My Sweet Valentine

by Annie Groves

  ‘But she hasn’t got anyone there now, has she?’ Dulcie pointed out. ‘She hasn’t got any family left.’

  That was what the other girls thought, but Sally had told Olive in confidence that she did have family in Liverpool, though she had chosen to cut herself off from them. She had a father, a stepmother and a baby half-sister, and, knowing Sally as she did, Olive didn’t believe that she didn’t care about her father any more. She would be worrying about him.

  Olive was right. Sally was thinking about her father, even though she kept telling herself that she mustn’t and that she didn’t owe him any concern after the speed with which he had rushed into marriage to Morag after her mother’s death. It was just because she was a nurse, and trained to care, a nurse who had seen what bombs could do to human bodies and human lives, especially the bodies and the lives of small children, that her heart had hammered when she had first heard that Liverpool was suffering a dreadful blitz, nothing else. To allow herself to feel anything else, anything personal, especially for the child who was the result of her father’s betrayal of her mother, would mean that she too was betraying her. She was the only custodian and guardian of her mother’s precious memory now, the only one who really cared about her, and who hadn’t betrayed her.

  Not that there was very much news coming out of Liverpool. In fact, it was almost as though the Government didn’t want anyone to know what was going on. Sally had asked Drew if he could find out what was happening, explaining away her concern as being for her old home city, and Drew had asked amongst the other reporters for her. Sally then learned that the city had experienced the most dreadful bombing.

  ‘Excellent work, Sister,’ the surgeon praised her, as he stood back from the operating table so that the patient on whom he had just operated was wheeled away. ‘You run a good team.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Brett,’ Sally responded.

  It still gave her a small thrill to be addressed as ‘Sister’, but for some reason today that thrill was tempered by a sense of loss as well. Because she was thinking about her father? No. If she felt any sense of loss then it was because her mother couldn’t share in her pride at being praised for her work. Her father meant nothing to her now. How could he when she so plainly meant nothing to him? She had begged him not to marry Morag …

  As she walked into the canteen, a discarded newspaper headline caught her eye. ‘An unnamed British city is cut off from the rest of the country by Hitler’s bombs.’

  She knew from what Drew had told her that that city was Liverpool, and she sank into a chair.

  ‘Are you all right, Sister?’ a fellow nurse asked her.

  ‘Yes. Yes. I’m fine,’ she responded.

  ‘Heavy morning in theatre, was it?’ another sister asked her sympathetically.

  ‘It was,’ Sally answered truthfully, even though she knew that it wasn’t the length of the operating list that was responsible for the sudden weakness in her limbs.

  She’d be off duty soon. Then she could go back to number 13 and read through the newspapers properly. Drew would have got them for her.

  Thinking of Drew made Sally smile. He was another gentle, kind man of the same type as her George. A thoroughly likeable, reliable, admirable man, even if poor Olive was desperately worried about the intensity of Tilly’s love for him. Tilly could certainly have done a lot worse, Sally reflected.

  She should get something to eat, she decided, but with that newspaper headline in front of her she found she had lost her appetite.

  SIXTEEN

  Alone in the kitchen of number 13, where she was about to paint her toenails, an activity forbidden anywhere than in their bedrooms, when the doorbell rang, Dulcie reluctantly slipped her still unpainted foot back into its open-toed shoe and went to open the front door.

  Standing on the doorstep was a good-looking young man in naval uniform clutching a wriggling baby with a bruise on its forehead against his shoulder with one hand and carrying a battered leather case in the other.

  Sally, who had gone up to write to George, was halfway down the stairs when she saw him. She’d been about to nip out to the post her letter, but now all thoughts of that were forgotten as she clung to the banister rail, her face drained of colour.

  ‘Callum!’ she exclaimed.

  Here was an older, far more war-weary-looking Callum than the young man who had come to this very house to beg her to make things up with her father. Sally’s whole body flinched at that memory and then flinched again as she focused on the child held tightly in Callum’s arms, and clinging to his dust-soiled uniform. It was her, the child, the result of the abhorrent betrayal of her mother by her father and her best friend.

