My Sweet Valentine

by Annie Groves

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ Drew commented several minutes after she had rejoined him.

  Tilly quickly told him about the girl in the powder room.

  ‘I wish so much that was us, Drew,’ she told him passionately.

  ‘What? You wish that I was a fly boy?’ Drew teased her, deliberately choosing to misunderstand her. Tilly, though, knew him far too well to fall for his ploy.

  ‘You know I don’t mean that. And you know too what I do mean.’ She broke off when they were served with what looked like a very small pink heart-shaped blancmange with a fanfare that it didn’t really deserve.

  ‘Yes, I do know what you mean,’ Drew agreed once their waiter had withdrawn from earshot. ‘I understand too why you’re saying it.’ He reached for her hand as he had done earlier in the evening, holding it firmly within his own. ‘I feel privileged and honoured to have your love, Tilly, and to know that you’d do that for me.’

  ‘For us,’ Tilly insisted fiercely. ‘For both of us, Drew. I want—’

  A small shake of his head, accompanied by a gentle squeeze of her hand, had her pausing for breath and allowing him to say into that silence, ‘There is nothing I want more than for us to be together properly, Tilly, but I have a responsibility to you, and I have given an assurance to your mother. I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the eye if I dishonoured that responsibility and that assurance. I don’t want …’ Drew paused, his conscience stabbing him as he told her truthfully, ‘I don’t want our love to be blighted or sullied by lies and deceit. It and you are worthy of better than that.’ It was the truth, Drew assured himself, even if for now there were other deceits that he couldn’t own up to. For Tilly’s own sake. He would have willingly told her everything if he didn’t know that doing so would threaten their love. One day he would tell her, of course. One day, but not yet.

  ‘Oh, Drew …’ Oblivious to what Drew was thinking, Tilly was overwhelmed by a flood of pride and love for him. He was so honest and decent, so trustworthy.

  ‘Come on,’ Drew coaxed her. ‘We’d better eat this so-called romantic pudding. They’ll be playing the last waltz of the evening soon, and we don’t want to miss it.’

  It was nearly two o’clock when their taxi pulled up outside number 13. Tilly had had a delightful ride back, snuggled up in the back of the cab in Drew’s arms. Not that he had done anything more than simply hold her, but being held safely in Drew’s arms was a perfect way to end what had been a very special evening, Tilly acknowledged, as Drew paid off the taxi and they hurried to the front door.

  In number 13’s kitchen, Olive heard Tilly’s key in the front door and stood up. Agnes had gone up to bed nearly an hour ago, but Olive hadn’t felt able to follow her up to her own bed. Not with the weight of so much anxiety hanging over her.

  ‘Mum, you shouldn’t have waited up for us,’ Tilly protested when she opened the kitchen door and saw Olive seated at the kitchen table.

  ‘I’m sorry if we kept you up late, Mrs Robbins,’ Drew apologised, adding, ‘I won’t stay and keep you up even longer.’

  ‘Oh, Drew, we were going to have a cup of cocoa together,’ Tilly reminded him.

  But Drew shook his head, telling her gently, ‘I think it’s late enough,’ before adding a polite, ‘good night, Mrs Robbins.’

  ‘Good night, Drew,’ Olive said politely back.

  Whatever doubts she might have about Tilly’s behaviour, she couldn’t fault Drew’s good manners – or his trustworthiness. A young man as deeply in love as Drew so obviously was with Tilly might find that his desire to be trustworthy could be all too easily overwhelmed by her passionate rebelliousness. Olive felt the now-familiar ache of anxiety and despair tighten around her heart.

  Of course Tilly had to see Drew to the door and of course once there it was several minutes before she came back, her lipstick having rather obviously been quickly reapplied in the hallway before she re-entered the kitchen.

  ‘Poor Drew. I promised him a cup of cocoa and now—’

  ‘Tilly, before we go to bed there’s something I need to talk to you about,’ Olive interrupted her.

