My Sweet Valentine

by Annie Groves

  Uncertainly she looked back towards the closed door to the house. ‘I shouldn’t really,’ she began.

  ‘Please, Sally. We may not get another chance to be properly alone together, and there’s something I want to say.’

  Silently Sally nodded her head.

  As George led her towards the car she could almost feel the air of determination that surrounded him, and a responsive tremble of emotion made her own insides feel all fluttery in a way that she considered to be most unlike her normal self.

  Mr MacIndoe’s car smelled of good leather and wood, and it was certainly warmer and rather more private than the shelter provided by her landlady’s front door, Sally had to admit. Not that she suspected for a single moment that George had anything improper in mind. George, bless him, simply wasn’t like that. One of the things she liked most about George was his reliability and his decency. Decency in a person meant a lot when you’d experienced a lack of it in someone of whom you’d thought better.

  Inside the car, she shook her head when George offered her the warm plaid car rug, but she didn’t turn away when George moved as close to her as the car seats would allow, her knee touching his, her flesh warmed by the comfort of that contact with him.

  George reached for her hands and Sally let him hold them.

  ‘There isn’t room for me to go down on one knee to you here,’ he began ruefully. ‘Sally, you know how much you mean to me, how much I love you and want you to be mine. At Christmas you didn’t want us to become formally engaged because you didn’t want to steal Agnes and Ted’s thunder, but today is Valentine’s Day, even if this isn’t the kind of setting I’d have chosen for my proposal, so please will you agree to be my wife now, Sally? I promise you that I will be the best husband I can be. I love you so very much.’

  His voice broke over those last words, the simple heartfelt emotion making Sally’s eyes fill with the sting of tender tears.

  ‘George, darling, yes, of course I will,’ she answered.

  His kiss betrayed how much her answer meant to him, her own senses responding both to the moment and to George himself with an answering passion that told her how right her answer was, and how right they would be together.

  ‘I’ve got the ring.’ George told her gruffly once he had stopped kissing her. ‘It arrived last week. Ma’s sent a letter for you as well, but if you don’t care for it, then …’

  The ring to which George was referring was his grandmother’s ring, which she had left to him for his bride-to-be. He had told her about it when he had first asked her to marry him, just as he had also told her all about his family in New Zealand – his doctor father, and his mother, who had been a nurse, and how they would welcome her into the family as his wife.

  ‘I shall love it,’ Sally told him truthfully. Wasn’t this what life should be all about? The gift of love, and respect for that love passed down through the generations, signifying the importance of family? Wasn’t that what she had once felt she had had in her own family and what she felt so bitterly devastated about losing? When they married, George’s family would become her family, and the children she and George would have would be children of that family, and that mattered very much indeed to Sally.

  ‘Here’s Ma’s letter,’ George told her, reaching into his inside pocket to pass her a bulky envelope with her name written on it, and then diving into that same pocket again to remove a small dark green leather box.

  A small tender kiss, and then he was opening the box and reaching for her ring finger.

  How different this occasion was from the one she had imagined the day she had looked into another young man’s eyes and believed she had fallen in love. It was time to put the pain and betrayal of the past behind her for ever now, Sally knew. She owed it to George and their future together to do so. Morag, Callum and her father weren’t worth a single one of her tears and never had been. She looked down at the ring George was sliding onto her finger and knew that the tears that were filming her eyes were not for the past, but instead were tears of happiness.

  The ring, with its oblong emerald stone flanked by two small diamonds, was beautiful, and all the more so, Sally truly felt, because of the way the gold ring was worn and thin from its previous use, surely representing the love with which it had originally been given and worn.

  ‘If you don’t care for it …?’ George was saying.

  But Sally shook her head and told him truthfully, ‘I love it.’

  It fitted her perfectly, and her first thought when she looked down and saw it on her own ring finger was how much her mother would have loved this moment and all that it represented.

  Her, ‘Oh George,’ was soft with love and the emotions inside her heart that Sally rarely allowed other to see.

  There was just time for another tender kiss, not so much an ardent kiss of longing and uncertainty this time but rather one of contentment and mutual commitment, and then Sally was opening her letter from George’s mother. It was hard to read it properly in the dim light from George’s torch, but she could look at the photographs that had fallen out of the envelope.

  One photograph was of a chubby baby – easily recognisable as George himself, as he had George’s curly hair – held in the arms of his parents: George’s father, so like him that Sally would have recognised him anywhere; his mother standing calmly facing the camera in such a way that Sally knew immediately that they would get on and respect one another. The others were of George as he was growing up: a bungalow with a long low veranda in the background and a dog sitting at George’s feet. Happy photographs of a happy childhood with loving parents. The same kind of childhood she herself had had.

  George’s mother’s letter was friendly and welcoming, taking their relationship a step further on from the letters she and Sally had already exchanged, making it plain that she was happy to welcome Sally as her son’s future wife. A nurse herself before her marriage to George’s father, she was, she wrote, looking forward to meeting Sally once the war was over. There was nothing in the letter to suggest that George’s parents expected their son and Sally to make their future lives in New Zealand, but Sally already knew that that would be what they and George himself would want. Without a family of her own to tie her to England any more she knew that she would not want to stand in George’s way, even if right now the thought of that new life felt just a little bit alarming.

