by Annie Groves
‘You said we were going to have fun,’ she reminded him with a little girl pout. ‘I thought you meant you’d be taking me to the theatre and out dancing…so that we could celebrate our engagement.’
‘Yeah, yeah, and so we will, but right now the kind of fun I want is the kind that comes with a double bed and a beautiful broad.’
Diane sat on the tartan rug, within view of the pretty small lake at Ellesmere, the little town almost on the borders of Cheshire and Wales. Lee had driven her through it when he had been looking for billets, although in reality it was too far out and she had said at the time how lovely she had thought it was, with its black and white buildings and its sense of being a world away from the war. Although they were too far away to see the faces of the occupants clearly, she could hear the laughter coming from the rowing boats on the lake and the splash of the oars of the amateur oarsmen, most of them young men rowing their girls. This was an English summer at its best, surely, with the smell of grass, and the lazy hum of worker bees filling the air around them. Ellesmere was undoubtedly a place for lovers, just as summer was a time for lovers, but she must not think about that, no matter how ironic and painful it was that Lee had brought her here. If only she were free simply to relax and enjoy everything that Ellesmere and its lake had to offer, but sadly she was not. Her arms wrapped tightly round her knees, she was looking straight ahead, but she wasn’t really seeing the view. Instead her thoughts were focused on what she knew she had to do.
‘We can’t do this. We mustn’t do this, Lee. We…we can’t be together,’ she burst out miserably.
‘Why not?’
‘How can you ask me that? You know why not. You’re married.’
‘My marriage is over, and that’s not just some line I’m shooting you, Di. It’s the truth. Look, I didn’t want this to happen to us any more than you did. In fact, I swore I wasn’t going to let it happen. Hell, I damn near busted a gut fighting not to let it happen, but since it has…surely you can see that we’d be fools not to take what we’ve been given? Be honest with me. How many people get to feel like this?’
‘Plenty of them, from what I’ve heard.’ Diane’s voice was metallic and thin with pain, as she struggled not to let Lee see just what his words were doing to her.
‘No, not plenty of them,’ he corrected her. ‘Very few, I would guess. This for us has come against all the odds – you know that as well as I do.’ He reached for her hand.
Diane tried to snatch it away but he wouldn’t let her.
‘Don’t try to tell me that you don’t feel the same way I do.’
‘It doesn’t matter how I feel. Can’t you see how wrong it would be?’ she protested with despair. ‘No matter what you say about your marriage, you are married.’
‘And you’re still in love with a guy who dumped you.’
Diane drew in her breath as she tried to stop the pain gripping her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, after she had finally exhaled, ‘yes, I am.’
‘But you still want me…’
She wanted to refute what he was saying so badly that it hurt, but she knew that her own honesty wouldn’t let her.
‘You love him but you want me,’ he persisted. ‘You know what I think? I think you’re afraid to admit that you might have stopped loving him because you’re afraid of admitting that you could have started to love me.’
‘No, that isn’t true.’
She sprang up, shaking her head in angry denial, oblivious to the curious looks she was attracting from the other couples who had come to this lake on the outskirts of a Cheshire village, with its tranquillity and the privacy it afforded eager lovers.
‘This can’t happen, Lee. It mustn’t.’ She was perilously close to breaking point. ‘We both know all about the temptations for a married man going off to war, when he’s far from home, and we both know too what happens to the women who are foolish enough to get involved with them: wartime “wives” who are no such thing. And what if you are lying to me? What if your wife really does love you? Do you think I could live with myself if I thought I’d been responsible for causing that kind of pain to another woman; a woman who has the right to…to everything?’
‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you?’
When she didn’t make any response, the major continued thickly, ‘With every word you’re saying you’re making me fall deeper in love with you, Di.’
‘Well, you mustn’t. You mustn’t. All we can ever be is…is two people fighting together to win this war. Nothing more than that. Nothing!’
The starkness of the silence between them strained her nerves, the echoes of her emotional words dying slowly on the air as though to reproach her for what she was destroying.