  It couldn’t be put off any longer. She’d had all evening to think about what she must say, and a very long evening it had been as well, sitting here in the kitchen, on her own for the last hour, wondering about the true nature of that stolen hour Tilly had spent at the Simpsons’ with Drew and what it might have led to.

  Tilly stifled a yawn. ‘If it’s the fire-watching here on Article Row—’ she began

  ‘No it isn’t,’ Olive stopped her. ‘It’s about you going back to the Simpsons’ tonight with Drew and the pair of you staying alone there for over an hour.’

  Olive watched with a sinking heart as the colour came and went in Tilly’s face before guilt gave way to a very definite look of defiance. Only now could she admit how much she had been hoping against hope that her daughter would be able to tell her that Nancy had been mistaken. Instead, Tilly was confirming all Olive’s own secret fears and doubts by demanding instead, ‘Who told you about that? Oh, I know. Nancy, of course.’

  ‘So it’s true then?’ Olive asked, unable to conceal her distress. ‘Instead of going out, as you had told me you were doing, you and Drew went back to the Simpsons’? You have let me down, Tilly, and not only that, you deceived me as well. I know how you feel about Drew—’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Tilly stopped her mother bitterly. ‘If you did you’d let us get married. That’s what I want, it’s what we both want, it’s all I want. You had what you wanted, Mum. You married Dad. You had your time together, and you had me, but you won’t let me and Drew have our love, and that’s not fair.’ Angrily Tilly began to turn away from her mother, and then stopped.

  ‘And as for me deceiving you, I wasn’t and I didn’t. We only went back to the Simpsons’ because Drew had forgotten the chocolates he’d bought me. We went to collect them, that’s all. We started talking, about … about Drew’s work, and we forgot about the time, so yes, we probably were in the Simpsons’ for an hour, but we weren’t doing anything wrong. Drew gave you his word about that,’ Tilly reminded her mother proudly, ‘and as he keeps telling me, nothing is going to make him break it.’

  Tilly was shaking inside but she didn’t want to let Olive see how let down and upset her mother’s attitude made her feel.

  As for Olive, instinctively she knew that Tilly was telling her the truth. She made a small conciliatory movement towards her daughter, but Tilly stepped back rejecting it and rejecting her.

  She should never have listened to Nancy and let her get under her skin, Olive berated herself. She had let the other woman’s unkind words play on her own secret anxieties and now this was the result. Tilly had become angry with her and even more protective about Drew and their relationship.

  Olive felt so tired and alone. If Jim had lived, things would have been so different. He’d have been able to speak to Tilly as a father. But he wasn’t. Tilly didn’t have a father, and she, Olive, didn’t have a husband.

  Olive knew that she couldn’t let Tilly go without at least attempting to sort things out between them. She took a deep breath. It was so important that she find a way of getting her headstrong daughter to understand how cruel and hard life could be to those who broke society’s rules. And the truth was that Olive was beginning to suspect that Tilly – her Tilly, whom she had shielded and protected from babyhood – was headstrong enough to do exactly that, because she felt so strongly about Drew and her love for him. How could she find the words to discuss so difficult a subject? Olive wasn’t like Tilly. She didn’t have and never had had Tilly’s fiercely passionate nature. She had loved Jim. She had enjoyed the tenderness of their lovemaking. But there had never ever been a time when they had been courting when she had been tempted to break those rules that said what a girl could and should and could not and should not allow a young man.

  ‘Tilly, I’m sorry you feel that I don’t understand.’

  ‘You don’t,�
� Tilly told her fiercely. ‘You keep saying that you do, but you don’t. You can’t. This is our war, Mum, not yours. It’s my generation of young men and young women who will suffer the most from this war. You forget that. We are the ones whose sweethearts could be lost, whose lives will be empty. We’ve seen what happened to your generation. We’ve seen all those women whose men never came back. We’ve grown up watching them live alone. Do you really blame us for wanting to have what we can whilst we can? That’s what you don’t and won’t understand. You had Dad in your life, Mum. You and he were married, you had me, but you want to deny me those things because you’re afraid for me. You had some happiness but you can’t see that I want mine too, even if it is short-lived. In fact, that only makes me want it all the more, just in case I do lose it. Just in case I do lose Drew.’

