by Cathy Kelly
‘Her name was Miss Standing and she was a bit of a blue stocking, but nice with it. She encouraged me to play with Tilly – she was a great believer in social reform. Of course, when Daddy found out Miss Standing was a Fabian he nearly died. Sent her packing, I’m afraid. After that, poor Tilly was teased over being friends with me, and she began to not want to come to play and I was left with Sybil. I didn’t have many friends until I came out.’
‘What was it like?’ Lily asked. ‘Coming out and all that?’
The question wasn’t quite as unconcerned as it sounded: ever since Sybil’s wedding, Lily had listened avidly for mention of Miranda Hamilton, or whatever she was before Jamie married her. Miranda Hamilton. It was strange that the name of a woman she’d never met had such power over her. But Lily found she could think of almost nothing else.
Jamie was foremost in her mind, but he was followed closely by the mystery of his wife, a woman from Diana’s world of wealth and privilege.
‘Who were your friends?’ she’d asked Diana idly one day, hoping for some snippet about Miranda. Maybe if she knew about her and about Jamie, then the spell would be broken. But she couldn’t say a word of what had happened between her and Jamie to her friend. For all her work in the hospital, Diana remained at heart very innocent.
‘I keep hearing how it was all so different before the war but, coming from Ireland, I can’t tell what’s changed and what hasn’t.’
‘Golly, everything’s changed,’ sighed Diana. ‘Before the war was practically another world, Lily. I can’t begin to tell you
But, once prompted, Diana had gone on to describe a world that was indeed alien to Lily. She talked about being presented at Court in a stiff satin dress with flowers in her hair, and dancing the night away with debs’ delights in Claridges and nightclubs like The 400. The name made Lily feel sick: they’d been going there that night.
‘We weren’t supposed to go to nightclubs,’ Diana revealed. ‘But we all did. I liked the Florida best. It was so much fun.’
Chaste kissing was as far as Diana had ever gone with a man, even now. Lily remembered in their early days of training, thinking it was strange that a nurse could know so little about sex. Having grown up with farm animals all around, Lily had a working knowledge of what must happen between a man and a woman. Diana, in contrast, had seemed clueless.
‘Nobody talked about you know what,’ she said. ‘All we were told about were men who were NSIT – not safe in taxis.’
She was on first-name terms with dukes and foreign princes, had spent a year at a finishing school in Paris where she and ten other young ladies had been watched like hawks in case they escaped from their patroness’s establishment, and had perfected their French and spent many hours in Parisian museums. As a young girl, she’d learned to dance at Madame Vacani’s, where she’d met and giggled with other young, female British aristocrats of the same age.
There was no doubt in Lily’s mind that her friend would marry one of the wealthy titled men from her world, but she was that rare creature: a person without snobbery. The difference in their upbringing genuinely didn’t bother Diana.
Yet it seemed clear to Lily that the old world was changing – birth and privilege meant nothing to a person lying in blood after a bomb had hit. Bombs made no distinctions between the rich and the poor, although a wealthy woman might have a fur coat flecked with blood around her when she arrived, as opposed to a poorer one who’d be in an old, darned wool coat over a nightie.
Lily shivered again in the cold. She was so tired but sleep was out of the question.
Night time was the worst, when Lily, exhausted until she laid her head on the pillow, replayed every aching moment over and over again, from the spike of knowledge that told her Jamie was hers, to the agony of finding out that he couldn’t be.
She replayed the scene in the kitchen again and again.
Had he been about to tell her…
‘Lily, there’s something I’ve got to tell you –’
And she could see the viciousness in Sybil’s eyes. Amazingly, Sybil hadn’t told Diana. Was it guilt at being such a cow, or did she prefer that Lily should suffer in silence? Lily had no idea.
Still, it was better this way, better that nobody else knew.
When Jamie’s face haunted her, sleep was out of the question. Since that night, over a month ago, there had been many nights when Lily sat at the window both here or in their old room in the nurses’ home, pulled the blackout blinds up and stared out at the dark streets of London.