‘If that’s what you want?’
She could hear the heaviness in his voice and she could feel it too in her own heart, but she had to do the right thing.
‘Yes…yes. It is what I want…’
She couldn’t look at him. If she did he would see that her heart was breaking. Why did this have to happen to her? Wasn’t it enough that she had lost Kit? Did fate have to compound that blow by making her fall in love with a married man?
‘I…I want you to take me back to Liverpool.’
It was only just gone six o’clock and the long light summer evening stretched ahead of them, but Diane knew she couldn’t trust herself to spend it with Lee. Not and keep the vow she had made to herself. How could this have happened? How could she have gone from thinking of him as someone whose dislike for her she returned, to someone she ached for and longed for, heart and body? It was the war that had done it, of course; the war, and the knowledge that life was frighteningly brief, that the man you held in your arms tonight might be dead tomorrow, that happiness had to be snatched from the jaws of fear and death and taken on the run before it was lost.
She bent down to start packing away the remains of their picnic, stiffening as she felt Lee kneel down next to her.
‘Tell me something,’ he demanded as he folded up the rug. ‘If you hadn’t known that I was married, what would your answer have been then?’
‘Whatever it would have been, it wouldn’t have altered the fact that I was still helping you to break your marriage vows,’ Diane told him quietly. ‘The only difference is that you would have been deceiving me as well as your wife.’
Myra lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling. It was over, thankfully. She could hear the sound of Nick showering in the adjoining bathroom, cursing without any heat at the inefficiency of the shower, and then starting to whistle cheerfully.
There would be bruises on her body tomorrow, her arms where he had gripped her too tightly and her breasts where he had squeezed and kneaded them, convinced that he was giving her pleasure. A ‘gift’ he had made her pay back with interest. She grimaced and wiped her hand across her mouth. She had been too startled to refuse when he had grabbed hold of her hair and pushed her face down towards his groin. Jim would never have expected her to do anything like that. Her whole body had stiffened in rejection. He had obviously not sensed how she was feeling, though, too carried away by his own arousal either to notice or, she suspected, care how she felt. But then Myra had grown up with a father who, via his treatment of her mother, had taught her that men were selfish and did not care about the women they professed to love, wanting only to have their own needs met.
She watched now as he came into the bedroom, naked from his shower. His body was heavily muscled and dark with body hair. There were scars on his arms and one low down on his belly.
‘Don’t worry, baby cakes,’ he had told her when he had seen her looking at them. ‘I’m still alive, but the guys who left me aren’t. They’re lying in New York harbour in a block of cement. No one double-crosses the Mancini family and gets away with it.
‘Still feeling hungry?’ he asked her now suggestively.
Myra shielded her eyes with her lashes so that he wouldn’t see the look of angry rejection in them. Forcing a pout she reminde
d him, ‘You promised to take me out dancing.’
‘Sure, and so I am, but you gotta get dressed first.’ He picked up his wallet and removed several five-pound notes.
‘I want my girl to be the best-looking girl on that dance floor tonight, sugar plum, so you go down to the beauty shop and get yourself the works. Take as much time as you want. I’ve got a guy I need to meet up with to talk over a bit of business.’
And he wanted her out of the way whilst he did so, Myra recognised. Well, if that was what he wanted, he could have it – at a price.
‘It will take more than a visit to the hairdresser to make me look as glamorous as the other women staying here,’ she told him, with a deliberate sigh.
As she had hoped, Nick peeled off several more notes.
‘Here, take this and go buy yourself something pretty,’ he told her. ‘Ask the doorman. He’ll know where you can get what you want.’
Forty pounds. Nick had given her forty pounds – an absolute fortune. Her dislike of the sexual intimacies he had demanded was already almost forgotten.
TWENTY-THREE
‘Are you all right, Ruthie, only you’ve hardly said a word, and what with you and your Glen going to see the vicar on Saturday I thought you’d have bin chattering nineteen to the dozen, telling us all about it,’ Jess teased Ruthie, her expression changing as she looked at her properly and saw her red-rimmed eyes. ‘Oh, you and Glen haven’t had a fall-out, have you?’
