Home for Christmas

by Annie Groves

  When Tilly and Dulcie had gathered up their possessions and were taking them upstairs, Olive used the opportunity to ask gently, ‘If everything all right, Agnes? Only you don’t seem to be smiling as much as you normally do. Is something’s wrong?’

  ‘No. Nothing’s wrong. I’m all right really,’ Agnes insisted, so quickly that Olive knew that her instincts had been right.

  ‘All young couples have their fall-outs at times, and when there’s a war on things aren’t always easy. If you and Ted have—’

  ‘It isn’t Ted. He’s ever so kind. Just the kindest person there could be.’

  ‘But someone has upset you? Is it someone at work?’

  ‘No.’ Again Agnes shook her head, but she was now looking agitated and upset, and Olive would have dropped the subject if she hadn’t seen the glint of tears in her eyes. Agnes didn’t have a mother of her own to turn to – Agnes didn’t have anyone of her own to turn to – and that stirred Olive’s maternal heart.

  Having put the ironing board in its place under the stairs, she said, ‘Come and sit down for a minute, Agnes.’

  ‘I’ll just finish doing the table. Dulcie and Tilly won’t want to be late going out.’

  ‘The table can wait and so can Tilly and Dulcie. Please tell me what’s wrong.’

  Silence and a downbent head were Agnes’s only response.

  Olive wasn’t going to give up, though. She reached for Agnes’s hand.

  ‘Agnes, when you came here to lodge, I promised Mrs Windle and Matron that I’d look after you properly. What do you think they’d have to say to me if they knew that I knew that you were unhappy and I didn’t do anything to find out why? They wouldn’t be very pleased with me at all, would they?’

  ‘Oh, it isn’t your fault,’ Agnes said instantly, looking dismayed.

  ‘Then whose fault is it?’ Olive pressed her.

  She watched as Agnes’s thin chest lifted and then fell again, a single tear splashing down her face.

  ‘It’s mine,’ Agnes half-whispered, half-hiccuped. ‘’Cos of me being abandoned outside the orphanage and not being respectable. Ted’s mum likes things to be respectable, you see, on account of them having a Guinness Trust flat, and because of her ending up . . .’ Aghast at what she had nearly betrayed, Agnes covered her hand with her mouth, her face bright red.

  ‘Agnes, what is it?’ Olive asked her. ‘Ted’s mother has been unkind to you, is that what you’re saying?’ Olive guessed.

  ‘No. No, she hasn’t been unkind to me,’ Agnes defended her beloved’s mother. ‘I wouldn’t want you thinking that. It’s just, well, I don’t think she thinks I’m good enough for Ted. When Ted brought her and the girls down to our station to shelter from the bombs, she never said a word to me. She just looked at me as though . . . as though she wished that I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Oh, Agnes,’ Olive sympathised. ‘Have you spoken to Ted about this?’

  ‘No. It wouldn’t be right, me saying things about his mum to him behind her back. And besides . . . well, Ted’s got plenty on his plate with him having to earn enough to support his mum and the girls. I wouldn’t want him thinking that I was complaining and letting him down. Nothing’s been said at all, and Ted says that the reason his mum doesn’t ask me round to have my teas with them or anything is because they haven’t got the space, and I know that the reason he can’t come here for his Sunday lunch when you invite him is because his mum likes him to help her with the girls on a Sunday. It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about not knowing where I’ve come from, and that not being respectable, especially now, with Ted saying how important being respectable is to his mum.’ What Agnes couldn’t tell Olive, out of loyalty to Ted and therefore to his mother, was just why respectability was so important to Ted’s mother.

  ‘Oh, Agnes, of course you’re respectable. You’re one of the most respectable girls I know. Ted’s mother isn’t going to hold it against you because you were abandoned.’

  But even as she said the words Olive knew that they might not be true. People could be funny about things like that, especially mothers of sons who wanted to marry girls like Agnes.

  ‘I really wanted to make friends with Ted’s sisters. I miss the little ones from the orphanage, but when Ted brought them down the underground I couldn’t get a word out of them.’

  ‘I expect the Blitz and all the bombs frightened them,’ Olive tried to comfort her, but Agnes didn’t look very reassured. Then Olive had an idea.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Agnes, why don’t I ask Mrs Windle if we can invite Ted and his family to the Christmas party in the church hall? That way you can get a proper chance to talk to his mother and his sisters.’

