My Sweet Valentine

by Annie Groves

  The seats around them were certainly filling up, and many of the men were in uniform. At least Wilder had bought them good seats in the circle. She frowned again, though, when she saw him slipping a coin into the machine that dispensed a pair of opera glasses, the better to see the stage, but without offering to pay for a pair for her.

  The lights dimmed, the curtains swishing open. The orchestra in the pit struck up a popular slightly saucy review number, the dinner-suited singer breaking off from singing it to tell the audience, ‘Here come the girls’, as the chorus came onto the stage from either side.

  Dressed in fishnet tights, and a uniform of shorts, tightly fitted jackets and little hats perched on their curls, the chorus did a parade ground march to the shouted orders of their ‘drill sergeant’, much to the approval of some of the men in the audience.

  The girls were all singing as they danced, and one of them in particular caught Dulcie’s eye, her heart slamming into her chest as she stared at her in disbelief. She’d recognise that face anywhere, and that skinny body.

  Edith. But it couldn’t be. Edith was dead. Dulcie looked again, harder this time, as she focused on the blonde three in from the end of the line, who was making big eyes at the audience and wiggling her behind just that little bit more than the others, and then reached across and grabbed the binoculars with which Wilder had been studying the chorus line with far too much enthusiasm, ignoring his objecting, ‘Hey,’ to study closer the young woman who looked so like her sister.

  Her mouth had gone dry, and her heart was racing. If it wasn’t Edith then she had a double. Dulcie would have recognised those small pale blue eyes anywhere, even if she had tried to make them look bigger with all that bright blue eye shadow. Always been jealous of her own lovely eyes with their thick dark lashes, Edith had. How Dulcie had laughed at her for putting Vaseline into her own much sparser ones at night in the belief that it would make them grow.

  She’d obviously peroxided her hair too. It had never been anything more than just short of mousy naturally, and she was probably wearing a hairpiece to thicken it up. Dulcie wasn’t deceived, though. That was definitely her sister. Through the opera glasses she’d even been able to see that small chip out of one of her front teeth where she’d fallen as a ten-year-old. Never one to allow anything to get the better of her, Dulcie was already mastering her initial shock, even though her recognition of her supposedly dead sister had given her a really nasty turn. That was typical of Edith, it really was, not thinking about how someone who knew her was going to feel, seeing her like that, alive and large as life when she was supposed to be dead.

  Hard on the heels of the initial shock that gripped her, Dulcie felt a fierce surge of anger.

  Well, of all the … She was certainly going to have something to say to Edith the minute she got off that stage, letting their mother get herself in the state she had because she’d thought she was dead. Yes, and going on to her, Dulcie, about it like she had, Dulcie decided wrathfully.

  The number was coming to an end. Dulcie stood up, putting the opera glasses down.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Wilder demanded when she made to get past him.

  ‘I’m going backstage to see my sister wot’s supposed to be dead, but isn’t, since she’s just been cavorting around and screeching on that stage down there, to find out what she thinks she’s doing, pretending to be dead when she isn’t. Mind you, I dare say I’d prefer to have people think I was dead than know that I was alive and working in a place like this.’

  ‘Dulcie,’ Wilder protested, but it was no good, Dulcie was already out in the aisle and making her way down towards the exit that led to the stairs.

  ‘’Ere, you can’t come in ’ere,’ a stagehand tried to stop her when she got backstage, but Dulcie ignored him, storming past and leaving Wilder to follow her. The babble of female voices led her down a short, dark, dank corridor smelling of cigarettes, stale air and dust, until she reached the open door at the end of it.

  The narrow cramped room was filled with girls in various stages of undress, some of them merely wearing tiny diamante-encrusted G-strings, others in net costumes sewn with sequins who looked as though they were naked apart from the sequins, all of them wearing makeup that looked as though it had been trowelled on, in Dulcie’s opinion, and all of them fighting for space in front of the wall of dressing tables and lit mirrors. Oblivious to the intruders’ presence, some of them were pulling on tall feathered headpieces. One of them yelled out, ‘Ow, Margot, that was me real hair you was pulling,’ whilst another girl tried to pull off her headdress and a third pitched in with a sarcastic, ‘Stop calling her Margot. Her real name is Maggie, as in Maggie may, and does.’

