by Annie Groves
‘There you are!’ June exclaimed, plainly oblivious to the tension. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Those two Spitfire boys we met up with earlier are waiting for their dance.’
Lou was only too glad to escape, even if it did mean dancing with a young pilot who had two left feet, both of which he kept putting down on top of her own.
‘Have you seen how much some of the girls are drinking?’ June asked Lou, round-eyed when they had finally returned to the table they were sharing with several other girls from their hotel, some American and some British. ‘Tonight’s been a real eye-opener, I can tell you. I mean, I like a good time, but some of the things that are going on here…I heard a couple of girls openly talking about going back to their rooms with a couple of men they’d only just met. Who was that girl you were standing with when I came over, only she’s just danced past us and she was really giving you the evil eye?’
‘She’s an American pilot who can’t resist shooting a line about her flying skills,’ Lou answered June, pulling a face and adding, ‘You know the type.’
Several of the other girls, who had been dancing, returned to their table, one of them, Nadine, announcing, ‘We’re all being treated to a free drink.’
‘Who from?’ June asked
‘An old friend of mine.’
When the drinks arrived, beer in bottles, Lou was tempted to refuse, but when Nadine told her firmly, ‘This is yours, Lou: ginger beer, a special order, since you’re not much of a drinker,’ she felt obliged to pick up the bottle instead and thank her.
Kieran watched Lou from the other side of the room. He hadn’t planned on coming to the club tonight, having discovered on previous visits to London that it tended to attract a rowdy ready-for-anything crowd that didn’t really appeal to him, but the others he was with had insisted, and rather than be dubbed a spoilsport he had gone along with what they wanted to do.
He supposed he should have guessed that the loud American girl who had introduced herself to him the previous evening at another party, and who had insisted that he dance with her and return to her table with her, would be someone who would naturally gravitate towards a place like this.
He had no real idea why he should feel it necessary to keep an eye on Lou, it was just inbuilt into him to look after daft kids who couldn’t look after themselves, Kieran decided. Only Lou wasn’t a kid any more, she was a woman. And a very attractive woman, as well. Kieran frowned, caught off guard by the direction his thoughts were taking, and determined to stop them. There were more than enough pretty girls around for him not to need to think about Lou Campion.
Patti Beauclerk, sitting as close to Kieran as she could, watched Lou with a look of gloating triumph in her eyes.
Patti didn’t like competition from other women – of any kind. The ATA pilot – Lou, Kieran had called her – was going to be very sorry indeed that she had crossed her.
It had been a stroke of luck meeting Nadine at the bar just as she was getting drinks for their table, and pretending that she owed Nadine a round of drinks. No one had seen her slip those amphetamine tablets into Lou’s drink – enough to make her as high as a kite, especially with that double shot of gin she’d put into it as well.
Patti had found out, from a pilot she had got friendly with when she’d first arrived in the country, that some pilots used the amphetamines ahead of a mission, or when they had thought they might have trouble staying awake on night duty. Always eager to prove her reputation for daring, Patti had got hold of some of the tablets and had found out that they gave an added buzz to partying, as well as keeping her awake.
The pilot who had introduced her to them had told her with a wink that he reckoned they were very good for removing inhibition, ‘if you know what I mean.’
She did, of course, and now she was really going to enjoy herself watching Miss High and Mighty show herself up in what she hoped would be a very spectacular manner indeed, under the influence of the tablets she had dissolved in Lou’s drink.
Lou felt quite extraordinary, caught up in a rush of excitement and euphoria akin to what she normally felt only when she was flying. She couldn’t stop talking, chattering away inconsequentially nineteen to the dozen, and finishing her drink despite its odd taste.
‘Come on’ she urged June, ‘let’s go and dance.’
‘What’s got into you?’ June demanded, laughing when Lou pulled her onto the dance floor in her eagerness to be there. ‘I’ve never seen you like this before.’
‘That’s because we’ve never been on leave in London before,’ Lou told her.
