by Annie Groves
The captain, who had so far stood back, now shook his head and told him drily, ‘Somehow I don’t think they’re going to fall for that line, Eddie–they’re far too intelligent.’
He turned to the girls. ‘We do want to thank you. As I mentioned in Bath, Eddie here is my cousin, and I’d have had to face a real telling-off from our shared grandmother if anything had happened to him.’
‘I’m her favourite,’ the lieutenant announced smugly.
Katie couldn’t help but laugh. The lieutenant, although quite obviously an accomplished flirt and used to getting away with the most outrageous behaviour, was nevertheless good fun.
‘Eddie here has just been pronounced fit to return to active service, and as we are both on leave at the moment, we would appreciate it very much if you would allow us to take you both out to dinner as a thank you for what you did for him.’
Gina looked at Katie. ‘What do you think? On the one hand we would probably get a decent dinner, but on the other we’d have to put up with the company of these two to get it.’
Gina was so clever knowing just the right note to strike, Katie thought admiringly as she guessed from her friend’s manner that she was happy to accept the invitation as long as she herself felt the same.
‘A decent dinner sounds very tempting,’ Katie answered, echoing Gina’s own tone.
Gina’s small nod of the head told Katie that she had given the right answer, and Gina was smiling when she turned to the captain and told him, ‘Dinner it is.’
‘Excellent.’ The lieutenant looked buoyant. ‘How does the Savoy sound? We can pick you up and—’
‘The Savoy would be very acceptable, but we will meet you there,’ Gina told him firmly.
Within ten minutes it was all arranged. Katie and Gina would meet the captain and the lieutenant at seven o’clock on Saturday evening at the Savoy, to be their guests for the hotel’s Saturday evening dinner dance.
‘I hope they realise that they may not be able to get tickets,’ Katie told Gina, as they made their way back to their desks.
‘Something tells me that they will get them by hook or by crook,’ was Gina’s answer.
Katie wasn’t the least bit romantically interested in either of the naval men but it had been fun to banter with the lieutenant. A little bit guiltily she recognised that the few minutes of fun they had shared with the men had lifted her spirits and that she was looking forward to Saturday evening. Even so …
‘You don’t think we’ve given them the wrong impression, do you?’ she asked Gina, her hand on the door to their workroom.
‘Not for a minute,’ Gina reassured her, adding wryly, ‘Mind you, if you want my opinion I reckon that the lieutenant’s the sort who doesn’t need any kind of encouragement–not that either of us gave him any, but my guess is that the captain is cut from a different sort of cloth, even though they are cousins, and that he will make sure that the lieutenant toes the line and behaves as he ought. Of course, if you’re having second thoughts …’
‘No,’ Katie admitted a bit self-consciously. ‘To be honest, I’m rather looking forward to it, although …’ She looked uncertainly at Gina. Katie knew that whilst she liked the idea of having fun, she certainly didn’t want that ‘fun’ to include anything ‘romantic’ or, even worse, having to deal with a man who behaved like an octopus, with his hands everywhere and one purpose on his mind, but she wasn’t sure how to say as much to Gina, and felt able only to add rather weakly, ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to go out with one of them on my own, but seeing as we’re both going it should be fun.’
‘I think we pretty much share the same opinion,’ Gina smiled. ‘One hint of any funny business and we’re leaving, right?’
‘Right!’ Katie agreed with real relief and gratitude that Gina had been confident enough to speak so frankly.
‘Bella?’
Bella tensed as the door to her office opened and Lena peered round it.
‘It’s such a lovely sunny day I was wondering if you and your mum would like to come round and have tea with us today. It would save you cooking.’
With every word Lena said Bella could feel her tension growing.
‘I can’t,’ she told her abruptly. ‘I’m far too busy.’ Bella bent her head over the papers on her desk, hoping that Lena would take the hint and go away.