  ‘I’m sorry that this evening hasn’t been as romantic as you deserve,’ George told her.

  ‘Not romantic? Being proposed to here, in this very expensive car, and given this beautiful ring, never mind being kissed so very, very well?’ Sally teased him gently.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ George protested. ‘I would have liked to have come up to London and taken you out somewhere swish where we could have drunk champagne and danced.’

  ‘George, I felt far more at home seeing the work being done here at the hospital than I would have done in some expensive nightclub,’ Sally assured him. ‘And we will get to dance together tomorrow evening, even if there isn’t any champagne.’

  George smiled lovingly at her. ‘I knew the minute I met you that you were the girl for me,’ he told her, ‘and I was right. I do wish, though, that I could have made tonight a bit more special, taken you somewhere we could have been on our own.’

  ‘It will be spring soon, and then summer,’ she told him softly. ‘Maybe we’ll be able to arrange to have a few days away together.’

  ‘Yes,’ George agreed, his voice thickening and then cracking slightly, his arm tightening around her.

  They both knew what was being said, what was being offered and promised. There was no need for either of them to spell it out in actual words. She wasn’t a girl, Sally told herself. She was a modern young woman living in a country at war. They had already agreed that they wouldn’t marry until the war was over, and no one knew when that would be.

  They looked at one another in the heavy intimate silence they themselves had created with their unsp
oken feelings.

  In the room she was sharing with Sally, whilst Sally was still outside with George, Dulcie undressed quickly with her dressing gown draped round her shoulders to keep out the cold of the chilly bedroom, deciding as she did so, that she was looking forward to seeing David again. George’s comments about David’s parents and his wife had aroused her curiosity. She liked the thought of hearing how badly Lydia had behaved and thus being able to criticise her with justification. The thought that talking about Lydia might be painful for David simply didn’t occur to her. The thought of David’s injuries didn’t put her off, either. He still had his handsome face, after all, and even if he hadn’t, Dulcie wouldn’t have shrunk from him. Her sense of self-preservation protected her from concerning herself about the emotional pain of others. She had decided very young that it was up to her to protect her own emotions because no one else was going to do that for her, especially not her mother. So she had simply cut herself off from thinking about things that were hurtful. She just wasn’t the sort to look beneath the surface of things in order to find out how another person felt.

  In Olive’s front room, Ted and Agnes were sitting on the sofa together holding hands, having just finished listening to a romantic play on the wireless that had made Agnes cry. Ted had mopped up her tears, gently reminding her that it was only a play. It was lovely being with Ted, Agnes thought. He always made her feel so safe and happy, and so proud now that she was wearing his engagement ring. Being engaged made her feel like she’d got her own special place in life, a proper place, not just Agnes the orphan, but Ted’s fiancée and wife-to-be.

  Agnes smiled at Ted. It was Valentine’s Day evening and she and Ted were together, and later on, after he had had his cocoa and before he left, when she walked with him to the door to say good night to him, Ted would take her in his arms and kiss her and she would kiss him back. Just thinking about kissing Ted and being kissed by him gave Agnes a lovely squidgy happy and excited feeling in her tummy. They wouldn’t kiss here in Olive’s front room, of course; that would not be proper. There was no need for that thought to be put into words. It was understood between them and, like so much of their relationship, did not need to be talked about. It was just the way things were, and accepted by them both.

  ‘You’ve been out there ages,’ Dulcie complained when Sally eventually came in to the bedroom, ‘and now you’ve gone and woken me up switching on that lamp. What are you doing?’ she demanded, when Sally sat down on her bed and spread the photographs from the letter George had given her on the bedspread, and began to reread George’s mother’s letter. Her mouth dimpled into a warm smile as she recognised again the warmth of George’s mother’s welcome into their family.

  ‘Looking at these photos,’ she answered Dulcie without taking her gaze off the letter.

  About to turn her back and try to get back to sleep, Dulcie suddenly noticed Sally’s ring.

  ‘You’re engaged?’ she demanded

  ‘Yes,’ Sally confirmed. ‘George asked me before Christmas but he wanted to wait until his mother had sent him his grandmother’s ring before we made it official.’

  ‘Well, for myself I’d rather have me own ring and not an old one that someone else has worn,’ Dulcie sniffed, ‘but if you’re happy with it then I suppose it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I’m very happy with it,’ Sally assured her, lifting her gaze from George’s mother’s letter to look down at her left hand. Her ring was special to her because it was special to George. She knew how much it meant to him to give her his grandmother’s ring, and how much he loved her.

