by Annie Groves
‘Mere means a bit of a lake, like, you see,’ Luke explained earnestly. ‘That’s what they call them in Cheshire.’
Katie had been upset and disappointed at first when her father had told her not to even think of travelling back to London whilst there was still so much danger of it being bombed, even though she knew that her parents wanted to protect her, but then Luke had suggested that since he had leave, they should spend the weekend together, and he had managed to borrow from somewhere a pair of bicycles for them and book them rooms – one each – at a couple of pubs that had been recommended to him so that they could have a ‘bit of a cycling holiday’, as he had put it, and he could show her something of Cheshire.
Although she hadn’t known Luke long, Katie knew that she could trust him. As the eldest son of the family he took his responsibilities to his siblings very seriously, and he would look after her and protect her just as determinedly as he did them, Katie knew – including if necessary protecting her from his own male desires.
Almost comically it had been Jean and not her own parents who had raised an objection to them sleeping under the same roof unchaperoned by a watchful parental eye, and she had made it plain that her concern was for Katie’s reputation, not her own son’s.
Whilst Luke had looked embarrassed, Katie had told Jean gently but firmly, ‘I know that I can trust Luke to be a gentleman, and I do trust him.’
‘When we used to come here as kids we’d come on the train and the first thing we’d do when we got off was ask for an ice cream,’ Luke was saying now.
‘Mm, don’t torment me,’ Katie laughed. The war meant that there was no ice cream today, but there were blue skies and sunshine, and the grass was warm beneath their backs as they lay down, wrapped in the old-as-time special privacy that all lovers feel, sharing that silent communication that needs no words and speaks heart to heart. The whole of the grassy bank that led down to the water might be busy with other people, the spring afternoon filled with the sound of other voices, but they were oblivious to them.
Luke reached for Katie’s hand, winding his fingers through hers.
‘I was a fool for getting it all wrong about you when I first saw you,’ he told her.
‘Well, you did hear me saying that I wasn’t interested in men in uniform,’ Katie reassured him. ‘You weren’t to know that I was just saying it because I didn’t want Carole egging me on to flirt, and then getting annoyed with me when I wouldn’t.’
‘You were in the right of it, really. It’s plain daft for a girl to go falling in love with a chap who’s in uniform when there’s a war on.’
Fear clutched at Katie’s heart.
‘I reckon that sooner or later our lot will be seeing some action.’
‘But you are seeing action. You’re on home duties, and look at all the bombs we’ve had,’ Katie protested.
Her fingers had tightened on Luke’s now, and he returned the pressure, trying to soothe her.
‘Defending the country isn’t like going into action. Stands to reason that them that are fighting will have to be stood down and brought home at some point, and that we’ll be sent out in their place.’
Katie sat up and looked down at him anxiously. Had he already heard something but wasn’t allowed to tell her? War brought so many secrets that had to be kept, as she knew all too well. Her own role in fighting the enemy was causing her plenty of sleepless nights. Following her first letter, a response had been received, and now she had been asked to write back to that. She knew that what she was doing was for the benefit of the country but somehow it didn’t feel right, keeping the fact that she was writing to another man – for they knew now that it was a man – from Luke, even though there was a good reason for what she was doing. The whole business of having to fit the messages she was being given into the code that had been broken, and then turn them into letters that read as though they were from a woman engaged in the beginning of a love affair, made Katie feel very uncomfortable, and would have done even without Luke in her life, she suspected. There was no one, though, with whom she could discuss her feelings – not Luke, as she was forbidden to talk about the letters to anyone not directly involved, and not her supervisor either, at least not without seeming unpatriotic.
Only the previous week Grace had commented on the secret nature of Seb’s work, saying that she knew it was difficult for him not being able to talk to her about what he was doing.
‘He feels guilty about it, I know, but like I’ve said to him, it’s his duty and he’s saving people’s lives with what he’s doing just as much as we are at the hospital with what we are doing.’