Instead Lena protested, ‘But, Bella, you worked all weekend, and …’
Bella had had enough. Her teeth were gritted, the knuckles showing white where she had gripped her hands into tight fists in an attempt to control her emotions. Her nails bit into her palms, but she didn’t care. She deserved that pain; she wanted it and welcomed it even though it could nowhere near mirror the depth of pain that Jan must have known in his last precious minutes of life, his plane shot down, burning as it screamed towards the sea, Jan himself probably on fire as well. A shudder of anguish shook her whole body.
Lena rushed to her side to a protective arm around her shoulders, as she whispered, ‘Bella …’
Bella tensed her body against Lena’s sympathy. It wasn’t what she wanted. Lena wasn’t who she wanted.
‘I’ve got work to do, Lena,’ she repeated fiercely, ‘and so have you.’
This time Lena took the hint, closing the door quietly behind her as she left Bella’s office.
It was June. Outside the sun was shining. From the nursery she could hear the children’s voices mingling with those of her nursing staff. A bee was droning dizzily, no doubt heavy with pollen, as it worked the yellow flowers of the laburnum tree outside her office window. Despite the war, people were trying to make the best of things and look forward to the summer. Government notices urging people to ‘Holiday at Home’ seemed to be posted everywhere, alongside posters from local councils advertising the events they were planning to entertain people, the business of everyday life humming as busily around her as the bee was humming around the laburnum racemes, but Bella felt completely removed from it all, as though it was happening in a different world, a world she no longer wanted to inhabit. Her world was different: a wasteland of might-have-beens, of wasted opportunities and dead dreams; a world of coldness so icy that it burned her heart, a world in which she was frozen for perpetuity.
She had lost Jan, and not just lost him but failed him and their love. He might have written to her that he understood, he might have tried to spare her with his gentle and loving words, telling her that he believed she had done the right thing, but she knew better, she knew the truth. She had betrayed him and their love.
How different things would have been, how differently she could have felt if only she had had the strength to put their love first; if only she had gone to him, with him, given herself wholly and completely to him, and shared with him that most precious gift of love and intimacy. But instead she had behaved like a coward, putting the views of others–of society, of her employers–putting herself and her status, her respectability within that society before Jan’s need of her, and now she was having to pay the price for that selfishness. That was why she couldn’t accept the sympathy Lena was trying to offer her, why she couldn’t allow herself the relief of tears; because she did not deserve either of those things.
Instead she must suffer. She deserved to suffer because of what she had made Jan suffer, because of what she had denied him and let him die without. How could she claim to love him and yet not have known that his need must come first? Wherever he was now he must be looking at her in sorrow and reproach, perhaps even in contempt too, for her lack of courage and for the way in which she had failed him and their love. And because of what? Because she had wanted to be seen as moral and respectable, because her pride could not bear for her to be dragged back down to what she had seen as her old unworthy self, her old selfish, selfobsessed self. How blinded she had been by that pride. How cruel and thoughtless, and yes, how selfish she had been in not putting Jan first. Instead she had cloaked that selfishness in ‘moral right', and in doing so she had lost the opportunit
y to give him the gift of her love, to cherish him and perhaps, in doing so, to keep him safe.
Pain gripped her, shuddering through her body. That was the hardest guilt of all to bear, torturing herself with the belief that, had she put her hand in his, had they gone to bed together, then he would not have died, because his sense of duty to her, and to the child they might have created together might have made him more cautious.
His letter to her, so loving and forgiving, held in its words the true essence of the man he had been, compassionate, strong, heroic, a man of the type this country would need so desperately once the war was over, a man who now, thanks to her, was lost to them all.
She could never forgive herself. She must never forgive herself.
FOURTEEN
Katie and Gina had had a lovely afternoon in Hyde Park, having decided, in view of the fact that they had agreed to go out with the captain and the lieutenant, to put off their river boat trip until another weekend, just in case they couldn’t get back in time.