  Agnes’s face lit up.

  ‘Leave it with me. I’ll have a word with Mrs Windle and then if she agrees – and I’m sure that she will – I’ll write an invitation to Ted’s mum that he can deliver to her,’ Olive promised, pleased to see her young lodger smiling again.

  ‘Here, you can’t sit there that’s our table,’ a shrill female voice objected, as Dulcie slid swiftly into one of the empty chairs round a table on the edge of the dance floor, directly facing the band, and pulled Tilly down into the chair next to her, seconds ahead of the four girls who had been about to sit down themselves.

  ‘Yes, we can. It’s our table now,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Well, I like that,’ one of the girls fumed, glaring at them, but whilst Tilly felt a bit guilty Dulcie merely pulled a face at their departing backs.

  ‘Just in time,’ she announced triumphantly. ‘I wasn’t going to have them beating us to this table. Everyone dancing past can see us here and I’m sure all the boys would rather look at us than at those four. Besides, your Drew will be able to see us here. If he comes, that is.’

  ‘He isn’t my Drew,’ Tilly insisted automatically.

  Dulcie had been right to say that they should get here early. The tables were already filling up, and although they were still attracting glares from the four dispossessed girls, thankfully they didn’t seem inclined to do anything other than glower.

  Tilly had visited the Hammersmith Palais many times since her first exciting dance here last Christmas, but she still felt a small fizzing sense of excitement and anticipation about being here. It was just about the best dance hall in London, so everyone said, with its good-sized well-sprung dance floor and its popular Joe Loss Orchestra providing the music. It was lovely, too, to see all the other women there dressed up in their dance frocks, the single girls determined to make the most of a few precious hours of relaxation and fun, and those with their partners looking forward to being held close in the arms of the person they loved. These days such happiness was sharpened by the knowledge that all too soon they could be parted by the duties of war. So many of the men were in uniform that the sight of them brought a lump to Tilly’s throat. She could imagine how proud and how afraid for them their girlfriends and wives must feel. Just thinking about that made her shiver, as though someone had walked over her grave, as the saying went.

  The Palais had not yet been decorated for Christmas, but the gilded columns, reflecting the light given off by the chandeliers and the silver ball suspended over the dance floor, made everything look shiny and exciting. Coming here was a real tonic, a bit of an escape from the grim reality of the war, rather like going to the pictures, only at the Palais you got to create your own fun and happiness rather than watching someone else’s on the screen, Tilly decided happily, the bubbles of excitement inside her giving her cheeks a pretty pink glow. Of course, that excitement had nothing to do with Drew. Nothing at all.

  People were already giving their table and Dulcie a second glance, and no wonder, Tilly thought generously, modestly unaware that her own pretty face and halo of clustering dark brown curls was attracting its fair share of male attention.

  ‘That bow in your hair really sets off that style,’ Tilly told Dulcie, admiring the scarlet ribbon Dulcie had added to her Pompadour curls, its colour ma
tching her lips and nail varnish.

  Dulcie looked ever so elegant and grown up, Tilly decided, the black satin skirt showing off Dulcie’s narrow waist and the way she had turned her chair so that she was sitting a bit to one side of the table facing the dance floor, showing off her ankles. Tilly didn’t feel confident enough to copy Dulcie’s pose. She was just happy to drink in the heady atmosphere of the place.

  ‘You’ll have to be careful of your ankle when you’re dancing,’ she warned Dulcie. ‘You don’t want to damage it.’

  Just for a second, Tilly’s innocent comment reminded Dulcie of Sally’s warning to her when she had been having her plaster removed.

  ‘Dancing won’t harm it,’ she assured Tilly determindedly. ‘Strong, that’s what my ankles are, ’cos I’ve got good ones, see. Here’s a waiter,’ she changed the subject. ‘What do you want to drink?’

  ‘I’ll just have a lemonade, please,’ Tilly told the hovering waiter.

  ‘And I’ll have a shandy,’ Dulcie added.

  ‘There’s an awful lot of men here in uniform,’ said Tilly.

  ‘What do you expect when there’s a war on?’ Dulcie mocked her. ‘Mind you, I don’t fancy dancing with some of them with them army boots they’ve got on.’

