Truly, Madly, Deeply

by Romantic Novelist's Association

  ‘I’m supposed to be flying to New York on Friday on business,’ he said. ‘But let me know if Josh wants to meet up and I’ll cancel.’

  ‘Oh, right, OK.’ She nodded around the choking feeling in her throat.

  ‘Hey, Lizzie, don’t cry.’ He brushed the moisture from her cheeks with his thumbs. ‘I won’t put too much pressure on him, I swear.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she stuttered. ‘I think he’ll be excited and…’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘It just feels so huge, that something I never thought would happen –could happen –is going to happen…’ She hiccoughed, knowing she wasn’t making a lot of sense. ‘And when it does, we’ll always have to face the fact we could have had so much more.’

  His hands rubbed her arms and she realised it wasn’t just Ren’s relationship with their son she was talking about.

  ‘I know.’ He kissed her lightly, drew her close. ‘And I’m sure it’s going to make us both angry and resentful at times.’ He stroked an open palm down her hair. ‘But right now, I don’t want to think about any of that. I just want to start from here and see what happens.’ He pulled back, smoothed his thumbs over her cheeks. ‘You’ve given me a child, Lizzie. Something I never thought I could have. Knowing that and having you in my arms again, makes me feel like anything is possible.’

  She gulped down the emotion closing her throat, and smiled into those beautiful emerald eyes as the lift doors swished open.

  ‘Hi, folks, sorry to keep you waiting so long.’

  Liz glanced round at the short, sweaty young man standing outside the lift, beside two men in blue overalls.

  ‘Don’t be sorry.’ She dropped her head back onto Ren’s chest, circled his waist and felt his arms wrap tight around her shoulders. ‘We’re not.’

  Summer ’43

  India Grey

  India Grey

  INDIA GREY’s qualifications for a writing career include a degree in English Language and Literature, an obsession with fancy stationery and an inexhaustible passion for daydreaming. She grew up –and still lives –in a small market town in rural Cheshire with her husband and three daughters, loves history and vintage stuff and is a firm believer in love at first sight. She’s written eleven books for Mills and Boon’s Modern series.

  You can visit her website at www.indiagrey.com, check out her blog at www.indiagrey.blogspot.com or find her on Twitter@indiagrey.

  Summer ’43

  ‘One pound forty-four? But I only want half a dozen stamps!’

  Beneath their heavy dusting of powder Mrs Partridge’s cheeks quiver with indignation, but the currant-like eyes glaring at me through the glass partition are confused. I swallow my impatience as the bell over the shop door rings again.

  It’s always busy on a Friday. These days a good proportion of Whitbourne’s cottages are second homes for weekenders, who park their BMWs on the double yellow lines outside and nip in to buy lightbulbs and pints of milk. Today it’s even busier than usual, which is unfortunate as I’m here on my own and having to serve behind both the shop and post office counters. Ivy Partridge, who thinks it’s 1929 rather than 1992, is holding up the queue.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s how much they are these days, Ivy. Twenty-four pence each.’

  Although I’ve pitched my voice at a volume that can be heard by deaf old Mrs Partridge, I’m aware of someone else talking just as loudly. It’s the American accent that gets my attention and makes my heart lurch, even now. Of course, it’s the re-union this weekend. Fifty years since the USAAF rolled into Norfolk and changed it forever.

  I slide Mrs Partridge’s stamps through the little slot beneath the glass with a hand that isn’t quite steady. I’ve been trying to ignore the event, although it’s been harder than ever this time as the annual low-key commemoration has been turned into something altogether more ambitious in honour of the special anniversary. From behind my glass screen I’ve heard the plans being discussed for months; a new memorial to the 429th Bomb Group is going to be unveiled and –aware of time catching up with them, perhaps –more veterans than ever are predicted to attend.

  Lips pursed, Mrs Partridge finally manoeuvres herself and her shopping trolley out of the way, enabling me to see the loud American lady. She is standing beside the rack of postcards, and as I watch she picks up the spectacles that are resting on a gold chain against her lilac angora pullover and perches them on the end of her nose. Even without the accent I’d know straight away that she wasn’t from Whitbourne from her expensive jeans and superbly cut hair, tinted a shade of ash blonde not on the colour chart at Salon Valerie. I suppose she must be about my age, but she might as well be a different species.