Seb, though, was intercepting messages, not writing letters to another girl. Or maybe it was just that it was easier for a woman to accept a man’s duty to his country than it was for a man to accept a woman’s, Katie reflected, because something told her that Luke would not be as understanding. He had already shown signs of jealousy, and didn’t like it at all when they were at the Grafton and another chap looked at her or, even worse, asked her to dance, not realising that she was with someone. Of course, it was flattering that he cared enough to feel possessive about her, but Katie had grown up aware of the damage her parents’ jealousy of one another, and the quarrels and discord that had led to, had done to their marriage, and she didn’t want that in her own marriage.
Marriage. Who had said anything about that? Certainly not Luke.
Katie pulled up a blade of grass and leaned over, tickling Luke’s face with it until he reached for her, pulling her down towards him.
Katie’s laughter died as she looked into his eyes and saw the passion there. Her heart began an unsteady excited flutter of small thuds. This was the time when she should pull away and suggest that they get back on their bikes. If she stayed here now then she would be inviting all those things, and all that temptation that Jean had been so anxious for them to avoid.
So why, instead of pulling back, was she leaning closer until her curls brushed Luke’s cheek and his hand reached up to hold the nape of her neck so that he could bring her down within reach of his kiss?
It was the sensation of a child’s ball bumping against her legs that brought Katie back to reality. The big grin the child’s parents – only a young couple themselves – gave them both as the father retrieved the ball made Katie blush and Luke look very male and protective.
‘Come on,’ Luke told her. ‘Let’s walk for a while.’
The village was very pretty in that traditional English way that catches at the heart, with narrow streets filled with a jumble of Georgian, Queen Anne and Tudor buildings in soft red brick. There was even some bunting up across the street for an annual rowing regatta, for all the world as though there was no war at all, and indeed, here today it was almost possible to imagine that there wasn’t, Katie conceded as she and Luke walked hand in hand.
‘Do you still love her, Luke, the girl who was so mean to you?’
Katie’s face burned a fiery red. She had no idea where the words had come from because she had certainly not intended to spoil the day by asking them, even though they had been niggling at her heart for quite some time now.
For a minute Katie thought that Luke was angry with her, and so she said contritely, ‘I’m sorry, I had no right to ask you that. It’s none of my business.’
Immediately Luke squeezed her hand and told her firmly, ‘Well, I should hope that it is, seeing as I happen to think that any lad you might have had a soft spot for before you met me is very much my business.’
‘But I haven’t been out with any other boys.’
‘But was there any you wanted to go out with, a special one perhaps?’
Again Katie could hear that sharp note of jealousy in his voice. It was easy to reassure him, though, by telling him that she hadn’t, since it was the truth.
‘Well, I’m glad about that because, you see, Katie, feeling the way I do about you I don’t want to think that you’ve got a soft spot for anyone else. And as for
Lillian, I did fancy myself in love with her, it’s true, but I reckon I was more in love with the idea of being in love than with Lillian herself. Once I found out what she was really like I was glad she’d got herself someone else. I was just a boy then; I’m a man now, and it’s as a man that I’m telling you that I reckon I’ve fallen in love with you, Katie.’
Katie’s chin tilted. ‘Well, if you only reckon …’ she told him pertly.
‘All right then, I know,’ Luke corrected himself softly, making the words a deliberate challenge that Katie herself had to meet.
‘I – I feel the same way about you,’ she admitted, objecting breathlessly when Luke seized her in his arms, ‘Luke, you can’t kiss me here …’
But it was too late because that was exactly what he was doing.
Charlie was well pleased with himself. His parents were certainly well pleased with him, even if his sister, Bella, hadn’t stopped pulling a sour face from the moment he and Daphne had arrived on Good Friday to spend Easter with Charlie’s parents.