  ‘Oh, look, there’s Drew.’ Tilly raised her arm and waved. ‘Over here, Drew,’ she smiled and he saw them and smiled back.

  ‘Drew’s wearing a dinner jacket,’ Tilly told Dulcie, impressed. ‘He looks ever so smart.’

  Dulcie, though, wasn’t particularly interested in Drew. She was looking instead at the three men accompanying him, whom he was directing towards their table. They were all tall and clean-shaven, with that confident look about them, and that slightly swaggering way of walking that airmen seemed to have, but it was the one in the middle on whom Dulcie focused her attention. Just that little bit taller than the others, with slicked-back fair hair, he was surveying their table with the kind of look that told Dulcie that he was just her type: confident, good-looking, and with that element of daredevil about him. Not that she was going to let him know that she’d even noticed him, never mind picked him out as her preferred choice of the three of them. Men like him liked to feel that they were the ones doing the hunting, Dulcie knew.

  Drew had reached their table and was introducing his companions. Dulcie deliberately held back to let him introduce Tilly first. She knew that Tilly, with her friendly non-flirtatious manner, was no threat to her own success, even if the three boys were making a fuss of her and paying her compliments.

  ‘And this is Dulcie,’ Tilly introduced her, drawing her forward. ‘Dulcie, these are—’

  ‘Art, Pete and Wilder,’ Drew told her.

  ‘When you said you’d got two pretty girls for us to meet, I kinda thought you might be kidding us,’ Art grinned, ‘but I was wrong.’

  ‘You sure were,’ the one Drew had introduced as Pete agreed enthusiastically.

  The third man, the best-looking one with the dangerous air about him, reached into his pocket and produced a packet of cigarettes, opening it and offering it first to Tilly, who refused, and then to Dulcie herself, holding her gaze as he said softly, ‘I wouldn’t say they were pretty.’

  There was a general shuffling of feet and an exchange of embarrassed looks by the other three, but Dulcie didn’t allow her gaze to move from the narrowed look she was being given.

  ‘I’d say they were gorgeous.’

  The other men laughed, the tension relaxing.

  Dulcie took a cigarette and placed it between her lips just like they did in films. When Wilder leaned forward to light it she lifted her lashes to look right into his eyes, again, just like she’d seen them do in films. And as she had practised doing for ages at home in front of her bedroom mirror, until she got the move just right.

  ‘Let’s get some drinks over here,’ he told the others without lifting his gaze from Dulcie’s. ‘What will you have?’

  ‘Tilly and I have already ordered,’ Dulcie told him.

  ‘Oh, so some other guys beat us to it, did they?’

  ‘No—’ Tilly began, but Dulcie kicked her under the table, so that she stopped speaking to give her a bewildered look whilst Dulcie remained enigmatically silent, lifting her chin to exhale the smoke from her cigarette – another mannerism she’d picked up from films.

  ‘So what do you do when you aren’t breaking hearts?’ Wilder asked her, having scooped up a chair from the other side of the table and then put it down next to hers before sitting on it.

  ‘I work in Selfridges. I’m a makeup demonstrator,’ Dulcie informed him, calmly inventing a title for her job without a flicker of guilt.

  ‘I’m really looking forward to going with you when you do your reporting and photographing,’ Tilly told Drew happily.

  ‘I’m looking forward to you coming with me. You’re a great kid,’ Drew responded equally enthusiastically. ‘How about Monday? Are you free Monday evening?’

  Tilly nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘I’ll call round for you,’ Drew promised her.

  ‘How will you know where to find the best stories?’ Tilly asked.

  ‘We’ll start off on Fleet Street, in one of the pubs the reporters use. That way we’ll get to know what’s happening.’

  Tilly took a gulp of her lemonade and exhaled a sigh of pure delight. She loved coming to the Palais, of course, but going story hunting with Drew promised to be really exciting and adventurous, a bit like being a girl reporter in the kind of stories she’d read when she was much younger, and something which, if she were honest, appealed to her far more than flirting with boys.

  ‘I’d heard that London has the best-looking babes in England, and now I know it’s true,’ Wilder told Dulcie.