‘You’re turning into a real party girl, and no mistake.’
Lou had stopped listening. All she really wanted to hear was the music, its beat thudding into her senses, making her whole body itch to respond to its demands.
Within minutes of them starting to dance a small space had been cleared around them, Lou’s exhilaration allowing her to overcome her normal reticence as she performed some of the complicated jitterbug moves she and Sasha had learned together.
Frowning slightly, Kieran watched Lou. She was glowing with exuberance, her face flushed, her eyes shining, their pupils huge and dark. The place of the girl she had been dancing with had been taken by a young American who was twirling Lou round with expertise, spinning her faster and faster, egged on by the crowd watching them.
Lou might be enjoying herself now but, as his mother had told them as children, too much excitement always ended up in tears and upset, and Lou was overexcited. Kieran had seen her dancing on many previous occasions when she and her twin had been practising for the ‘competition’ his uncle Con had set up, but he had never seen her behaving as wildly as she was now, throwing her head back and laughing when her partner threw her around so speedily that the full skirt of her dress flew up, revealing the long slender length of legs Kieran was forced to acknowledge were just about the best he had ever seen.
It was no business of his how Lou behaved, of course, but the way she was behaving was certainly out of character for the girl Kieran remembered.
‘Looks like your friend from home has taken one too many of those pills you flyboys like to take,’ Patti commented meaningfully, unable to resist drawing Kieran’s attention to Lou’s wild behaviour. ‘She should be more careful about what she drinks.’
Patti’s words, said so smugly and with such gloating delight, distracted Kieran’s attention from Lou to Patti herself.
‘I reckon that tomorrow morning she isn’t going to feel anything like as proud of herself as she is right now. In fact, I’ve heard that it’s a dismissal offence for the Brit ATA girls to let the side down and not behave like ladies.’
Kieran knew women – at least as much as any man could ‘know them’. He knew all about those smug secret little smiles, and the meanings that were hidden in seemingly innocuous little words. He’d grown up witnessing his sisters practising their art, and learning to be young women. He’d witnessed their squabbles, their fallouts with once ‘best friends’, their hostility towards other girls who had offended them in some way only understood by other females.
‘You’ve spiked Lou’s drink,’ he guessed.
Patti was enjoying herself. Kieran’s attention was focused totally on her now.
‘Now why would I go and do something like that?’
‘How many pills did you put in it?’ Kieran demanded.
‘I can’t remember,’ Patti lied.
‘One, two?’
Patti raised an eyebrow and pouted. ‘Why do we have to talk about her? What does it matter how many there were?’
There was something in the way that Kieran was looking at her now that Patti hadn’t expected and certainly didn’t welcome. She wished now that she hadn’t let him guess what she had done, even though at the time it had seemed too delicious a secret to keep to herself.
‘Tell me,’ Kieran insisted grimly.
‘All right, it was three,’ Patti admitted sulkily, ‘although why you sh
ould be making such a fuss about it and her I really don’t know.’
Three? Kieran looked towards the dance floor where Lou was being swung off her feet by her partner. Across the space that divided them their gazes met and somehow as her feet touched the ground Lou missed her step, and lost her balance, tumbling to the floor, and then lying there, too surprised and bemused to make any attempt to get up.
‘What are you doing?’
Ignoring Patti’s outraged demand, Kieran pushed back his chair and got up, striding across the floor to where half a dozen GIs had surrounded Lou and were counting her ‘out’ in the manner of a felled boxer in the ring, whilst Lou herself simply laughed, oblivious to the disapproving looks she was being given by some of the women witnessing what was going on.
Pushing aside the GIs Kieran reached Lou and bent down to haul her to her feet.
‘Kieran…’ Lou was uncomfortably aware of the tight line of Kieran’s mouth. The look on his face rather reminded her of one her father might have given her when she was a wilful teenager.
‘Show’s over boys,’ Kieran told the watching GIs.