  Fury washed through her in a savage wave, but it was a fury that, despite its strength, could not entirely subdue the sick fear that was jolting her heart into a disjointed beat and crawling coldly through her veins. Logic told Sally that there could be only one reason why Callum was here with that child, but it was a logic that she didn’t want to accept.

  Instead she railed at him furiously. ‘You have no right to come here. No right at all, and especially not with that … that child.’

  ‘You know him?’ Dulcie demanded, turning to look at her fellow lodger, her eyes narrowing as she saw the shock that had taken all the colour from Sally’s face and left her staring from the good-looking naval officer to the child he was carrying and then back again.

  ‘Yes, she does,’ the man answered for Sally, stepping forward so that Dulcie was obliged to step back.

  Once inside the hall he closed the door with his shoulder.

  Callum. Callum was here and he was carrying that child. Agonising surges of angry pain burned into Sally.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded. ‘Why have you brought that … her here?’

  ‘You’d better come into the kitchen,’ Dulcie invited, ushering the man – Callum, Sally had called him – along the hall and into that room, ignoring Sally’s outburst. She was enjoying seeing Sally – who was always just that little bit superior, with her nurse’s uniform and her closeness to Olive – so plainly caught off guard and uncomfortable. Besides, there was the exciting mystery of who the man was and, more important, the identity of the child. Dulcie had seen a lot of life in the raw, living with her parents, but this was the first time she had seen a single man turn up at someone’s door carrying a child. A woman doing the same thing, yes, but a man, never.

  ‘Come a long way, have you?’ she asked chattily. ‘I expect you’d like a nice cup of tea? Just park yourself here on this chair,’ she told him as she pulled one out from the table for him.

  The child eyed her with huge dark brown, thickly lashed eyes. A few wisps of dark curly hair had escaped from the knitted bonnet she was wearing. Since the bonnet was pink Dulcie surmised that the child must be female.

  ‘Pretty little thing,’ she commented. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Alice.’

  From the doorway Sally, who had followed them into the kitchen, gasped as though a knife had been twisted in her heart, which in a way it had. Alice had been her own mother’s middle name.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ she told Callum. ‘You’ve got to go. I don’t want her here either. Take her away.’

  Well, well, Sally was getting herself worked up and no mistake, Dulcie thought, recognising a bit of a mystery and, she hoped, a bit of a scandal with it.

  ‘I can’t do that, Sally,’ Callum responded.

  There was a small pause whilst he and Sally looked at one another and Dulcie pretended to busy herself making the tea, still agog and determined to find out what was going on.

  ‘I had to bring her, Sally. She hasn’t got anyone else anymore. You and I are all she’s got now.’

  Sally knew what that meant. It meant that the child’s parents – her own father – were dead. Pain ripped through her. Inside her head she had a mental image of her father before Morag had destroyed their relationship, the tenderness of his love for her, his d
aughter, so clear to see in his expression. He had loved her so much – both her parents had – and she had loved them. Once she had thought that nothing could ever destroy that, but she had been wrong. The pain of her loss engulfed her, filling her with bitterness and angry resentment, against Morag for taking her father’s love, against Callum for not siding with her in denouncing his sister, and for the child he was holding, who had taken what should have been hers – the love of their shared father. And was there also a feeling of agonised guilt somewhere in that mix, an anguished recognition that now there could never ever be a reconciliation between them? How could they have been reconciled, with the evidence of her father’s betrayal there in the form of his and Morag’s child? Their child, alive whilst they were dead. Alive whilst her father was dead …

  ‘No.’

  Sally didn’t know whether the moan ripped from her throat was of denial against the claim Callum was making on her on the child’s behalf, or of rejection of what she knew his words must mean.

  She had known it, of course, from the minute she had seen him. There could be only one reason why Callum would bring this child here.