  So now Sally and Agnes were both engaged, Dulcie thought when Sally had eventually turned off the bedside lamp. And anyone could see that Tilly was head over heels with Drew. Who would ever have thought that the three of them would be spoken for before her? Not that she couldn’t have been spoken for if she’d wanted to be. There was John, who had always had a soft spot for her, and Wilder, of course. Dulcie didn’t want to settle down with anyone at the moment, but by rights Wilder ought to have recognised that a girl like her needed to be treated a bit special, like. He could have proposed just so that she could have told the others that he had, even though she’d have turned him down. He was going to have to pull his socks up a bit if he wanted to keep her, Dulcie decided. Mind, if she were ever to wear an engagement ring it would have to be a lot better than Agnes’s, and Sally’s. She’d want diamonds, three of them all together like she’d seen on the ring fingers of the rich women who came into Selfridges to shop. Women like Lydia …

  Tilly had had the most wonderful evening. She had felt a little bit out of her depth at first when she had realised that Drew had brought her to the Savoy for their evening out, but Drew had soon seen to it that she recovered her confidence, telling her that she looked far far prettier than any other woman there, and that he far preferred the sparkle in her eyes to the glitter of the expensive jewellery other women were wearing.

  In no time at all they had been ensconced in their very private table in the restaurant, chosen by Drew so that they could watch what was going on all around them whilst remaining relatively private themselves, and within half an hour of their being seated, Tilly was thoroughly enjoying herself as she and Drew playfully fought to see who could recognise and identify the most VIPs.

  There was nothing she and Drew enjoyed more than people-watching, Tilly thought happily as they sat together at their little table, and if the meal they were being served – a rather thin soup followed by a fish dish followed by the promise of a ‘truly romantic’ pudding, was probably rather a long way from the Savoy’s famed pre-war standards, Tilly was far too much in love and far too happy to care.

  In between courses they got up to dance, joining other diners on the floor, Tilly feeling so very proud to be with Drew, whom she believed was the kindest and the very best man there, making her quite the luckiest girl.

  In between talking about themselves and the wonder of their love for one another they talked about Drew’s book and about the war.

  ‘Are you still planning to write about the gangs that go around looting after the bombs have fallen?’ Tilly asked him as she sipped her wine and felt very grown up and sophisticated.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Drew confirmed. ‘I’ve found out that some of the looters are so well organised that they don’t even wait until the all clear sound. Instead they follow the emergency services and are even breaking windows themselves under cover of the falling bombs in order to get into shops and homes.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Tilly told him, both shocked and angered.

  ‘The trouble is that most of these looters are so quick and so good at using emergencies that it’s next to impossible to catch them red-handed, and so they get away with it. There are even stories of looters actually removing not just watches and jewellery but also clothing from the bodies of the dead.’

  Tilly shuddered, and Drew reached across the table to hold her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that.’

  ‘Of course you should,’ Tilly defended him. ‘And I’m glad that you did. I want you to share your work with me, Drew. I don’t want to be protected from what’s happening. I just wish that you could find some way to actually catch these people in the act and then unmask them in your articles. They should be punished for doing anything so dreadful.’

  She sounded so passionately indignant, but looked so enchantingly pretty, that Drew immediately wanted to kiss her. He loved her so much, his brave strong-hearted Tilly.

  Happily the musicians had struck up for a slow waltz and they were still waiting for their ‘romantic pudding’ so he was able to suggest that they get up to dance.

  It was wonderful being held tightly in Drew’s arms whilst they swayed slowly together, the top of her head resting against Drew’s jaw, Tilly thought dreamily as the lights dimmed and the warmth of Drew’s hand on her back brought her even closer to him so that they could steal a lingering kiss, after which Til
ly decided that a visit to the ladies’ room to repair her lipstick might be a good idea before she returned to the full light of their table.

  When she pushed open the door to the powder room, another girl was already seated at one of the satin-covered stools, in front of the individual dressing tables, looking into the mirror in front of her, only it wasn’t her lipstick she was gazing at, but the very pretty diamond ring sparkling on her ring finger.

  Seeing Tilly looking at it, she told her in obvious excitement, ‘My boy has just given it to me. I’m so thrilled. He’s in the RAF and I had wondered … well, I’d hoped, but he hadn’t said so much as a word, other than to promise me that he wanted to make tonight very special for both of us.’

  The powder room was empty apart from the two of them, with no cloakroom staff in attendance to overhear them. But even so, Tilly was surprised when the other girl – a pretty strawberry blonde wearing a deep pink satin dress – confided, her cheeks flushing almost the same colour as her frock, ‘I’m just so glad now that I agreed to spend the night here in London … with him, so that we can really be together. My parents think I’m staying at an all-girls’ hostel, but Rory has booked us a room here.’

  When Tilly’s eyes rounded the other girl asked fiercely, ‘You don’t approve?’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ Tilly assured her. ‘I was just thinking how brave you are.’

  ‘Rory is the one who is brave,’ the other girl told her softly. ‘He’s flown fifty missions now. Every time he flies I wonder if this will be the night he doesn’t come back. Now, if that should happen, then at least I will have had tonight. It’s the least we can do for them, isn’t it?’ She paused, reapplying her lipstick carefully. ‘Give them what we can of ourselves to cherish and to fight and live for, don’t you think?’

  She was standing up before Tilly could do anything more than nod, and then watch her enviously as she left the powder room.