Everyone knew that it wasn’t just because it was Easter that he and Daphne were here. The ring he’d borrowed the money off his father to buy, a single diamond – a single very expensive diamond, in fact – was now shining brightly on Daphne’s finger. He and Daphne had chosen it together, or rather Daphne had chosen it and he’d whistled silently under his breath and hoped that his father was feeling generous. He certainly ought to be, with a hero for a son and a double-barrelled with a father a ‘name’ at Lloyd’s as his daughter-in-law-to-be.
Lord, but it had made Charlie grin to himself to see Bella’s expression when she had realised that he was now the perfect son and she was the one who got the parental frowns. After all, he’d had enough years of it being the other way round. Poor old Bella, she wasn’t even going to get a look in at the wedding either. Daphne had as good as said that she wasn’t going to ask Bella to be one of her attendants.
‘It doesn’t seem right somehow, with her being widowed, and as Mummy has already said, with me having two cousins of my own and there being a war on … Oh, Charles, I’m so happy,’ Daphne had told him. ‘And so are Mummy and Daddy. Knowing how close you were to dearest Eustace makes you and me so very special.’
Charlie had agreed, of course he had, but in reality he was getting a bit fed up of the constant references to Eustace, and Daphne’s eyes filling with tears every time she mentioned him, which seemed to be hundreds of times a day. Eustace was dead now, after all. Charlie had tried jollying Daphne along, and hinting to her that he preferred girls who were fun, although of course he hadn’t told her that he preferred them so much that he’d already been tempted by one very jolly girl indeed who lived in the village close to the base. Luckily she was married, so no danger there of any problems, should Charlie find himself in the kind of situation a chap would be a fool to deny himself.
For now, though, he was on his best behaviour, the perfect newly engaged young man, a hero, whose father-in-law-to-be had shaken his hand with tears in his eyes when he had given him permission to propose to his daughter.
‘Bella’s been able to get tickets for you and Daphne for the Tennis Club dance, Charles, haven’t you, Bella?’
Bella gave her brother a thin smile. ‘Yes.’
Just as Laura had predicted, the committee had been almost ready to fall over themselves to provide tickets for a hero of the Battle of Britain – a full table of six of them. Bella had spent a lot of time thinking about Jan since Laura had commented on how good-looking he was. She was looking forward to showing up at the Tennis Club dance on the arm of a Battle of Britain hero, all the more so because she knew how much Laura wanted him to partner her.
Not that Bella had any personal interest in Jan. How could she have? He was, after all, a refugee with no country and no money. It was unfortunate that Laura had included Bettina in her invitation to Jan to go with them to the dance. Bella was well aware that Jan’s sister despised her. Well, Bella didn’t care.
She didn’t care much either for the manner in which Laura had now taken to ordering her about, like she had done earlier this week when the crèche had been officially opened, but Bella had been forced to remain in the background whilst Laura greeted the dignitaries and smiled for the local press photographer.
They had now been inundated with enquiries about places at the crèche, and it had been Bella who had had the dull and time-consuming job of taking all the names and addresses of the mothers applying on behalf of their infants and then preparing a typed list in alphabetical order to include the names and dates of birth of all the children.
Bella had been seething when Laura had complained that Bella hadn’t put the children, when there was more than one to a family, in date-of-birth order.
‘You never said that you wanted me to do that,’ she had defended herself.
Laura had simply said firmly, ‘I thought you would have known to do it without me having to say, Bella. You are my assistant, after all, and it is what I would have done.’
As Bella was quickly discovering, there were two sides to Laura.
There was the Laura who treated Bella as an equal and who linked her arm with Bella’s and wanted to be her friend, especially when it came to talking about Jan, and then there was the Laura who was very quick to let not just Bella herself, but also the world at large, know that she was the one in authority and Bella the one who had to obey that authority.
Well, tonight Laura was going to learn that when it came to attracting men it wasn’t having the most authority that counted, but having the prettiest face. And she, Bella thought smugly, was beyond any doubt the prettier of the two of them.