‘What are you doing?’ Lou demanded when Kieran started almost to march her off the dance floor. ‘I want to go back and dance some more. I was enjoying myself.’
‘So we could all see,’ Kieran acknowledged. ‘But somehow I don’t think you’d also enjoy waking up tomorrow morning in the bed of one of those GIs, which is what was going to happen.’
His brutal words shocked Lou out of the euphoria that had been gripping her.
‘No, that’s not true,’ she protested. ‘I’d never do anything like that.’ Her head had started to ache and she suddenly felt slightly sick and dizzy, swaying against Kieran.
‘Where are your friends, that girl you came here with?’ Kieran demanded. The best thing he could do for her was hand her over to her friend and tell her what Patti had done, urging her to get Lou back to wherever they were staying and keep her there until the effect of the amphetamines had worn off.
‘They’ve gone,’ Lou told him. ‘June wanted me to go with them but I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep on dancing.’
Kieran cursed under his breath.
‘I’m thirsty. I need a drink. I’ll have a gin and tonic.’
‘You’ll have no such thing,’ Kieran informed her grimly.
‘Chuck will get me one,’ Lou announced determinedly.
Kieran looked across at the GI who was glowering at him and reflected to himself that a drink wouldn’t be all that Chuck might want to give her. Not for the first time or, he suspected, the last, he cursed the fact that his mother had seen fit to tell him every day of his growing life, ‘You’re the eldest, Kieran, and that means that it’s up to you to look after the little ones, especially with the girls.’ And had thus instilled into him an indestructible sense of responsibility.
It was no good telling himself that Lou meant nothing to him and there was no reason why he shouldn’t simply leave her to fate and her GI. He knew girls like Lou; he had grown up amongst them. They were the sort of girls who didn’t go messing around with boys and who insisted on an engagement ring on their finger and the banns called before they permitted anything more than a few kisses. Respectable, brought-up-in-a-certainway girls, who kept to the rules. The war might have given some of those girls a freedom their mothers had never had, but ultimately the war would end, and those who had lost their good reputations could end up regretting that freedom.
The truth was that Kieran did feel a sense of responsibility for Lou. There was no point dwelling on things that had happened in the past, though if he were honest with himself then he did still feel uncomfortable about the way he had played Lou and Sasha off against one another, manipulating their emotions and taking advantage of their naïvety when he had gone along with his uncle Con’s plans to put them on the stage for his own financial benefit.
He hadn’t wanted to listen then to his mother’s warning to him not to follow in her brother’s footsteps. He had had to learn for himself what he really wanted from life. Joining the RAF was the best thing he had ever done. It had shown him a different kind of life, where respecting others and earning their respect in turn were more important than pulling a fast one over the naïve in order to earn a few quid.
Lou was trying to pull free of his grip and if he wasn’t careful, judging from the way her GI admirer was watching them, an unpleasant scene could easily develop. The best thing he could do now was get Lou back to wherever it was she was staying, but he knew that telling her that wasn’t going to be a good idea.
Instead he walked her firmly towards the exit, answering her angry, ‘What are you doing?’ by telling her, ‘This place will be closing soon. Everyone will be moving on to another club.’
‘Does it have a dance floor?’ Lou demanded.
Kieran nodded.
Lou had felt so hot that she welcomed the sharp coldness of the November air against her flushed face, pulling away from Kieran as she hummed under her breath and then began to dance on the pavement.
‘Come on, there’s a taxi.’ Kieran started to lope towards it, pulling Lou with him, forcing her to stop dancing to keep up with him.
Kieran could see from the cabbie’s face that he wasn’t keen to have them as passengers, but Kieran bundled Lou into the cab before the driver could protest, and then got in himself.
‘Where to, guv?’
‘We’re going dancing,’ Lou responded before Kieran could say anything. ‘We’re going to dance all night.’
In the mirror the cabbie’s gaze met Kieran’s.
‘What’s the address of your hotel, Lou?’ Kieran asked.