  ‘Why you … you’ve got no room to talk, you bitch,’ Margot defended her reputation, whirling round to drag her long red nails down the bare arm of her accuser.

  ‘Al right, you lot, them of you what’s in the next set have got five minutes before you’re back on stage. Them of you that’s not on again until the second show had better scarper and leave a bit of room for them that is on stage to get changed. And remember, any girls found fighting will be sacked. I’ve told you that before.’

  Until now Dulcie hadn’t seen the small balding rotund harassed-sounding man, who had hidden in the middle of the packed dressing room.

  The sight of another man in such close proximity to so many scantily clad and good-looking girls had Wilder, who had been eagerly staring into the room from Dulcie’s side, move a bit closer in.

  Dulcie, for once uninterested in her boyfriend’s tendency to have a wandering eye where pretty girls were concerned, scanned the room for her sister. Her heart was thumping unusually fast and felt heavy in her chest. She was sure the girl she had seen was Edith, but right now, in these alien surroundings, she was suddenly experiencing an out-of-character wish that she had someone with her to support her, someone like their brother, Rick, or David. David? What possible use could he be to her? He didn’t even know Edith. Rallying, Dulcie assured herself that she wasn’t wrong. A sister like Edith, with all her nasty tricks, would never be forgotten, even if the Edith their mother had been so proud of had only appeared on stage as a singer, not a chorus girl. Dulcie wondered unkindly what her mother would have to say about that, and if she’d be as proud to boast about her talented ‘star’ of a daughter when she learned exactly how Edith was parading herself around now. But where was she? The small dressing room was packed, but then Dulcie saw her as one of the other girls moved and she quickly claimed her empty seat in front of one of the mirrors whilst another girl, who had been hovering, obviously waiting for the space, complained, ‘Hey, Edie, that’s not fair. You aren’t on again until the second show and I’m on in the next set.’

  ‘Too bad. You should have been faster on your feet. Old man Parsons is always saying that your timing’s out.’

  ‘Oooo, don’t try crossing swords with Edie, Fanny,’ another girl chipped in. ‘You’ll not get the better of her. Got a tongue like a newly sharpened knife, she has.’

  ‘Yeah, and a voice to match,’ someone else called up from the back, her comment greeted with general and not very kind laughter.

  Encouraged by the fact that her sister – and Dulcie was convinced now that it was Edith – was obviously not the most popular girl in the room, Dulcie pushed her way through the mass of hot female flesh, wrinkling her nose at the smell of sweat and greasepaint. Close up, she could see that it wasn’t just the girls’ faces that were covered in makeup; they were wearing it on their bodies as well to give themselves a tanned look, and the combination of hot skin and greasy makeup wasn’t very appealing.

  ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ one of the girls demanded, glaring at Dulcie.

  ‘If you’re after a job, auditions are held on Sunday afternoons and I warn you now there’s already a waiting list your arm long. One of the best shows in London, this one is.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be seen dead prancing around in a few feathers and not
much else,’ Dulcie retorted sturdily, well aware that she was risking the dislike of every girl in the room with her criticism. But Dulcie was used to being disliked by her own sex and it didn’t bother her. Besides, she had something more important to do than worry about a few other women, she acknowledged, as she focused on the reflection of her sister’s face in the mirror and delivered the line, ‘Unlike our Edith, who’s supposed to be dead, and who has let her poor mother think that she is dead for going on for two years.’

  There was a general gasp from the watching audience, as Dulcie had known there would be. Unlike the unfortunate Margot – apparently – Dulcie knew all about the importance of good timing and was a past mistress of its art.

  Not that Edith seemed to think so. Beneath her makeup her face had drained of colour, her eyes reflecting her shocked disbelief as she swung round from the mirror just as the girls parted to allow Dulcie to walk right up to her.