  Out of nowhere an icy cold wave of weakness surged through her. She swayed slightly, her hand going to her heart, her body crumpling.

  Instantly Callum was on his feet, thrusting the child towards Dulcie, who took hold of her, and then going to Sally to place his hands on her arms to support her.

  Callum was touching her; holding her; pretending to be concerned for her. His duplicity made Sally feel sick, and gave her the strength to thrust him off and then move to the sink, as far away from him as she could get. If only Dulcie hadn’t been here and she had answered the door, she could have closed it against him, and locked him and that wretched child out. Then no one would have been any the wiser; no one would have known anything.

  Against her will Sally’s gaze was drawn to the baby, something painful swelling inside her chest as she watched the tenderness with which Callum took her from Dulcie. There was a familiarity about the baby’s features and colouring. Sally had seen photographs of Callum and Morag as children, and this baby looked just like them. But then it should, seeing as Morag was its mother and Callum its uncle. She was glad that she couldn’t see anything of her father or her own colouring in it, she told herself fiercely. That meant that she had no obligation to feel connected to it in any kind of way.

  The baby was reaching for Callum’s finger, closing her fat little baby hand around it and then smiling at him.

  ‘Aaw, she’s gorgeous,’ Dulcie announced. ‘That’s a nasty bruise she’s got there, though.’

  ‘She’s lucky to be alive,’ Callum answered. ‘The house took a direct hit, Sally. Some wretched bomb crew discharging what was left of their bombs on their way back to Germany, according to the officials. It’s a miracle that Alice was found. She was buried under the house. They found her in your father’s arms. Morag was lying next to him. The ARP warden I spoke to said that they would both have died instantly.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Sally curled her hands into two angry fists. ‘Do you really think that I want to know that my father gave his life to protect her? She should never have been born. Take her away. I don’t know why you’ve come here. I’m sure the authorities would have found a way of letting me know about my father’s death at some stage, even if somehow or other they managed to let you know first.’

  ‘My ship had put into Liverpool and I’d been given leave to go and see my family – our family, Sally. I thought it was good timing, putting into Liverpool so close to Alice’s first birthday.’

  Sally’s mouth tightened.

  ‘You and I are all Alice has got now. She’s your half-sister and my niece. She’s our responsibility. I was there when they dug her out of what was left of the house. I’d gone straight there as soon as I could when my ship docked in Liverpool. The damage to the city is appalling, but even so, I hadn’t expected …’

  The grief Sally could hear in his voice caused her heart to thump painfully.

  ‘Half the road had gone, even the cherry trees.’

  There was a huge hard lump in Sally’s throat. Her mother had loved the pink blossom that had filled the branches of the cherry trees in the spring. Whenever she thought of her home it was those trees she visualised.

  ‘All of it flattened,’ Callum was continuing grimly, ‘but somehow Alice was saved. Someone had heard her crying beneath the rubble. They’d been digging for over two hours when I got there. I never thought … To find that she was unharmed … I’ve spoken with the authorities in Liverpool. They’re overwhelmed with people to look after following the bombing, especially orphaned children. They were relieved when I told them that Alice had two close blood relatives, especially when I told them that one of them is a nurse.’

  The baby was Sally’s half-sister, and the handsome naval officer’s sister had obviously been married to Sally’s father, and not with Sally’s approval, Dulcie reckoned.

  Sally might be trembling inside with the pain that Callum’s brief description of the scene of destruction caused her but she wasn’t going to let him see that.

  ‘The child is nothing to me,’ she told him. ‘I told my father when he married your sister that I no longer considered myself to be his daughter. The child is nothing to me. I want you both to leave.’

  ‘You can’t mean that. Alice has no one else. I’ve got to rejoin my ship tonight. They’ve only given me extra leave so that I could bring Alice to you. She’s still a baby, Sally, unable to speak for herself. I can’t believe that you mean to turn your back on her. Your mother would never have wanted you to do that.’

  ‘You dare to mention my mother to me?’