Tonight, she felt so lonely that she knew she’d almost welcome the roar of the air-raid sirens and the darkened stumble down the stairs into the Anderson shelter in the garden. There at least she’d feel a sense of camaraderie, instead of this awful being alone.
The air-raid siren began to wail and Lily got stiffly to her feet, feeling cold from kneeling so long by the bedroom window.
On nights like tonight, she didn’t mind the siren: it interrupted the raging fire in her brain and the pain in her heart. But she wondered, as she peered out of the window to where the searchlights now lit up the sky, if Jamie was safe. She hoped so.
In early November, Philip was back in London and Sybil quickly arranged to come up to meet him on Thursday evening. Before they knew it, a party had been organised, starting with cocktails somewhere, then on to dinner and hopefully a club.
Diana had said she was meeting Sybil in Haymarket first as it was so central.
‘Sibs says she wants to go to the Savoy for cocktails. Silly girl, I told her you can’t get into the Savoy, it’s full of visiting American colonels waving dollars around. “Jolly good,” she says, “I love Americans!” “Really, Sibs,” I told her. “You’re married and besides, the war isn’t a giant cocktail party. The Goring is the most darling place and it’s much cosier…” but she won’t be swayed. Do say you’ll come, Lily. It’ll be such fun. Philip has asked lots of pals too.’
But Lily couldn’t risk it. She knew that Jamie might easily be part of the group, if he was still in England. He might not be, he might have rejoined his submarine, gone off to whatever theatre of war was important. Stupid phrase: theatre of war. As if it were a show. If women had their way, there would be no show. Women didn’t want to lose people.
Even if there was a crowd of Philip’s friends there, and Jamie was just one of many talking and drinking, she’d have to leave. She wouldn’t be able to sit there in his presence, feeling so betrayed, and with Sybil gloating maliciously in the background.
‘No, Diana,’ she said. ‘I’m too exhausted. Count me out.’
Maisie was dating an American soldier she’d met in the Café de Paris and had gone out to dinner with him. The house felt very empty with them both gone, so Lily tried to amuse herself by having a bath with the regulation four inches of water. Even with a kettleful of hot water added, it was still too cool. Finally, she got dressed and went out for a walk. She decided to head over to Hyde Park and breathe in the nearest thing to country air she was likely to get in the city.
It was dusk as she began walking home and her heavy shoes were killing her. She’d had a pair of plimsolls that were a lovely relief from her work shoes but they were too worn down now and buying shoes was always such a hard task. Her feet were very narrow with high arches. She often thought she had such trouble with shoes because she’d gone barefoot so much as a child, running over the stones on the back avenue to Rathnaree, her little feet with beetle-hard skin. If Lily closed her eyes, she could feel the cool ticklish flicker of grass on her feet as she ran through the fields, trailing hands through the stalks of rushes.
A bus roared past her on the Bayswater Road, inches away. Lily’s eyes shot open and she rocked back from the edge of the footpath, realising that she’d nearly walked shut-eyed into the road.
‘Watch out, love. He nearly had your head off.’ The speaker was a tiny, shrunken man with a stick.
‘Thank you,’ said Lily, shaken.
This
was ridiculous; she could have been killed or at the very least ended up in her own hospital on a gurney.
But the streets kept shimmering in and out of her mind, being replaced by a vision of the Savoy, with Diana rushing in, hair flying and a cloud of Arpège trailing in her wake, saying, ‘Sorry I’m late.’ Diana was always late, Lily thought fondly.
She’d be there by now, garnering admiring glances as she sat with her beloved sister and her brother-in-law’s friends. Lily had been to the Savoy with Diana once before, had drunk in the heady atmosphere of the exquisite Art Deco palace and the frisson that this, here, was where it was all happening.
For once, she wished she were back in the nurses’ home: at least in the common room there would always be someone to talk to and a radio to listen to. Right now, she felt so isolated, so not a part of anything any more.
And then she heard it: the low drone of the siren. Instinctively, she looked up, trying to see the deadly V-2 rockets in the sky, as if seeing them would keep her safe from being hit.
