic and fear and sickness, curdled in her stomach. What was the matter with her? She was a married woman with a husband, parents, an extended family of aunt, uncle, and cousins, whilst those three downstairs were refugees with nothing. How could they laugh? How could they possibly be happier than she was? They certainly had no right to be. If she wasn’t feeling so dreadfully and uncharacteristically tired she would have gone downstairs to the kitchen and told them so.
‘We had two amputations in the theatre this morning, but we aren’t getting anything like as many road accidents now that we’re back to double summer time,’ said Hannah tiredly as she sank into a chair opposite Grace, who had been making the most of having their sitting room to herself to write up her notes on the new patients admitted to the ward. She would be on nights herself again soon and Night Sister expected the junior nurse to accompany her on her ward round and to know off by heart each patient’s condition, symptoms and treatment.
‘Did you hear about those girls from the barrage balloon site?’ asked Hannah. When Grace shook her head, Ha
nnah explained, ‘It seems they decided to have a bit of a night out, seeing as things seemed quiet, only when they got back the balloon had broken loose. Now, as punishment, the whole lot of them have been sent up to some remote island off Scotland.’
‘Oh, poor things,’ Grace sympathised.
‘Never mind poor things. If you ask me it serves then right,’ Hannah contradicted her robustly. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Grace, you’re far too sympathetic. It won’t do in a nurse, you know,’ she joked, adding, ‘Mind you, I suppose you’re still worrying about Teddy.’
‘Yes. I am,’ Grace agreed, ‘and not just about him.’ She closed her exercise book and leaned forward, interlinking her fingers and looking down at them as she rested her forearms on her crossed knees. ‘I keep thinking about what’s going to happen to him and I can’t help wondering if I ought … well, that is to say …’
‘You mean he’s asked you to go all the way with him?’ guessed Hannah immediately.
‘No, no, he hasn’t, but I think that if I offered …’ Grace coloured up. Normally speaking this wasn’t the sort of conversation she’d have dreamed of having with anyone, but the situation she was in now was so different from anything she had ever thought she might experience that somehow it made normal conventions seem less important. Even so, she couldn’t quite bring herself to tell Hannah that she suspected from the occasional passionate kisses Teddy gave her when he couldn’t help himself that even though he wanted to protect her, he did want to go further.
‘There’s plenty of men that are asking their girls to do it, scaring them half to death by saying that they might not come back, and there’s plenty of girls too that wish they hadn’t let them,’ Hannah told her warningly.
‘Yes I know.’
‘Are you in love with him after all, then?’ Hannah asked.
‘I don’t think so. Anyway, it’s not like that. It’s just that I keep thinking that if I don’t then he’ll never know what it feels like, will he? And that makes me feel guilty.’
‘How do you know that he hasn’t already with someone else?’ asked Hannah practically.
She didn’t, of course, Grace admitted.
‘And what would happen if you were to get caught and fall for a baby?’ Hannah pressed on ruthlessly. ‘That would be a fine thing, wouldn’t, it? Him dead; you carrying and not wed.’
Grace felt sick at the thought of the shame of such a situation.
‘And then even if you weren’t, what would happen if you were to meet someone else who you did fall in love with? What would you tell him? There’s not many chaps who’d take kindly to their girl saying that she’d done it with someone else.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ she agreed, ‘but I just can’t help thinking—’
‘Well, don’t go thinking, and yes, I am right. If you want to know what’s really what, then you should go down to the women’s ward where they have the woman that have been brought in because they’ve tried to get rid of a baby they don’t want. We had one in theatre last week. Mr Anslow did his best to save her but she was in that much of a mess inside with septicaemia from what she’d had done that he couldn’t. Nurse Perry that’s a full year ahead of me went in to a dead faint just with the stink from her.’
Grace’s own stomach heaved, not so much with sickness as fear and horror. Everyone had heard the stories of the horrible deaths suffered by those women who had broken the law and gone to a backstreet abortionist in a desperate attempt to avoid having an unwanted child.
‘Mind you, if she’d survived she’d have ended up in prison,’ said Hannah matter-of-factly. ‘Not that there aren’t those with the money and the connections who can get themselves sorted out properly with no questions asked, of course, but it’s different for the likes of us.’
‘I thought it was supposed to be all right if a man used … something,’ said Grace selfconsciously.
‘Aye, supposed to be,’ Hannah agreed, ‘but there’s many a couple thought themselves safe and then found out that they were no such thing. If you want my advice, Grace, you’ll leave things as they are. And if Teddy does start hinting about you doing it with him, then make sure you say no.’ Her expression softened slightly and she reached out and touched Grace’s arm. ‘Look, I’m not saying that I don’t understand. I dare say I’d feel just the same meself in your shoes.’