  Typically, though, Dulcie thought angrily, her younger sibling soon recovered herself and, patently oblivious to the fact that she was in the wrong and had been found out, just as she had always done as a child she tried to turn the situation around so that Dulcie got the blame.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose you shed any tears over me, did you?’ she said sharply. ‘You were always jealous of me and my success.’

  ‘You call this success?’ Dulcie demanded, waving her hand around the dressing room.

  ‘There’s a war on, in case you’ve forgotten,’ Edith retorted, ‘and I’m doing my bit to keep our troops cheered up.’

  A raucous yell of approval went up from the listening girls, which spurred Edith on to demand, ‘What are you doing – still working at Selfridges, nicking makeup samples?’

  ‘No, as a matter of fact I’m not.’

  ‘She’s working in munitions.’

  Dulcie turned round to find that Wilder had come into the room to stand beside her, his presence amongst them causing quite a stir amongst the girls – although not the kind of stir one might normally expect from a crowd of half-dressed young women who suddenly found a man in their midst.

  ‘Oooh, look at what he’s wearing,’ one of them cooed. ‘He’s one of them American pilots. You know, like the one that you fancied, Arlene, only he didn’t fancy you. Not once he’d got what he wanted off you and suddenly remembered that he’d got a wife and two kiddies back home.’

  ‘Dulcie’s working in munitions,’ Wilder repeated to Edith.

  ‘Munitions?’

  Dulcie glared at Wilder as she saw the delight in Edith’s eyes. ‘My, that’s posh, isn’t it?’ she mocked Dulcie. ‘Munitions, and you always so keen to better yourself an’ all, Dulce. I feel sorry for you, I really do.’

  ‘And I feel sorry for our mum,’ Dulcie told her, determined to change the subject. She’d have something to say to Wilder afterwards, and not just about what he’d said to Edith.

  Dulcie didn’t like the way her sister was smiling at Wilder all coy and downcast false eyelashes, as she told him in a soft little girl voice that Dulcie knew from the past was put on, ‘Dulcie’s always been mean to me, I don’t know why. I know that our mum always thought I was the pretty one of the two of us, and the talented one as well, with my singing and that.’

  As she wound a finger through her curls Dulcie felt like seizing her sister by the shoulders and giving her a good shake.

  ‘Why haven’t you let Mum know that you’re all right?’ she challenged her sister. ‘You must have known how she’d be when you went missing that night the theatre was bombed. Broke her heart, it has, believing you’re dead.’

  ‘I would have told her if she hadn’t moved away, and no one knowing where she’d gone, and then the whole street being blown up,’ Edith defended herself.

  ‘She didn’t move away until weeks after you’d been reported missing, assumed dead.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t do nothing about it at first, seeing as I was knocked clean out and then didn’t know nothing about who I was or what had happened for weeks meself. The first thing I did as soon as I was well enough was go looking for Mum.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound to me like you tried very hard.’

  ‘But with the houses being bombed what was I to think except that Mum and Dad had bought it?’

  ‘You know where I live. You could have got in touch.’

  ‘Why?’ Edith demanded with brutal candour. ‘We’ve never got on and I reckoned I’d be the last person you’d want to have back in your life, especially with me doing so well, and you only working at Selfridges. Mum always did say that it was because you were so jealous of me that you were the way you were with me.’

  ‘One minute, girls. Oy, what are you two doing in here? Dressing room is out of bounds to admirers,’ the small rotund man announced, spotting Wilder.

  ‘Well, you’d better get in touch with Mum now,’ Dulcie told her sister, ‘unless you want me to do it for you.’

  ‘You’ve got to go. I’m on stage again soon.’

  ‘Get in touch with Mum, Edith, or else. Look here’s her address,’ Dulcie threatened her before rummaging in her handbag to find a pencil and then using an empty cigarette packet from the dressing table in front of her to write down their parents’ new address.

  ‘Come on,’ Dulcie told Wilder, turning her back on her sister, ‘I’ve had enough of this place. Let’s go somewhere else and have a bit of supper.’

  ‘What? And miss the rest of the show when I’ve paid for the tickets?’ Wilder protested angrily as they left the changing room. ‘You can forget that. I want my money’s worth.’