The bus taking them to work swung round a corner, causing Ruthie to fall heavily against Jess.
‘No, it’s nothing like that,’ she told her miserably as she straightened up.
‘So what is it then?’
‘It’s just…Oh, Jess,’ tears flooded from her eyes, ‘the most dreadful thing’s happened. An awful fight…Poor Walter’s been badly hurt and…’ As quickly as she could, Ruthie explained what had happened.
‘You mean that GI that Myra’s walking out with beat poor Walter up for no reason at all?’
Ruthie could hear the shocked indignation in Jess’s voice.
‘Glen said it was because Nick has a grudge against Walter because he’d seen him cheating at cards. There’s a group of them in the platoon, apparently, that all play cards together, and they bet and drink heavily. Glen says that it’s always leading to trouble and fights. But I still haven’t told you the worst thing.’
‘What “worst thing”?’
Ruthie bit her lip and said wearily, ‘When the police came, Nick told them that it was Glen who had been hitting Walter, and she – that Myra -backed him up. By the time the MPs got there they’d gone. This Nick with Myra had told the police that they’d got a train to catch. I tried to tell the police that it wasn’t true what they’d said about my Glen being the one to hurt Walter, but they wouldn’t listen. Glen said it didn’t matter because Walter would be able to tell them what happened once he was well enough. The policeman asked me if they’d been drinking because he could smell it on their breath, but it was only a bit of something Mr Brown, our neighbour, had given them after we got back from seeing the vicar…’ Tears welled in Ruthie’s eyes. ‘Glen said he’d be in touch with me as soon as he could, but I haven’t heard anything yet.’
‘Well, it’s only been a few hours, hasn’t it?’ Jess pointed out practically. ‘Seeing as it were only yesterday dinner and we’re on an early shift today. Oh, but poor Walter. I wish I’d bin with you. I’d have had something to say to that Myra, telling lies like that,’ she announced robustly. ‘She’s a fool if she keeps on seeing that Nick now. If it was me I’d have bin off like a shot the first time he showed me that he had a nasty temper.’
Ruthie gave a small shudder. ‘It was so frightening Jess. Glen tried to stop him but he just kept on kicking Walter and he hit Glen too.’
‘Now don’t you go getting yourself upset about it all over again. If your Glen told you not to worry then that’s what you must do. You look like you haven’t slept a wink.’
‘I haven’t,’ Ruthie admitted.
‘You shouldn’t have come in this morning.’
Ruthie gazed at her wide-eyed. ‘I…I couldn’t stay off. After all, there isn’t anything wrong with me, and it wouldn’t be right, would it?’
‘Well, it won’t be right either if you fall asleep in the middle of filling one of them shells and end up with TNT all over you, will it?’ Jess told her firmly, as the bus pulled up at the factory gates.
She was feeling doubly guilty for not going with Ruthie and the two men to see the vicar now, Jess admitted as they all stood up to get off the bus. Poor Ruthie was so gentle and unworldly that she simply wasn’t up to coping with something like this. The poor kid would probably have nightmares about it for weeks, Jess thought compassionately. And as for poor Walter, it was just as well that his girl back home didn’t know what had happened to him. She’d be worrying herself sick, just as she would if it had been…Now what was she thinking? Just because Billy had told a whopping big fib about joining the bomb disposal lot because he wanted to impress her, and just because he had snatched a dance with her before Yvonne had come storming over demanding that he dance with her, that didn’t mean…well, it didn’t mean anything, Jess told herself firmly, and it was high time she got that through her own silly head and her even sillier heart.
Ruthie tried to focus on the normal morning routine of changing out of her own clothes and into her overall, tucking her hair up into the cotton cap provided for that purpose, as she got ready to go into the cleanway area. All around her the other girls were doing the same, meticulously removing anything they were wearing containing metal because of the danger from the TNT.