Now, at five o’clock, having enjoyed a cup of tea, they were walking arm in arm down Sloane Street, towards Katie’s billet, Gina having disclosed that she lived not very far away from Cadogan Place herself, ‘in a small flat that actually belongs to an aunt of my father’s, but which she’s allowing me to use. It was her pied-à-terre for when she visited London. She’s widowed now, and she finds the damage the German bombs have done to the city too upsetting to want to visit very often. Her husband was an architect, and she’s rather passionate about buildings.’
Katie noted this information, recognising that it confirmed what she had already guessed, namely that Gina’s family was rather well-to-do. Not that Gina gave herself any airs and graces–far from it.
As they said ‘goodbye’ to one another on Sloane Street, standing by the private garden that belonged to Cadogan Place, Gina told Katie, ‘I’ll get a taxi and call to pick you up at a quarter to seven. If we get to the Savoy and they aren’t there waiting for us then we can ask the cabby to drive up to Green Park and then turn round and take us back.’
Katie agreed, then turned to leave, only to hear Gina saying almost awkwardly, ‘Oh … I expect you know that the Saturday night dinner dance at the Savoy is rather dressy, only there’s nothing worse than arriving somewhere and feeling one is wearing the wrong thing.’
Once Gina’s comment would have reduced her to a silence of tongue-tied hot-faced self-conscious embarrassment, Katie acknowledged, but now she was able to say easily and comfortably, ‘I remember how elegantly dressed the women always were when I used to accompany my father to the Savoy. He’s a musician and a conductor. I haven’t been since I came back to London but I dare say, if anything, people are making even more of an effort.’
There! In a couple of sentences she had acquainted Gina with her parents’ and her own status, and assured her that she wasn’t going to embarrass herself.
‘Oh, yes, absolutely,’ Gina agreed, looking relieved. ‘Of course the American women–the diplomatic and high-ranking military wives–are incredibly well dressed. No rationing for them, although our lot do their best to hold their end up. The last time I was there an awful lot of old family jewellery was on show, even if it was being worn with pre-war evening gowns.’
There was no real question over what she would have to wear, Katie admitted once she was back in her room in her billet. After what Gina had said, there was only one dress that could be worn, and yet it was with great reluctance that she removed it from her suitcase where it was carefully packed away in layers of tissue paper. Tissue paper that had been smoothed down by Jean’s maternal hands, the dress itself a gift of love from Luke’s aunt Francine and from Jean herself.
Tears trembled on Katie’s eyelashes when she lifted it from its resting place. It was so beautiful, the most beautiful dress she had ever worn, the memories that went with it so precious to her, each one folded every bit as carefully into her heart as Jean had folded the dress.
The pale grey silk taffeta shimmered in the stillbright sunlight, causing more tears to blur Katie’s vision. She had been wearing this dress the night she had first met Luke, not knowing who he was then other than the grim, hostile but oh so handsome dark-haired young corporal who had done so much to protect the Grafton Dance Hall from catching fire after a bomb had been dropped on the building next door to it. She had had no idea then that he would turn out to be the son of the couple with whom she was billeted, the ‘Luke’ his mother spoke of with such love and pride.
Luke. Katie sank down on to her bed, letting the dress slip to the floor as she covered her face with her hands and let the tears flow. She had tried so hard not to give in to her emotions, to remember how much others were called upon to bear because of this war, to tell herself that whilst Luke was safe and well, she had nothing to cry for other than her own foolish broken heart, and that truly loving someone sometimes meant putting them first and being hurt when your love was not returned. She knew she could no more have held Luke to an engagement he no longer wanted than she could have lied that she no longer loved him. He had wanted his freedom and, much though that hurt her, she had to accept that. He had claimed that he was breaking their engagement because he couldn’t trust her, but Katie felt there was more to it than that and that at some stage whilst he had been away from her he had either stopped loving her or realised that he had never loved her at all.