  ‘Oh, look at these, aren’t they darling?’ she announces to the shop at large, picking up a card bearing a black and white image of Whitbourne, before cars were parked alongside the cottages and when Jim Brook’s garage was still a forge. ‘Lyle, honey, we must send some of these home! They’re so quaint!’

  My next customer moves up to the window but I don’t see who it is because darkness has gathered quite suddenly behind my eyes, like it does sometimes when I stand up too quickly. Lyle. Did I hear that right? I have to grip the edge of the counter until I know I won’t pass out, and when the darkness dissolves again it’s the American lady who is standing in front of the glass, laying the postcards in a fan before her.

  ‘I think there was a queue,’ I croak.

  She looks around, genuinely surprised. ‘Oh I beg your pardon –’

  ‘You go ahead.’ It’s Dan Lockett who moved aside for her. I hadn’t noticed him come in. He looks at me now and gives me the ghost of a smile. ‘I don’t mind waiting.’

  The lady beams, like a child that’s been given its own way. ‘Well now, I’d to send these to the United States. Six of them –one for each of our grandchildren. I can’t believe I found such perfect postcards! Lyle, honey, come and see.’

  There’s no mistaking the name this time. The worn lino on which I’ve stood almost every day for the last fifty years seems to dissolve beneath my feet and I feel like I’m spinning down through thin air. I’m aware of her husband coming over but I keep my head down, concentrating hard on opening up the big book of stamps and tearing carefully along the perforations. It might not be him, I tell myself. Lyle must be a common enough name in America, and since there were two thousand Yanks up at the base back then it’s possible there were dozens of Lyles. The stamps are torn out. I brace myself to hit the ground and look up.

  It’s him.

  He is holding one of the postcards, studying it at arm’s length, the way I do myself these days. My first thought, as my heart clenches painfully, is that he hasn’t changed, not a bit. It’s ridiculous of course, since no one looks the same at –what, seventy-four? –as they did fifty years earlier, but he is instantly, achingly familiar. The same heavy-lidded, laughing eyes; the same tanned, hollow cheeks.

  ‘Well, look at that –Just how I remember it.’

  The same voice, which used to make goosebumps rise on my arms.

  ‘My husband was with the 429th,’ the lilac lady –Lyle’s wife –explains proudly. ‘He was based here during the war.’

  ‘I know.’ I force the words past the lump in my throat. ‘I remember.’

  Her eyes widen and her face splits into an incredulous smile. ‘No? Lyle, d’you hear that, honey? This lady thinks she might remember you!’

  He lowers the postcard and through the glass his eyes meet mine. The same faded blue as I remember –a precise match, I used to think, for the washed-out blue squares on my mother’s checked tablecloth. I kept that tablecloth after she died for that reason. Have it still, somewhere.

  ‘Hope?’ he says with a slow-spreading smile. ‘Well I’ll be…Come out here and let me take a proper look at you!’

  And so, like a sleepwalker I leave my glass enclosure and go through into the shop. There, amid much laughing and oh-my-goshes from his wife, Lyle takes hold of
my shoulders and kisses me on each cheek. Then, with his eyes still on me, he puts his arm around his wife’s lilac shoulders and says, ‘Hope, I want you to meet Nancy. Nancy, this is Hope Riley.’

  ‘Oh Lyle, she might’ve been Hope Riley fifty years ago but I’m sure she has a different name now!’ Nancy Johnson laughs as she too kisses me on both cheeks. I breathe in her perfume with a pang of masochistic fascination.

  ‘No.’ Pulling away awkwardly, I tug my cardigan down over my tweed skirt, eating him up with my eyes. ‘No, that’s still my name. I never married.’

  ‘Oh, well fancy that!’ Nancy’s hands flutter to the glasses around her neck. For a second she looks a little flustered but rallies quickly. ‘Well, it sure is nice to meet you, Hope. We’re staying up at Alford Hall –do you know it? You must join us for dinner one evening, mustn’t she Lyle? Then you two can reminisce about old times.’