‘I just keep thinking how I’d feel if I was Teddy and I knew I was going to die without ever having known what it’s like. I know we’re supposed to wait until we fall in love and get married, but what if you don’t have time for that? What if all the time you’ve got is now, Hannah? What would we do then?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hannah admitted quietly.
* * *
It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair. After all she’d done, putting up with Alan and ‘it’, there wasn’t going to be a baby after all. Her monthlies had started two days ago and even though they’d been mercifully short-lived this time, they’d been really bad and had left her feeling pulled down and tired. So tired, in fact, that her mother had insisted that she ought to see the doctor, and had made her an appointment there and then for this afternoon.
‘You probably need a bit of a tonic,’ she’d told her.
Bella hadn’t said anything. The only tonic she needed was getting those refugees out of her house and getting Alan to behave towards her as a husband should, and that Trixie put in her place.
She was on her way to see Alan now. He hadn’t left her any housekeeping this week – again – and when she’d told her mother, she’d said that it was disgraceful and that her father would have something to say to Alan’s father if things went on like this.
The refugees had gone out this morning and when they’d come back Jan had been in uniform. The first time she had seen him he had been wearing a tweed jacket, a pair of cavalry twill trousers with a tattersall checked shirt, and a V-necked pullover all in soft shades of brown; the kind of clothes she was used to seeing men in, but somehow Jan’s had looked different, softer and older, and in some indefinable way they had seemed to fit him better than her father and Alan’s new clothes ever seemed to fit them.
Jan was one of those Polish Air Force pilots who, when Poland had been forced to surrender, had managed to fly his plane to Britain, along with many other Polish pilots, his mother had told Bella proudly. Those men were now forming a squadron under the auspices of the RAF.
In that case, the sooner he got posted the better, Bella had told her sharply and the further away the better, because she certainly wasn’t going to put up with having him thinking he could sleep in her spare room whenever he felt like it.
Mr James, her father-in-law’s fussy elderly clerk, opened the office door to her and told her that both Alan and his father were out. The offices were decorated in the same drab brown as Alan’s parents’ house; the furniture was equally old-fashioned, and the atmosphere equally formal. An oil painting of Alan’s father hung on one wall. Beneath it, in a locked cabinet, were several silver-gilt trophies won by both Alan and his father. The whole place had an air of self-satisfied prosperity and smugness.
‘Miss Trixie is in, if you want to leave a message with her,’ he informed Bella.
Oh, yes, she’d certainly leave a message with her, Bella decided angrily. A message that told her that she shouldn’t go around kissing other women’s husbands.
Trixie was busy typing when Bella pushed open the office door, her fingers fairly flying over the keys, short practical fingers with short unpolished nails. Not manicured like her own.
The fact that Alan could actually want to kiss someone so plain and dull when he was married to her, further enflamed Bella’s temper.
Trixie had seen her now and had stopped typing.
‘Alan isn’t here, I’m afraid,’ she told Bella quietly.
‘No, I dare say he’s trying to do the decent thing and stay away from you, after the way you’ve been throwing yourself at him.’
Trixie’s f
ace turned bright red.
‘I suppose you thought he wouldn’t tell me about you making up to him and kissing him,’ Bella continued. ‘Well, of course he did, seeing as I’m his wife and he’s my husband. And let me warn you that if you don’t leave my husband alone I’m going to make sure that people know just what kind of woman you are. Poor Alan, he said he didn’t know which way to turn when you started chasing him. He’s been that worried that I’d be upset about it, but it’s like I told him, no one would ever think that he’d look at someone like you when he’s married to me. So you just stay away from him in future, otherwise it won’t just be me who knows what you’ve been up to.’
Trixie was crying now. ‘I love Alan and—’
‘Well, he certainly doesn’t love you,’ Bella cut her off ruthlessly, ‘because the other night when he was in bed with me doing what married people can do, he told me that he loved me.’
Trixie had gone a really funny colour now, and her stupid face was convulsing into an even plainer expression than usual. It was clear that what she had told her had shocked her, Bella recognised triumphantly.
‘Just you remember,’ Bella told her as she opened the door ready to leave, ‘in future, keep away from my husband.’
Once Bella was back out on the street, the giddy sense of power and triumph she had felt in the office receded, leaving her feeling very odd and weak. So weak that she almost felt as though she might faint. Perhaps her mother was right and she did need a tonic.
EIGHTEEN
Wednesday 15 May
‘It’s bad news, isn’t it, now that the Dutch have surrendered?’ Jean asked Sam worriedly.
They were alone in the house, the twins having gone to the cinema and Francine being at a rehearsal.
‘Ay, love, it is,’ Sam agreed. He saw her expression and knew what she was thinking.
There had been so much bad news these recent weeks. The Germans had already overrun Norway and now this. The Bank Holiday had been cancelled because of the crisis and the papers had been full of the shocking fact that the German Wehrmacht had invaded France and Belgium.
