The Bannister Girls

by Jean Saunders

  The rest of the women in the room might be dressed up like peacocks, but Angel Bannister outshone them all with her style and class. Jacques de Ville felt more drawn to her than to any other woman he had known in his life, and it had little to do with the fact that from the moment he had seen her, he had ached to paint her.

  A man held up one finger to them to indicate that there was a table available for the officer and his party. As Angel followed Jacques, with Dolly and Reg right behind her, weaving their way in and out of the crush of people, she felt a little shimmer at his words. His lady? It was another of his preposterous comments, but one which had undoubtedly made her heart beat faster.

  ‘We got here just in time,’ Dolly hissed, as they took their seats, and the flickering gaslights were lowered one by one. ‘Any later, and we’d have missed the start of the show.’

  The couples on the dance floor dispersed like ghostly figures silhouetted against the brightness of the stage. A troupe of dancing girls came on, kicking their legs high to the wild applause of the uniformed men and their companions.

  The dancers wore bright pink satin shorts and blouses that didn’t quite reach the waist, so that every time they moved an intriguing little expanse of flesh was revealed. On their heads they wore a froth of matching pink feathers, and their mouths were identical glossy pink bows of colour. Their bosoms bounded joyfully with every kick, to the rousing cheers of the onlookers. At the end of the dance, the band played a burst of a patriotic song of the moment, and the girls pirouetted slowly, each one saluting and dropping down on one knee, before they all scrambled up and kicked their way sideways offstage.

  ‘How d’you like it, me lady?’ Dolly leaned across the table to leer at Angel.

  ‘It’s marvellous! I’ve never seen anything like it!’

  Dolly looked taken aback at Angel’s obvious enthusiasm. At first, her eyes had watered in the heavy smoky atmosphere, worse than any London pea-souper, but she had quickly got used to it, and revelled in the unusual evening.

  ‘You really mean it, don’t you?’ Jacques said with pleasure. ‘You look a different girl from the one who was so cross at not finding a cab!’

  Angel laughed, perfectly relaxed. She felt different too. She felt – uninhibited, for the first time in her life. Even on her most defiant jaunts away from home, she had never felt quite this buoyant, and she couldn’t explain why. She didn’t want to explain, or to question it. In that instant, she identified totally with these people here, desperately enjoying themselves today, because none of them knew what tomorrow might bring.

  ‘You don’t even know my name,’ she said suddenly, remembering her manners. ‘It’s Angel – Angel Bannister –’

  ‘Angel! What a bleedin’ name to go to bed with!’ Dolly shrieked. Reg leaned across the table.

  ‘I had a mate who worked for a bigwig called Sir Fred Bannister in Yorkshire once. Bastard of a bloke, he was too. Only came visiting his factory once or twice a year to see they wasn’t shirking, and spent the rest of his time in his posh house in London or his country estate in Somerset.’

  Dolly was watching Angel’s face.

  ‘You’d better stop going on about ’im, Reg. Looks like our Angel’s heard of ’im too.’

  ‘He’s my father,’ she said calmly. ‘And he’s not such a bastard when you get to know him, Reg. It all depends on who he’s dealing with.’

  ‘Touché!’ Jacques murmured with a smile. ‘So we have someone important amongst us, do we?’

  ‘No. Just another human being.’

  She spoke smartly. It always made her squirm when she sensed inverted snobbery. Besides, somehow it didn’t sit well on Jacques whoever-he-was. She asked him outright.

  ‘Just another Flying Corps officer,’ he replied in the same vein. ‘Though my full name is Captain Jacques de Ville.’

  ‘An’ I’m Dolly Dilkes, an’ this ’ere’s Reg Porter, so now we all know each other, let’s watch the show!’ Dolly said, bored with all this formality. She and Reg had only taken Jax under their wing for the evening, so to speak, when he’d looked lost and lonely, and she was already half regretting it.

  One of the dancing girls walked slowly across the stage carrying a large cardboard placard, announcing that the next act would be Miss Eliza Kent, the Songbird of the South.