  Dear God. My hand goes to my mouth to hide an involuntary and wholly inappropriate burst of laughter. I look at Lyle, expecting to see my own horror at the idea of reminiscing about old times in front of his wife mirrored on his face, but he just smiles that smile that makes my bones melt.

  ‘That sounds like a fine idea. How ’bout we say tomorrow? Seven o’clock?’

  Seven o’clock. I hear myself repeat it, as if that might make it seem less surreal. It’s only after Lyle and his wife have left the shop that I remember my other customers. I look around for Dan Lockett, but he’s already gone.

  Alford Hall used to be home to the Pemberton family and a staff of thirty until the war changed their fortunes and robbed them of both their sons. These days it’s one of a discreet chain of carefully-styled hotels, frequented by businessmen and groups of women on spa weekends. I haven’t been near the place for years.

  Lyle and Nancy are waiting for me in the lobby, sitting on an overstuffed sofa beside the empty fireplace, drinks on the table in front of them. Nancy sees me first and gets up, her hands outstretched. She’s wearing a narrow two-piece of dull gold silk, a thousand times more elegant than my Laura Ashley shirtdress, or indeed anything else I’ve ever owned.

  ‘You look a picture,’ she says kindly. ‘Doesn’t she, Lyle?’

  ‘She sure does.’

  His voice is warm and approving and his eyes move lazily over me like they used to, even though his wife is watching. He seems perfectly at ease, but then he always did. It was one of the things that thrilled me; that in the midst of all the chaos and danger he should be so completely relaxed. ‘What can I get you to drink, Hope? We’re having gin and tonics.’

  My skin prickles. I shake my head. ‘Sherry, please.’

  I long to follow him to the bar but Nancy pats the sofa beside her, inviting me to sit.

  ‘So, tell me all about yourself, Hope,’ she says, and gives a peal of silvery laughter. ‘I was going to ask if you’ve lived in Whitbourne long, but I guess I already know the answer to that.’

  ‘I was born here,’ I say, struggling to match her vivacity and failing entirely. ‘My father was the vicar. I started work in the post office when I was seventeen, the year the US Army arrived. The men from the base used to come in all the time, although in those days there was precious little to buy.’

  It became a joke between us, Lyle and me. Once he’d spent his plentiful GI pay on more string and ink than any man could reasonably need he began to think up increasingly ridiculous errands as an excuse to come in. He’d ask for a refill for the air in his bicycle pump, camouflage paint, a tube of elbow grease; all the time looking at me with those lazy blue-sky eyes that told me what he really wanted. Me. Me.

  When he comes back with my sherry he tells us that our table is ready. As we go into the dining room I try to meet his eye to see if he too is remembering the last time we went out to dinner together. The first and only time.

  Ten missions down his crew got forty-eight hours leave; time too precious to waste on crowded trains bound unreliably for London. We went to Cambridge, where he checked us into a hotel as Mr and Mrs Johnson. On honeymoon, he told the stony-faced receptionist, and got away with it too, thanks to the uniform, the accent, the smile. I kept my hands rammed into my pockets because I had no ring. In the lift on the way up to our room he made easy conversation with the prehistoric porter, while all the time his hand was beneath my jacket, his fingers tracing circles of ecstasy down my spine.

  It was my first time but I wasn’t scared. Lyle was different from the undernourished English boys I knew. I was different. Since I’d met him I’d been filled with a kind of energy, almost violent in its intensity, and as he kicked shut the door of our sparse little room and pressed me against it, I suddenly understood what it was for.

  I still remember every detail of that room, from the pattern in the gold rayon curtains to the cigarette burns on the bedside table. We didn’t leave it much, except to dash down to the icy bathroom at the end of the corridor, and for dinner that night in the echoing dining room.

  As he pulls my chair out I am back there. The modern-day opulence of the ‘Pemberton Restaurant’ fades and I can smell over boiled greens, sense the curious stares of other diners rapidly souring into disapproval when Lyle slides his hand up my thigh under the tablecloth and I let out a yelp of laughter and lust.

  ‘I expect you dine here a lot,’ Nancy says now, looking at me over the top of the leatherette folder that holds the menu.