  Tilly was trembling, shaking with the intensity of her emotions, Olive could see, and she herself felt as though she were drowning in the darkness of her own pain. Tilly spoke so passionately about what she needed now, and so lightly about enduring future loss. She had no idea, no awareness of how swiftly and permanently the pain of that loss could make it feel as though the happiness that had gone before it had never been. All she wanted to do was protect her daughter, but Tilly was behaving as though she, Olive, was trying to hurt her, by denying her her chance of happiness.

  Without giving her the opportunity to respond, Tilly had gone, the sound of her heels on the stairs making what seemed to Olive to be an angrily rejecting noise that deliberately distanced her from her mother.

  Olive closed her eyes. To squeeze back her tears? As a young mother, a young widow, she hadn’t allowed herself to feel sorry for herself, and she certainly wasn’t going to do so now.

  With quiet resolve she began the familiar task of leaving the kitchen ready for the morning. One day, please God, Tilly would have children of her own and then perhaps she would understand how she felt right now, Olive tried to comfort herself.

  In their shared bedroom Agnes was already asleep. With the room so familiar to her, Tilly didn’t need to disturb Agnes by switching on the light in order to get ready for bed. Despite the shortages that rationing was forcing on everyone, the bedroom was as cosy as Olive could make it, with warm rag rugs beside both beds and a square of carpet that covered most of the floor and protected the girls’ feet from the cold linoleum. No winter night went by without Olive ensuring that every bed had its hot-water bottle, and automatically, as she burrowed beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, Tilly placed her feet on the blissful warmth of her own.

  As always, though, the last thing she did before settling down for the night was to reach for Drew’s ring, where it swung from her neck on its chain. Holding Drew’s ring wasn’t, of course, as wonderful as holding Drew himself would have been, and Tilly blamed her mother for that. Why wouldn’t she understand that in trying to protect her from being hurt if she should lose Drew, her mother was in reality denying her the chance to have what she could have of him and their love? Arguing with her mother wasn’t going to bring her round, though, Tilly knew. She would have to find another way to convince her.

  SIX

  ‘… And she’s only been to see you that once and never come again, never mind that she’s your wife? Well, I call that proper disgraceful, I really do. Mind you, I can’t say that I’m surprised, her being the sort that she is.’ Dulcie was rather enjoying herself. After all, it was far warmer here in the hospital that it had been this morning, dragged out by Sally to ‘explore’, in the cold drizzle, East Grinstead’s high street with, in Dulcie’s eyes at least, its boring old black and white timbered buildings and its shops with nothing on sale that could ever have compared to Selfridges at its height. Plus she’d received plenty of appreciative male attention from the other patients since she’d been shown into the ward half an hour ago, and now she was getting to dig some of the dirt on her old enemy, Lydia, into the bargain. And she’d got out of helping to get ready the large empty room that was being used for tonight’s dance because she’d promised to sit here with David and bring him out of himself a bit.

  ‘She isn’t my wife any more.’

  David’s grim words – his first proper words to her since she had sat down at his bedside – stopped Dulcie mid-flow as she stared at him in astonishment.

  ‘Well, she might not be acting like she is, but legally—’ she began.

  ‘We’re getting a divorce. After all, there isn’t much point in a husband who can’t perform his marital duties. Not when, like Lydia, you’ve got husband number two lined up, who can.’

  Another girl might have recoiled from or been embarrassed by this reference to the extent of David’s injuries, but Dulcie didn’t possess that kind of sensitivity.

  ‘I suppose the chap she’s going to marry is the one I saw her with in London, when my young man took me out for dinner. Booked in as Mr and Mrs, as bold as brass, they were. I must say, though, that I’m surprised that Lydia’s prepared to show herself up by letting you divorce her.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ David told her. ‘She’s divorcing me – for adultery.’

  Dulcie’s eyes rounded. ‘But I thought you said you couldn’t …’ she began.