Once you could see them, you were safe, surely? Not true: the wards of the Royal Free were full of people who’d seen and yet still ended up destroyed with bomb fragments.
The siren grew steadily louder. As familiar as the sound was, it had taken on a new, terrifying aspect since the advent of the V-2s. Her heart was racing as she tried to remember where the nearest shelter was. Of course: Lancaster Gate Underground.
She joined the river of people streaming towards the station steps and in moments, she was caught up in the crowd, being jostled down into the entrance, past an old ‘Make Do and Mend’ poster with the ends curling up as it came off the wall.
Normally, Lily hated the Underground and steered well clear of it. Some people loved the camaraderie of bedding down on the station platforms at night, joining in with the sing-songs and taking advantage of the tea provided at dawn. But not her. For Lily, the thought of being buried alive in a narrow, airless tunnel beneath the ground made this a far from safe haven.
New panic clawed up inside her as she reached the ticket hall. The only way down was the lifts. She hated lifts, and especially now, when they’d be full to bursting. Crushed in the human river, she had to fight to breathe. If the entrance was bombed, she’d be buried alive in a small metal box at the bottom of a lift shaft. She knew she had to get out.
Even the V-2s couldn’t be as bad as a slow death in an airless coffin.
‘Let me out!’ she shrieked and turned, pushing against the human river trying to force their way in. It was all she could do to keep breathing, let alone move against the flow, but she knew she couldn’t turn back now.
‘Lily.’
She thought she heard somebody call her name but she couldn’t be sure: it was like being in a nightmare, she didn’t know what was real or not.
‘Lily!’
It was the voice she’d heard in her dreams, and the last person she’d expected to see here today. Jamie.
He was behind her in the crowd with his hand held out, fingers reaching towards her.
‘I have to get out,’ she shouted wildly. ‘I can’t go down in the lifts.’
‘Hold on,’ he yelled back. ‘I’ll get you.’
She knew it was madness to climb back up to the street, but she didn’t care. Only one crazy thought gripped her: once she was with Jamie, she’d be safe.
With a final surge of energy, she reached his fingers first, then his strong hand gripped hers and hauled her against him. Her face was crushed against the scratchy wool of his Navy uniform, and she breathed in, inhaling his scent and the sensation of being safe.
The crowd was thinner now, and with Jamie holding her, they made it up to the street.
It was only a few minutes since she’d heard the siren, yet it seemed like hours. The streets were nearly deserted, like a ghost city banked up with sandbags: only the foolhardy weren’t seeking shelter.
‘Here,’ he pulled her into the doorway of a big, imposing house with a huge portico above them. ‘It’s as safe as anywhere above ground.’
His arms were around her and Lily held on to him tightly. From the east, they could hear the low rumbling of the bombs. Like counting thunderclaps when she’d been a child, Lily felt a guilty relief that the bombers were targeting somewhere else.
‘What are you doing here?’ she said.
‘I came to see you,’ he replied.
Lily looked up into his face. His eyes were the most extraordinary colour: a lucent grey that appeared lit from some powerful inner force. They weren’t the sort of eyes that could lie. Searching them, she found nothing but truth.
‘Why?’
‘You know why,’ he said in a low voice.
She kept looking at him, wondering how she knew his face so intimately when she barely knew him. The dark eyebrows, the scar that bisected one and made her long to run her fingers wonderingly over it.
‘I’ve been keeping away from you,’ he said. ‘I made myself stay away. I told Philip I couldn’t meet him later. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to see you again. When I went to the Savoy and Diana told me you weren’t coming, I knew I had to see you.’
‘It’s wrong,’ she said. She couldn’t look at him. He’d come to find her and she wanted him so much, but it was wrong. He had a wife. Under the eyes of God, he couldn’t betray that wife. She couldn’t betray his wife. If they gave in, they would be committing adultery, a mortal sin.
Would God forgive that?
True, her faith had been rattled during the war from what she had witnessed. How could God allow this much pain and death?