  ‘Ooh, she’s lovely,’ Dolly sighed. ‘She always makes me want to cry.’

  ‘Well, don’t cry too much, or that black stuff will be running all over your face,’ Reg grinned, as she flapped her heavy eyelashes at him for effect.

  Miss Eliza Kent was small and waiflike, dressed in a long gown and a wide flowered hat that almost dwarfed her. But her voice was pure and powerful, tugging at the heartstrings from the moment she opened her mouth to sing of heartache and suffering, and ending with more inspiring songs spawned by the war, urging everyone to join in with her. They did so lustily, with tears in their eyes, or huskily through working throats.

  ‘…and we’ll never see our Johnny,

  no, no, never again…

  now he’s gone to join his brothers

  and the glo-o-ry…’

  Amid roars of applause and whistling, Miss Eliza Kent bowed low, promising to sing for them all again for the finale of the show.

  ‘I’m not sure I can stand another bout of slush and sentiment,’ Jacques muttered to Angel.

  ‘Where’s your patriotism?’ She grinned back. ‘Can’t you see how much they all love this vicarious suffering? The war’s only been going for seven months. Think of all the work it’s giving to songwriters and musicians!’

  ‘That’s very upper class cynicism, Miss Bannister!’ Jacques mocked her.

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it –’

  ‘Why not? Why shouldn’t we say what we think as long as we’re not giving away state secrets? We might all be dead tomorrow, and we spend half our lives saying what we don’t mean to people we don’t care about.’

  They looked at one another. It was a strangely charged moment. Just as quickly, they looked away. It was as if they had each glimpsed a secret truth that neither was prepared to acknowledge yet.

  Chapter 2

  The sleazy comic was next on stage. His jokes were daring and risqué. Dolly squealed with laughter and clung to Reg, who laughed just as heartily. When the anecdotes poked lavatorial fun at Kaiser Bill and his balloons, the laughter grew noisier, but Angel had to admit that the man’s coarseness slightly diminished the horror of the threatened Zeppelin air raids.

  All the same, she was glad when the comic finished his act and the jugglers came on, to be followed by a fire-eater, who drew gasps of disbelief from the audience.

  ‘Enjoying your slumming, are yer, lady?’ Dolly asked archly, as Angel laughingly wiped a film of beer froth from her upper lip at Jacques’ instruction.

  ‘It’s not bad!’ Angel said airily. ‘It’s a change from the way I usually spend my evenings, but you know what they say about a change being as good as a rest.’

  ‘And how do you usually spend your evenings?’ Jacques asked. ‘You’re a bit of a mystery lady, Angel.’

  ‘Am I? You mean, because I was plucked out of the darkness and pushed into a London taxi-cab without proper introduction?’ She taunted lightly. ‘I know nothing about you, either, except your name and present occupation!’

  ‘Isn’t that all we know of most people? We only know what little we choose to give of ourselves.’

  Angel felt herself warm to him. She liked a man who thought beyond the obvious. ‘How perceptive you are. Not many people bother to analyse it so accurately. But you’re quite right. And we put on a different face to everyone we meet, too. Like donning a mask at a masquerade ball.’

  ‘Now you’re being the perceptive one –’

  A sudden shushing all around them stopped any further conversation, to Angel’s annoyance. Jacques de Ville was definitely the most interesting man she had encountered for a very long time. Vastly more intelligent than som
e of the so-called intellectuals her parents invited to the house. Jacques was intelligent in a basic, vital way, not merely with the educated claptrap waffled by some of the young men down from university.

  They sat through the pseudo-ballerina’s performance, the woman teetering about on her points in a ghastly rendition of Swan Lake. Angel tried not to remember the exquisite performance given by the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden.

  Next there was a ridiculous travesty of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, so sadly terminated for the duration – that awful, doom-laden phrase that was bandied about so often now. Two teams of young men wearing huge dark blue or light blue scarves and caps, sat at opposite ends of the stage behind card cut-outs of the university boats, supposedly pulling on their oars, and singing the most hideous songs composed for the occasion.