Bella was jerked out of this pleasant mental confirmation of her own unassailable status by her mother, who was still going on about June being the perfect month for a wedding, and the importance of not wasting any time in getting things organised.
‘You’ll want to get married in your own parish church, of course,’ Vi smiled, her mind busy with plans. In one sense it was a pity that Daphne’s home was so far away because that meant that Vi herself could not be as involved in the wedding preparations as she would have liked. After all, she already had the experience of having organised Bella’s wedding, which everyone had said had been the wedding of its year, and Bella quite definitely Wallasey’s bride of the year. Daphne was a lovely girl and sweetly pretty, but her looks in no way rivalled Bella’s, and with the war on it would be next to impossible for her to find a wedding gown that could rival Bella’s.
‘It’s such a shame that you are so much taller than Bella,’ Vi gushed, ‘otherwise you could have worn her wedding dress.’
‘Oh, that’s very kind of you but I think that Mummy is planning to have her own gown altered for me. Mummy’s going to ask her cousin if we can borrow Great-grandmother’s lace veil and tiara.’
Any sense of dissatisfaction Vi might have felt at not being able to have a say in Daphne’s wedding dress was swiftly forgotten when Daphne uttered the word ‘tiara’. Vi felt positively light-headed with the joy and pride that filled her. Just wait until she told her WVS group that her son’s bride would be wearing the ‘family’ tiara. She would only mention it casually, of course, just dropping the information in so as not to sound boastful or awaken any resentment.
‘Well, of course, naturally your mother will want you to wear it,’ she managed to agree.
It was just as well really that the South of England was too far away for her twin sister, Jean, and her family to be able to travel to the wedding, Vi decided. Such refinements as a double-barrelled surname, Lloyd’s and a tiara would all be wasted on Jean and her down-to-earth husband, Sam. Sometimes Vi actually felt that Sam, instead of being in awe of her Edwin, was actually slightly contemptuous of him, but that, of course, was impossible.
‘I must write to your mother, Daphne, and offer my help. After all, I have organised a wedding myself and I may be able to give her some little tips, and June isn’t that far away.�
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‘Mummy and Daddy think that we should wait for a while,’ Daphne told Vi. ‘They were engaged for a year before they got married and, as Daddy says, with Charles feeling so strongly that he wants to continue in uniform even though he’s been told that medically he’s not really fit enough to do so, we should perhaps wait.’
Vi looked at Edwin, who immediately looked grimly and meaningfully at Charlie. It had cost Edwin an arm and a leg to find a doctor who was prepared to state that Charlie’s ‘bad back’ meant that he should be dismissed from the army on the grounds that he was medically unfit, and now here was ruddy Charlie over-egging the bread as usual, by the sound of it, and damn-near getting himself stuck in uniform.
‘Well, of course, I hate the thought of not staying in uniform,’ Charlie informed them all, correctly interpreting his father’s grim look, ‘especially when I’d been looking forward to fighting for Eustace as well as for myself.’
Bella rolled her eyes when she saw the way in which Charlie’s claim had Daphne reaching for his hand, a look of blind adoration in her eyes. Daphne really must be stupid to be taken in so easily by Charlie, Bella thought unkindly.
‘But since the doc has as good as told me that my back could give out altogether if I’m not careful, I don’t think I’ve got any choice but to accept that from now on my contribution to the war effort will have to be whatever I can do whilst working for you, Dad.’
‘Well said, son,’ Edwin approved over-heartily.
‘Daddy’s worried about us being able to find somewhere to live,’ Daphne continued, still clinging on to Charlie’s hand.
‘Well, that’s no problem,’ said Vi immediately. ‘Bella has that lovely house right here in Wallasey that her father bought when she got married. It’s far too big for her now, and to be honest I’ve been thinking for a while that it would make much more sense for Bella to come back home. If you and Daphne were to move into it, Charles, we’d probably even be able to get rid of those wretched refugees. After all, Daphne’s parents are bound to want to come up and visit her.’