‘What do you want to know that for?’ Lou asked indignantly. ‘We’re going dancing. You said so. I want to get out.’ She was reaching for the door.
‘Know where you’re going yet, guv, only me meter’s ticking away and—’
‘The Montgomery Hotel, please, it’s just off the King’s Road, the Sloane Square end near the barracks,’ Kieran answered, giving the address of his own hotel.
The taxi took off at such a speed that Lou was thrown against Kieran as they turned a corner, the taxi driver obviously eager to get rid of them as quickly as he could.
‘Stop, I want to get out. I want to go dancing.’
‘Carry on driving, cabbie,’ Kieran contradicted Lou.
‘I want to get out, and you can’t stop me. You had no right to…to take me away from my friends.’
The cab swung onto the King’s Road, the damp pavements and road glistening under the light from the moon, couples clinging together in sheltered doorways. If he let Lou get out of the cab now it would be like letting a new-born kitten cross a busy road.
‘Looks like your girl has been having a good time,’ the cabbie commented.
‘I’m not his girl,’ Lou corrected him.
‘She’s my sister,’ Kieran fibbed, ‘and not really used to London.’
‘You’d better keep a watch on her, then, ‘cos this city ain’t the place to be these days if you don’t know what’s what. All sorts, we’ve got here, and some of them not too fussy about how they behave.’ As he spoke a Jeep screamed out of a side street: the American MPs, with the white gloves that had earned them the nickname ‘snowdrops’, no doubt on the lookout for servicemen breaking the rules.
Kieran’s hotel was at the bottom end of what might once have been described as ‘shabby genteel’, and had, Kieran suspected, been dying a slow death until the war had increased the demand for hotel rooms. He had been meant to be sharing with another pilot, who had cried off at the last minute, leaving Kieran in sole occupation of the double room.
Lou wasn’t feeling very well at all. Her heart was pounding so unsteadily and heavily that she could almost hear it beating; she felt slightly sick and dizzy and wanted to lie down, but at the same time something inside her felt as though it had been wound up tightly, filling her with an unfamiliar sense of desperate, restless urgency. A
s she followed Kieran out of the taxi she looked curiously at the façade of the hotel whilst she waited for him to pay the cabbie.
‘This doesn’t look like a club,’ she told him.
Ignoring her, Kieran took hold of her arm in a firm grip and prayed mentally that the hotel’s reputation of turning a blind eye to its guests returning from an evening out accompanied by a friend, provided the doorman was tipped generously, could be relied on.
Luckily, though, the hallway was empty. It was probably too early for most of the guests to be returning, Kieran thought, as he urged Lou up the stairs and then along the landing towards his room.
They had almost reached it when Lou, who mercifully hadn’t said anything for several minutes, suddenly announced, ‘I don’t feel right,’ and then collapsed against him.
Luckily they were close enough to his room for Kieran to be able to half carry and half drag her into it and then get her on one of the room’s two single beds before turning to lock the door. When he turned back to the bed, Lou was lying there watching him.
‘How do you feel now?’ he asked her.
‘Strange,’ Lou answered him truthfully. ‘Like my head’s an express train with things rushing through it all the time and I can’t make them stop. It’s as though everything inside me is fizzing and wanting to do things, and yet at the same time I feel really dizzy and sickly.’
‘Patti put some amphetamines in your drink, that’s why you’re feeling like that.’
‘Patti? You mean your girl? The one who was boasting about buzzing some poor farmer?’
‘Yes, but she’s not my girl.’
‘Well, she was acting like she was,’ Lou pointed out spiritedly. ‘Why would she put amphetamines in my drink?’
‘To get even with you, I should imagine, and because she was hoping they would encourage you to throw off your inhibitions and make a fool of yourself, or worse.’
Lou was beginning to feel dreadfully weak and shaky all of a sudden, but her head was still buzzing and just trying to listen to her own thoughts was exhausting her.