  Dulcie knew what that angry hard look on Wilder’s face meant. Sometimes she really didn’t know why she bothered with a boyfriend who could be so difficult, she really didn’t, except of course that they made a good-looking couple, and with him being American and everything other girls envied her. Unlike other boys who’d taken a shine to her, though, Wilder didn’t know his place and kept on pestering her for the kind of favours she had no intention of giving him. Dulcie wasn’t that sort. She didn’t want the reputation a girl got when she was too free and easy in her ways.

  Dulcie hadn’t been particularly keen on going to watch the show in the first place. She’d much rather have gone dancing, but now that she knew that Edith was in it she liked watching it even less, especially when Wilder kept on nudging her and going on about what a good figure Edith had and how she knew how to show it off.

  She was glad when the show finally came to an end. By then she was ready for the supper Wilder had promised her in a new nightclub he’d heard about from one of the other Eagle pilots. In the foyer to the theatre, though, he released her hand and told her that he needed to visit the ‘washroom’.

  Dulcie took advantage of his absence to visit the ladies’ herself, but when she got back to their planned meeting spot Wilder wasn’t there. Dulcie did not approve of men keeping her waiting. Then, as if that hadn’t been bad enough, after several toe-tapping irritable moments when her irritation had only been mildly alleviated by the admiring smile of a man who had to be at least forty, and attached to a wife, when Wilder did turn up he had Edith in tow. Dulcie knew better than to let her sister know she was put out. That would be exactly what Edith would want.

  ‘Look who I’ve just bumped into,’ Wilder announced jovially.

  Dulcie gave her sibling a false smile and told her, ‘Such a pity that other girl, who was taller than you, blocked you out during that last number, and you was a bit out of step as well. I dunno what Mum is going to say when she hears that you’ve become a hoofer instead of a singer. What about that manager you were so friendly with? The one who was supposed to be going to turn you into the next Vera Lynn.’

  Edith tossed her head but didn’t answer, turning instead to Wilder and smiling at him flirtatiously.

  ‘And remember, Wilder, any time you feel like coming round to see the show, you just mention my name and they’ll give you good seats at a reduced price. Especially if you bring som
e of your friends,’ she told him.

  ‘Thanks, Edith, I’ll remember that. The guys are always talking about coming up to London.’

  The enthusiasm in her boyfriend’s voice caused Dulcie to narrow her eyes watchfully as she moved closer to him and put a firm hand on his arm.

  ‘Pity we’ve got a second show. I could have come and had a bit of supper with you otherwise,’ Edith announced quite plainly enjoying herself getting under her skin, Dulcie recognised.

  But Dulcie brought their exchange to a determined end by stepping between them, blocking their view of one another. ‘We’ve got to go, Edith. And don’t forget to get in touch with Mum,’ she said, before starting to walk away from her sister so that Wilder had no choice other than to follow her, since she was holding firmly to his arm.

  ‘Of course, Edith was only flirting with you like she was to get at me,’ Dulcie told Wilder once they were outside. ‘She’s always been jealous of me, with me being prettier than her.’

  There! That should make it plain to Wilder what the situation was, Dulcie decided, as they joined the busy throng of entertainment seekers already moving through Leicester Square.

  Although it was around eleven o’clock, the Square was still busy because it was Saturday night and because people had been taking advantage of the new Double Summer Time hours.

  Wilder had stopped walking, determined to find a taxi to take them to the nightclub he’d been told about, Dulcie standing at his side, when the first rising notes of the air-raid siren cracked off.

  ‘Come on,’ Dulcie told Wilder, grabbing his arm, and they started to hurry towards the nearest shelter.

  At number 13 Olive was just about to get in to bed, after checking that Alice was asleep after her ten o’clock bottle, when she heard the siren.

  ‘You take, Alice,’ she instructed Tilly the moment her daughter appeared at her bedroom door, scooping the baby expertly from the cot that was on loan from another member of Olive’s WVS group, and handing her to Tilly. ‘You go straight down to the shelter. I’ll get everything we need from the kitchen.’