By the time she was bathed and dressed, her dark gold hair brushed, and the neat little matching bolero that went with her gown nestling against the wide white sash emphasising her slender waist, Katie had a brave smile pinned to her lips, but her heart still felt sore.
Peggy Groves, who was coming into the house as Katie was leaving, having seen the taxi pull up outside from her bedroom window, paused to say admiringly, ‘Oh, I say, don’t you look glam. I hope you’re going somewhere nice.’
‘The Savoy,’ Katie told her, before darting outside and hurrying over to the cab just as Gina was about to get out of it.
‘You’re prompt,’ Gina smiled approvingly, her eyes widening slightly when she saw Katie’s gown. ‘What a beautiful dress, and how perfectly it suits you, Katie.’
‘It isn’t actually mine. It belongs to … to my ex-fiancé's aunt. She is, or rather she was, a singer–she’s married now. She’s the most generous person. Even though Luke and I broke up, she insisted that I was to have this dress, which she’d loaned to me whilst I was billeted with Luke’s parents, and Luke’s mother sent it on to me.’
‘They obviously thought a lot of you, Katie, and with good reason.’
‘I loved Luke’s family,’ Katie told Gina truthfully. ‘I still miss them and I think I always will. Your own dress is lovely too.’
‘Well, it’s pre-war, I’m afraid, although I’ve always loved it. I wore it for my twenty-first birthday party.’
The burgundy silk was perfect with Gina’s dark hair and eyes, and Katie saw that Gina was wearing a very pretty pair of pearl and diamond ear clips, which matched the pearl necklace she always wore.
‘Well, at least we shan’t have to ask the cabby to drive past and then bring us back,’ Gina announced when the cab turned into the Savoy. ‘The boys are already here waiting for us.’
Indeed they were, and looking very handsome and masculine in their Royal Navy uniforms, Katie had to admit as the doorman came forward to open the taxi door for the girls, prompting the captain to step towards the cabby, obviously intent on settling the bill.
Katie looked at Gina, who gave a small nod of her head, obviously approving his good manners.
Katie could see that both men were impressed by the girls’ appearance, their approval giving her confidence a boost as she thanked Eddie for the corsage he presented her with, whilst the captain did the same to Gina.
Of course, they had to retire to the cloakroom to pin the corsages to one another.
‘So sensible of them to choose white so that they wouldn’t clash with what we are wearing,’ Gina sm
iled.
To Katie the Savoy was almost a home from home. She had come here regularly with her father when he had worked here, although in those days she had been dressed very plainly in something businesslike, not a beautiful evening gown. So many times on those evenings her feet had tapped eagerly as she longed to dance. Luke had been a very good dancer. It was a family gift the Campions, including Jean shared, although Sam had always claimed that he had two left feet.
‘Cocktails first, don’t you agree?’ Eddie was suggesting, as he led the way to the already busy cocktail bar.
The captain, Leonard, might be quieter than his more outgoing cousin, but he still had an air of authority about him that others plainly recognised, falling back a little to make room for the naval officers
Not that Leonard and Eddie were the only two men in the room in uniform–far from it. Katie had become used now to the sight of so many different uniforms in the capital, but tonight somehow it seemed that rather more of them were American than had previously been the case.
Not to be outdone by the men’s smart uniforms, the women were all wearing elegant dresses, many of them, as Gina had already said, looking a little pre-war in style, but very elegant none the less, reminding Katie of pictures she had seen in her mother’s copies of Vogue as a young girl. A woman in her forties, walking past proudly on the arm of her partner–a colonel in the army–was wearing a beautiful dull yellow silk satin gown that was very 1930s in style, its colour perfectly complimenting her diamond-set topaz jewellery.
Sequins were very much in style, brightening up the plainness of the otherwise very simple black evening gowns worn by many of the older women, whilst Katie heard one young girl still in her teens confiding to her friend as they walked past them that her dress–a lovely pale pink embossed silk over net petticoats, had been made from ‘Granny’s coming-out frock”.