  ‘Not often, no. My goddaughter’s son got married here, but other than that—’

  ‘You have godchildren? Oh, how wonderful.’ Her face lights up with relief at this conversational lifeline. ‘How many?’

  ‘Four. Plus two nieces and five great-nieces and nephews. Far easier and more enjoyable than having any myself.’

  It’s a line I’ve used so many times over the years that it trips off my tongue automatically. Nancy laughs and reaches for her handbag.

  ‘You’re right about that. That’s why I love being a grandma –you can spoil ’em like crazy and give ’em back before bedtime. Here, let me show you ours.’ She’s taken a Kodak envelope from her bag and is shuffling prints like a croupier with a deck of cards. ‘Three fine sons and six adorable grandchildren. There’s Tiffany and Madison –they’re Michael’s girls –and Casey and Lyle Junior…’

  Their tanned, smiling faces blur into one, but I notice their eyes. Blue eyes. Lyle’s eyes, staring out at me from every photograph, accusingly it seems, although I’m prepared to accept that’s my own paranoia. Or guilt. Even so, after a few more snaps I have to look away.

  ‘Forgive me, I’m boring you.’ Briskly Nancy gathers the photographs together, smiling to disguise the fact that she’s hurt. ‘I guess you never wanted kids yourself then?’

  It’s very hot in the dining room. My mouth is dry. I pick up my glass and drain the last of the sherry.

  ‘I didn’t want to be like my sister, Joy,’ I say quietly, looking straight at Lyle. ‘I didn’t want to spend my life washing nappies and mashing up carrots.’

  He is studying the wine list as if he really is interested in it. As if he genuinely doesn’t remember. But perhaps he can sense my eyes on him because he shuts the folder with a snap and smiles widely at both of us.

  ‘As this is a special occasion, whaddya say I order us some champagne?’

  I can’t sleep. Too much champagne, probably. My heart is racing and my mind is trying to keep pace with it.

  It’s 3.30 am, and I’ve taken the box in which I store things of sentimental significance down from the top of the wardrobe. I can’t stop thinking about the photographs Nancy showed me; the children’s faces have been flickering in a jerky slideshow behind my eyelids as I’ve been trying to sleep. I move aside invitations to long-ago weddings and yellowed snippets from newspapers, delving down through the strata of my life until I find what I’m looking for.

  It’s the only photograph I have of myself and Lyle, the only one that exists. His arm is around me and we’re both laughing, which has made our faces blur slight
ly. Dan Lockett took it when we came across him in Whitbourne woods one day –his father was a forester on the Alford estate and they had a cottage up there. Dan was turned down by the Army, on account of a weak heart, apparently. He had a desk job in some department or other, but he’d broken his ankle –God knows how, in an office –and been sent home to recuperate that summer.

  I look at the photograph for a long time, then close my eyes and let the colours bleed back into the faded black and white scene. It’s late afternoon; the sun is warm on my face and there are bits of leaves in my hair. My hips ache pleasantly, and the tops of my thighs are damp because today Lyle forgot to bring a French letter. He didn’t discover this until he had unbuttoned my dress and kissed me all the way up from my navel to my mouth, by which time both of us were way past caring. One time, he says afterwards. One time’ll be fine.

  It better had be, I say lightly. I am seventeen and hungry for life beyond the vicarage and the post office; the life we’ve talked about having together once the war is over and he has broken it off with Nancy. I don’t want to end up like Joy, and spend my days washing nappies and mashing up carrots.

  Laughing into the camera, we have already forgotten about the gamble we have taken. It is getting late and Lyle has to get back to the base. Tomorrow, although he doesn’t know it yet, he will fly his sixteenth mission, to Regensburg; a mission that will go down in USAAF history as one of its most ill-fated. Sixty B-17s will be lost, hundreds of men killed, including the navigator and tail gunner in Lyle’s crew. Lyle, in the top turret, will be hit in the shoulder and elbow. He’ll be taken to hospital in Lincoln, but it will be two frantic weeks before I find this out, by which time he will be on a Red Cross ship halfway across the Atlantic.

  We have shared our last cigarette, our last shivering orgasm, and are down to the last few of our numberless kisses, but we know none of this as he puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me against his body and we squint into the afternoon sunlight and laugh.