  ‘…we’ll pull till we burst,

  and we’ll get our end in first,

  and we’ll thumb at the accurs’d

  other fe-e-llows…’

  ‘A bit different to the real thing, Angel,’ Jacques said during the obligatory clapping.

  ‘You’ve seen it then? Have you lived in England?’

  He smiled. ‘My mother was English, and I had an English education, although my family home is near Bordeaux in France.’

  ‘Oh!’ she said softly.

  She dearly wanted to ask him more, but the Songbird of the South was coming back on stage to give a final rendition of a rousing ditty to stir all hearts. When it was over, she turned to Jacques once more.

  ‘Has your home suffered at the hands of the Germans?’

  ‘Not my home. But when one’s country is under threat, then we all suffer.’ He spoke with a dignity that touched her more than a long sorrowful dissertation on the evils of war.

  ‘Come on, Jax. Don’t get all morbid!’ Dolly leaned forward, and a waft of her Californian Poppy scent enveloped them all. ‘Why don’t you and Angel have a dance, same as Reg and me?’

  They realised that now the stage show was over, the gaslights were popping into life once more. Dolly dragged at Reg’s arm, and frantically beckoned the other two to join them.

  ‘We’ll get no peace until we do,’ Jacques grinned. ‘May I have this dance, Miss Bannister?’

  ‘With pleasure, Monsieur de Ville.’

  She replied with as much grace as if this was a society occasion, instead of some anonymous little cellar club, temporarily safe from the German air raids. She went into his arms as the band changed its tune for a dreamy slow two-step as more couples merged onto the floor. There was not much space to move, and the dancing was little more than a slow shuffle to the music.

  It was very different from the dances Angel attended with her parents. No gentleman would dare to hold a lady so close, and nor would she lean her head against his shoulder quite so brazenly. But every serviceman in that crowded room held the girl in his arms as though for the last time, and the feeling transmitted itself very forcibly to Angel Bannister. She could feel the thud of Jacques’ heart against her body, and it echoed the beat of her own. She could feel his breath on her cheek, and the sudden sweet touch of his lips on her hair.

  ‘I wish this night never had to end.’

  He spoke abruptly, and Angel recognised the low throb of desire in his voice. ‘I wish I could hold you for ever, chérie, because I’m so afraid that when I let you go, I shall never see you again.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ she whispered. ‘It sounds so final.’

  He gave a short mirthless laugh.

  ‘Don’t you know that’s the way we’re trained to think these days? Make the most of your leaves, chaps, because it will probably be your last!’ He put on a mock British accent as he said the words.

  ‘Are you on leave?’

  ‘Why else would I be savouring every minute of this evening with a beautiful lady?’

  The words seemed to float between them. The music played on, the dancers all around them moved back and forth across their vision, and they noticed none of it. Their footsteps slowed, until they were hardly moving, just holding each other in the middle of the dance floor.

  ‘I think I should be getting home,’ Angel murmured in sudden fright. ‘You promised to get me a cab, Jacques.’

  ‘Of course. We’ll go at once.’

  He steered her through the crowd, waving good-bye to Dolly and Reg, who gave them the thumbs up sign and danced on. Angel retrieved her coat and hat and overnight bag. Everything was being done in reverse. They would leave the club, being careful not to let any light shine outside to alert any enemy aircraft in the skies. They would climb the steep steps to the street. Jacques would put her into a taxi-cab, and the odds were that she would never see him again.

  They stood outside, suddenly awkward with one another. The rain had stopped, and the March wind had dropped to no more than a crisp breeze. Angel shivered all the same.

  ‘Do you really have to go home right away?’ Jacques’ voice was rich and deep. It wasn’t trying to persuade her, but it was as if, like her, he was reluctant for this evening to end.

  ‘I don’t have to,’ she said slowly. She looked up at him.

  ‘Shall we walk for a while, or is too cold for you?’

  ‘Of course not. I mean, no, it’s not too cold, and yes, I’d like to walk.’ Why did she suddenly feel so tongue-tied, so gauche and young, where minutes before she had felt so sophisticated and so much in control?