  He was self-confident, this American, with his compliments and his admiring looks, but Dulcie knew his game. For now she was willing to play along with it. After all, she’d already seen the envious looks their table had been given by several other groups of girls who hadn’t as yet hooked up with partners. It was also an undisputable fact that Wilder, in his uniform, which he’d told her boastfully he’d had ‘custom-made at your Austin Reed store’, looked bigger, bolder, and just plain better than many of his British counterparts in their regulation-issue uniforms. Dulcie certainly wasn’t going to have Wilder deserting her for a girl he thought might be more appreciative of his flattery – and of him. But if he thought that the evening was going to end with him giving her anything more than admiring looks and compliments, he was going to be disappointed.

  Flattery was all very well as a sweetener when it came to men, but Dulcie believed that a little bit of sharpness didn’t go amiss in making sure a chap knew that a girl wasn’t a pushover. Her lightly mocking, ‘And you’ve met loads of English girls, have you?’ wasn’t just a small put-down, it was also a way of discovering a bit more about him.

  ‘Sure,’ he responded promptly, ‘I’ve met enough to recognise real gold when I see it. I’m surprised you aren’t going steady with someone already.’

  So she wasn’t the only one doing a little digging. Dulcie didn’t mind Wilder’s question though. It showed that he was interested in more than just a couple of dances.

  ‘I’m choosy,’ Dulcie told him, adding nonchalantly, ‘I dare say you’ve got a girl of your own at home somewhere?’

  She wasn’t going to get involved with someone in uniform who already had a steady girlfriend somewhere else, and who just wanted her to stand in for that girl.

  ‘One girl?’ Pete, overhearing Dulcie’s comment, laughed. ‘He’s got—’

  Dulcie pretended not to notice the sharp elbow Wilder applied to his friend’s ribs, winding him into silence. She had his measure now. He was the type who thought he was God’s gift to her sex. Well, she’d soon teach him differently. But first a bit more flattery was called for, Dulcie decided, to smooth away that wary look she could now see in his eyes.

  Leaning towards him, she gave him her sweetest smile, acco
mpanied by a wide-eyed, impressed look, as she said admiringly, ‘You’re very brave, volunteering to fight in a war that you don’t have to be part of.’

  Immediately the wary look vanished, to be replaced by a self-satisfied grin.

  ‘We can’t let you Brits have all the fun,’ he told her, ‘and besides, we thought we’d come over and show your fly boys how it ought to be done.’

  ‘And boy, are we doing that,’ Pete enthused. Slightly shorter, slightly less good-looking, slightly younger than Wilder, he was obviously rather in awe of him, Dulcie recognised. That was good. It proved her judgement was right and that she’d picked the best of the bunch, and the leader of the group.

  ‘Did you see the look on the faces of those RAF pilots in the officers’ mess after you’d flown under that Bristol Channel bridge, Wilder? I told them it was nothing and that they should wait and see what we can really do,’ Pete flagged up Wilder’s daredevilry.

  ‘Did you really do that?’ Dulcie asked, opening her eyes wide and looking amazed. She had no idea where or what the Bristol Channel bridge was, and she cared even less, but it was obvious that the three Americans believed that flying under it was something special, but she was prepared to indulge Wilder’s vanity by praising him for it – for now.

  ‘Sure I did. Apparently it’s off limits to the RAF, but we’re American and there’s nothing we like more than breaking a few rules, isn’t that right, guys?’ As he spoke Wilder leaned forward and put his hand on Dulcie’s knee.

  She let it rest there for a few seconds before crossing her legs, so that he was forced to remove it, before she said archly, ‘I hope that one of you boys is going to ask me to dance.’

  ‘Sure,’ Wilder agreed, getting up and offering her his hand.

  ‘It looks as though Dulcie and Wilder are getting on well,’ Tilly told Drew happily as the other couple got up to dance the last dance of the evening. Tilly was glad that Drew hadn’t asked her. They had danced together earlier in the evening – energetic, good fun jitterbug dances that had left Tilly breathless with laughter and enjoyment – but the long slow lights-down, couples-up-close, last dance wasn’t something she would have felt comfortable doing. Because of Rick? Tilly’s heart gave a small uncomfortable thump at the thought of Dulcie’s brother. She was over all that silliness now, she reminded herself. She’d grown up since last Christmas, and all that upset and hurt she’d felt when Rick hadn’t asked her for the last dance, but had danced with someone else instead.