  He hadn’t been at all pleased when he’d been told that Dulcie was coming to visit him. Seeing her yesterday had been a shock, reminding him far too painfully of a life he no longer had, the person he no longer was. He’d planned to ignore her in the hope that she would go away. He’d forgotten that Dulcie simply wasn’t the kind of girl you could ignore, and now, to his astonishment, he discovered that there was something grimly cathartic about talking to her.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be real adultery, Dulcie,’ he explained wryly. ‘The solicitor just finds someone – a woman – who for a sum of money agrees to say that she and I spent the night together at an hotel after Lydia and I were married but before I ended up here.’

  ‘You mean you’re letting her get away with turning her back on you so that she can marry someone else?’

  ‘It’s the done thing when one is a gentleman.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know why you’d want to be a gentleman when Lydia certainly isn’t a lady,’ Dulcie told him roundly, giving him a reproving look when he started to laugh. Dulcie didn’t like people laughing at her.

  Someone else, overhearing the sound of David’s laughter, was very pleased by it.

  Mr Archibald MacIndoe, the surgeon, accompanied by George, had just entered the ward to take a look at his patients and talk with them. He turned to the younger man and said to him approvingly, ‘Good work getting that young woman to spend some time with the group captain, Laidlaw. She’s obviously raising his spirits, and that’s just what we need to see.’

  As George said to Sally later, when he joined her in the room that Sally and some of the duty nurses and other staff were decorating for the evening’s dance, ‘I have to admit that, like you, I wasn’t sure if I’d done the right thing getting Dulcie to visit David.’

  ‘You were obviously a better judge of the situation than me,’ Sally told him generously, as he handed her a cup of tea.

  The room hummed with everyone’s chatter as they worked, pinning up decorations and inflating balloons, so that George had to move closer to her and raise his voice slightly as he responded.

  ‘David certainly looked as though he was enjoying Dulcie’s company when I took a quick peek into the ward ten minutes ago. He was actually joking with one of the other men and warning him off attempting to get Dulcie’s attention.’

  Sally smiled at him, her smile widening as he gave her an appreciative look.

  ‘That’s just the spirit we need to see in him,’ George continued. ‘He’s recovered very well from the amputations and the skin grafts, and technically there’s no reason why ultimately he shouldn’t go home. He’ll always be wheelchair-bound, of course, but with both his wife and his parents turning their backs on him …’

  ‘He feels safer here?’ Sally guessed. ‘Poor boy.
Come on,’ she said after she’d finished her tea, ‘if you’ve got some time to spare, you can hold the ladders for me whilst I put up this bunting the local WI has loaned us for the party. Apparently it was made for the celebrations after the end of the last war, so I’ve been warned that it’s getting a bit fragile.’

  ‘It’s much the same era, then, as the gramophone we were also offered,’ George grinned, ‘and the records. Luckily one of the patients is a bit of a swing music fan and he’s volunteered his own gramophone and records, provided his favourite nurse rewards him with a kiss, apparently.’

  ‘No patient would ever get away with that at Barts,’ Sally laughed.

  ‘No, and neither would any other hospital I know of have barrels of beer on the wards for the patients, but then this is not like any other hospital, and our patients are not like most other patients. They are young, otherwise healthy and fit young men with all that that means, with the kind of injuries that no one should ever have to face. As Mr MacIndoe says, whatever it takes to get them to want to work towards the most normal kind of life they can have has to be undertaken. Mending their bodies as best we can on its own isn’t enough.’

  Archibald MacIndoe wasn’t Dulcie’s only champion. Ward Sister, making one of her inspections of her territory, noted the hubbub of activity and laughter coming from the end of the ward where was the group captain whose lack of interest in his own ultimate recovery had been causing her some concern. Speedily she made her way to David’s bed and even more speedily assessed the situation.

  A young woman who could look not just comfortable but actually preen herself at the attention she was receiving from a group of young men with the kind of injuries her patients had, and bring a smile to the faces of those young men who were able to smile, was someone who should be encouraged to repeat her visits, as far as Sister was concerned.