Jamie took one of her hands and brought it to his lips. She could hear his breathing deepen. They’d have to think about God afterwards, there wasn’t the time now.
She brought him home, led him up the stairs into her bedroom. It was a large and dark room, with heavy alizarin crimson wallpaper and a vast bed and wardrobe in a rich wood, and no carpet on the wooden floor.
Jamie shut the door, locked it, then grabbed her. It was hard to say which of them was fiercest: Lily wanted to meld herself to him and it seemed as if he wanted to devour her with his mouth, tasting her with his lips, his tongue plunging into her forcefully. Her fingers ripped at the buttons on his uniform. Briefly they separated as he opened his jacket, then tore at her cardigan.
There was no moment to think about what she was wearing: suddenly, she was naked, pressed against him. They fell on to the coverlet, bodies on fire against each other.
Lily had never felt a man’s hands on her naked skin and she arched herself against him, loving the feeling of his mouth on her nipples, biting, licking, sucking. She could feel his erection long and hard against the smoothness of the skin of her thigh and she wondered how she’d ever thought sex must be a strange business, from years of looking at men’s flaccid bodies in the hospital. They were ill, lethargic: Jamie was strong, powerful and a ferocious energy burned within him.
Furious intense ardent aggressive ferocious.
She stroked the long angry red scar on his hip, the scar that had brought him home the first time they met. He barely limped now, she realised: when they’d met at Sybil’s wedding, the limp was noticeable, but not any more.
‘Is it painful?’ she asked.
‘Not now,’ he breathed, fixing his mouth over her breast again.
Lily closed her eyes and gave in to the sensation.
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he breathed.
‘I don’t care.’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘I want you to want me again.’
‘I do.’
‘And not be hurt.’ One long finger reached inside her and Lily felt her body spasm with pure pleasure.
‘We don’t have to –’
‘We do.’
She thought she’d die if she didn’t consummate this now. She swung herself underneath him and straddled him, reaching down to touch him and marvelling at the sensitivity of his body as he gasped in pleasure.
‘Te
ll me how –’
He positioned her over him and their eyes locked: lucent grey on pure blue, while their bodies slowly moved. Then she felt him nudging inside her and she couldn’t breathe. Still, he stared at her and she could sense him falter, and knew it was for her benefit.
Then she moved her body, sliding so that she was impaled upon him and the huge surge of him inside her made her cry out.
‘Oh, Lily,’ he groaned and then they were moving together, clinging tightly, his hands gripping the soft curve of her buttocks until Lily felt the slow burn of ecstasy ripple out from somewhere inside her and she gasped, arching herself on top of him, reaching, stretching, and then he was with her.
They lay curled together afterwards, with the curtains still open. The moon was a sleek crescent curve in a dark sky.
‘You’ve no idea how many nights I’ve looked out of the window and wondered about you,’ Lily said, snug in the curve of his arm. ‘I wondered, could you see the same moon, where were you, what were you doing, and if – if you ever thought about me.’
‘I haven’t thought of anything else,’ he said with humour in his voice. ‘They’re not best pleased with me in the War Office. Think I’m going back to the sub soon.’
There was silence. Not talking about where they were going was a part of a submariner’s life and intellectually, Lily understood it totally. Emotionally, it hurt. If he had to go, she wanted to know where, so she could follow every moment in the newspapers, on the radio and in the newsreels. That way at least, she could be close to him.
She knew so little about submarines, only that, unlike battleships, once they were hit, there was little hope for survivors. The sea was cruel and unrelenting. He could die so easily, locked underwater in that claustrophobic tube. The terror of his dying like that pierced her.
‘We shouldn’t have done this,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid that we’re going to be punished. You’re married and, in my faith, that’s for life. How can we have a future?’
‘I’m fed up with concentrating on the future,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Life is all about future. If we win this campaign, if the Allies advance here, if the Axis fails there…What about now? What about how we feel now? What about me making a mistake seven years ago when I got married and now having to deal with that every day of my life since I met you.’