  Dulcie had never seen Sally so fired up.

  ‘Your sister stole my father from my mother whilst she was dying and this … this child is the result of that betrayal. Take her away, Callum. There’s bound to be an orphanage that will take her.’

  ‘I don’t believe you mean that. You’re in shock at the moment, and I’m sorry to have been the bearer of such bad news. I know how much your father meant to you.’

  ‘Once, before he betrayed my mother, but not since then.’

  As though Sally hadn’t spoken Callum continued, ‘I have to go.’ He stood up and carried the baby over to Sally, almost forcing her into Sally’s unwilling arms, and then bending his head briefly to kiss Alice, his voice soft as he told her, ‘I’ll be back, little one,’ before straightening up to step back as though somehow he knew that, despite her anger and aversion, it would be impossible for Sally physically to reject someone so vulnerable, no matter what was in her heart.

  By the time Sally’s brain had taken on board that the soft warm weight she was holding was the child she desperately wanted to repudiate, Callum had reached the front door.

  Hurrying after him, hampered by the fact that she was holding the baby, Sally could only watch as he opened the door and then walked out. She wanted to run after him and thrust the child at him as he had done her. She wanted to tell him to take it away and that he had no right to have done what he had done, but there was a huge, aching, raw place in her heart, like the bomb crater that she suspected must now be her childhood home, caused by the news that her father was dead.

  The baby started to cry, her face growing red as huge tears rolled down her cheeks and the sound of her wails grew in intensity.

  Coming out of the kitchen, Dulcie closed the front door. ‘Well, that’s a turn-up for the book, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You having a baby sister, and not ever saying a word about it.’

  Dulcie had to raise her voice over the frantic pitch of the baby’s cries.

  ‘Poor little mite’s probably missing her mum and dad. Here, give her to me,’ she ordered. ‘No wonder she’s yelling, you holding her like that. She’s probably hungry as well. Let’s hope that that Callum had the sense to put a bottle and some formula in that case he’s left. Go and have a look, will you, Sally, whilst I try and set
tle her down a bit?’

  ‘She’s not staying,’ Sally told Dulcie. ‘She’s nothing to do with me and I don’t want her to be.’ And yet she was still doing as Dulcie had suggested and opening the case, which was packed with baby clothes and nappies, all of them thick with brick dust. Inside her head Sally had an unwanted image of them being collected from the detritus of the destroyed house. She’d seen it so often, after all, here in London: people picking through the rubble looking for their belongings.

  ‘Hurry up with that bottle, will you, Sally?’ Dulcie urged her. ‘There it is, look, and the formula with it.’

  Numbly Sally put them on the worktop next to the sink, and then watched distantly as Dulcie deftly washed the bottle and the teat with hot water from the kettle, and then prepared a bottle of warm formula with one hand whilst holding the baby with the other. She expertly settled Alice in the crook of her one arm whilst testing the heat of the formula on the bare skin of the crook of her elbow where she’d pushed up her cardigan sleeve.

  Seeing Sally watching her, Dulcie scoffed, ‘There’s no need to look so surprised. You might be a nurse, but you can’t grow up in the East End and not know how to look after a baby, which is more than you seem to know.’

  Immediately she was given the bottle the baby started to suck hungrily. Settling herself in a chair, Dulcie took advantage of the situation to ask casually, ‘Make us a fresh cup of tea, will you, Sally? I’m fair parched.’ Adding, ‘I’ll tell you what, that Callum of yours is a good-looker. Mind you, I always think that a naval uniform makes a man look handsome.’

  ‘He is not my Callum. He’s nothing to do with me,’ Sally denied.

  ‘His sister was married to your dad, wasn’t she, so that makes him related to you, doesn’t it?’ Dulcie challenged her, shifting Alice’s weight to a more comfortable position and smiling back at her when the baby smiled up.

  And that was how Olive, who had met Agnes walking up the street, found them when she walked into the kitchen after her WVS meeting.