‘Here, give us the key to your locker a minute, will you, Ruthie?’ Maureen whispered quietly, sidling over to her. ‘Only I’ve bin promised a bit of stuff for the kiddies, like, for Christmas. Just a few tins…’
Ruthie winced, lifting her hand to her forehead, her head was aching with worrying so much. If only Glen would just get in touch and tell her that Walter was all right and that he had explained what had happened, but she knew she mustn’t worry. After all, Glen had told her not to. Instead she should think about their wedding and how happy they were going to be. How long would it be before she and Glen were interviewed by his commanding officer? Two months’ notice of their planned wedding date, Glen had told her he had had to give. They had told the vicar that and so he had suggested the third Saturday in October, which gave them a bit of extra time.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Maureen demanded impatiently.
‘Yes, of course I am,’ Ruthie told her. ‘Only you know I don’t approve of black-market things,’ she reminded her uncomfortably.
‘Oh, that’s just typical of someone like you wot’s got a GI boyfriend,’ Maureen snapped angrily. She had adopted the fashion amongst some of the girls for keeping a piece of her hair free of her cap so that the TNT could turn it yellow – or if one’s hair was very dark, orange.
‘You’d never get me doing nowt like that,’ Mel had sniffed critically. ‘Who wants everyone knowing that you’re working in munitions?’
‘Aye, and just think about what could happen if a chap leaned over to offer you a light for your cig, with them TNT fumes dying your hair,’ Leah had grinned.
Personally Ruthie couldn’t take to the fashion at all, and was only too glad to protect her hair from the effect of the TNT. It was bad enough ending up with yellow-tinted skin.
‘It’s all right for you, isn’t it? You don’t have to go wi’out nothing. I’ll bet he brings more than a few tins when he comes round your house. I’ll bet there’s chocolate and stockings, and ciggies and all sorts gets given to you, all stuff wots on ration, and you’re getting it for free. And then you’ve got the nerve to go telling me that I shouldn’t have a bit of black-market stuff for the kiddies wot’s cost me an arm and a leg.’
As usual, Ruthie acknowledged, as she gave in and handed over her locker key, Maureen had managed to make her feel both
in the wrong, and very selfish.
‘Please make sure you give me the key back, won’t you?’ Ruthie asked.
The woman who had been covered in TNT was back at work, her face and hands looking very red and sore.
‘That’ll teach her to go nicking,’ Ruthie heard one of the other women remarking with obvious satisfaction as she glared at her.
Perhaps she was too soft-hearted, but she couldn’t help feeling sorry for her, Ruthie admitted, even though she could understand the anger of those whose things she had taken.
When would she hear from Glen? She could hardly bear the waiting, but she knew she would have to do so.
She had hardly slept last night, Diane admitted, as she stepped out into the early morning sunshine, and that meant that for two nights running now, thinking about Major Lee Saunders had kept her awake.
She had done the right thing, she knew that. But that hadn’t stopped her from lying awake thinking about the sweetness of his kisses. Sweeter than Kit’s. She couldn’t compare them, and she wasn’t going to. Kit had ditched her because he no longer loved her. But Lee…She mustn’t start weakening. She mustn’t! She was in uniform and on duty now, she reminded herself sternly as she reached Derby House. She had made it plain to Lee that she couldn’t and wouldn’t help him to break his marriage vows. But what if he refused to accept what she had said; what if he tried to persuade her to change her mind? Was she strong enough to remain steadfast? She would have to be for both their sakes and for the sake of the woman to whom he was married.
The sight of a familiar face up ahead of her in the queue to show passes provided a welcome distraction.
‘Susan!’ Diane exclaimed, hurrying up to the other girl. ‘It’s good to see you back.’
‘Thanks.’
Diane tried not to show how shocked she was by the change in Susan’s appearance. She looked thinner and older, with a bleakness in her eyes that couldn’t be hidden, not the lively self-confident girl who had first greeted her on her arrival at Derby House at all.