  Jacques took the small overnight bag from her hand, and tucked her hand in his arm protectively. She could feel the warmth of him against her, and as she saw him smile in the dim light to which she was quickly becoming accustomed, she felt a new mood take hold of her, a kind of recklessness.

  ‘Where shall we walk?’ she asked. ‘It sounds perfectly ridiculous, but I’ve rarely walked in London at night before, and never without my parents or a suitable chaperon!’

  ‘Am I not a suitable chaperon for you, chérie?’ His arm squeezed her to his side. ‘You will always be safe with me.’

  ‘I know.’ She answered as gravely as if she had known him always. It was almost ludicrous to be walking through the dark London streets, going nowhere, in an area she didn’t know.

  And yet to feel as if there was a sweet inevitability about everything that was happening tonight. Their footsteps led them to one of London’s small green parks, with its surround of wrought iron resembling black lace in the wisps of evening mist. They sat close together on a bench, and Jacques’ arm slid around Angel’s shoulders.

  ‘If only we had more time.’ Jacques spoke with an odd note of despair in his voice, as the sounds of London alternately loomed or receded all around them. ‘Like everyone else in this bloody war, we have so little time –’

  As he stopped abruptly, she glanced up at his strong profile, the breeze ruffling his dark hair, and she felt her heartbeat quicken. What he left unsaid was that they had so little time to be together…

  ‘Tell me how long you’ve been with the Royal Flying Corps,’ she said huskily in the new awareness between them that was almost brittle.

  ‘Seven months. But for the last six weeks I’ve been on pilot training. It’s what I always wanted, of course, only now I’ve found something that I want even more.’

  He looked at her. His fingers traced the soft curve of her cheek, and Angel held her breath. The hum of the late night London traffic was all around them, but she was only conscious of her own heartbeats, and Jacques’ voice.

  Angel trembled, not needing to be clairvoyant to know that Jacques would now be piloting one of the flimsy little flying machines on the dangerous missions over France.

  ‘Does your leave last much longer?’ She couldn’t trust herself to say anything more than prosaic words at that moment. She couldn’t even remember if he had already told her. It was all happening too soon … too frighteningly soon…

  ‘Just tonight.’

  From the disciplined flatness of his voice, Angel knew he didn’t say it as some kind of emoti
onal blackmail. She had asked the question, and the answer seemed to yawn like a chasm between them. Just tonight. And after that…?

  ‘Jacques, I think perhaps I had better go –’ she heard her own faint voice, and the hint of panic in it. He caressed her hands with his fingertips.

  ‘If that’s what you wish, I’ll find you a cab at once, chérie. I promised you that. What I want, more than anything in the world, is to take you back to my hotel. Scream if it shocks you, but I can’t bear to see you go. I don’t want to spend the rest of the night alone with just the memory of you.’

  Her mouth was too dry for her to speak. Her pulses raced. She knew exactly what Jacques’ words implied. And oh, she wanted it too … she wanted him, in a way that was totally new and elating and awesome to her…

  ‘I’m not in the habit of screaming,’ she whispered, her answer in the tightening of her fingers against his as she spoke, and his arms closed around her, enveloping her. She felt as though she was discovering an age-old truth. How long, after all, did it take to fall in love?

  They spoke very little in the cab that took them to the Hotel Portland where Jacques had a room for the night. And if this was seduction, Angel was very much aware that she was allowing it to happen. No one was forcing her, even though it was everything her mother had ever warned her against, and everything her sisters would despise.

  Louise would be scandalised; Ellen would say scornfully that she’d always known that eventually Angel wouldn’t be able to let a man keep his hands off her.

  Once they were inside Jacques’ room, he pulled across the heavy curtains and turned up the gaslight, and the room was bathed in a soft warm glow that hid the meanness of the decor and the basic furnishings. It wasn’t the Ritz, but it wasn’t the Ritz they were seeking.

  Jacques put her overnight bag onto a chair, and gently unfastened her coat, tossing her hat after it. She seemed too numbed to say anything now. She was here, in a hotel bedroom with a stranger she had known for less than a day, and the enormity of it all was only just beginning to strike her.