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‘Yes, Nancy, I know you must and everybody else knows it too.’ Olive could not stop herself now, her words, like water through a ruptured dam, bursting uncontrollably forth. ‘And let me tell you something, you are an interfering busybody whom everybody tries to avoid, and if it’s all the same to you I’ll bid you good day!’ At that Olive pulled on her gloves and, with her head high, she slammed her front gate firmly behind her and marched straight-backed up the street. Nobody, but nobody, was going to cast aspersions on her daughter.
Olive had just reached the top of the street when she literally bumped into Sergeant Archie Dawson, who was ambling around the corner. She was heartily glad that Nancy had retreated into her own house as he caught her deftly around the waist to stop her stumbling into the road and into the path of a horse and cart. Olive could imagine only too well what her vindictive neighbour would insinuate about her innocent friendship with the upstanding policeman. Feeling the warmth of colour rising to her cheeks, she chided herself for being so gauche. She wasn’t a girl any more, with a head full of starry dreams; she was a grown woman with a grown-up daughter … who was having starry dreams of her own right now.
‘Oh, hello, Archie, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going.’ Olive could feel her heartbeat quicken and reprimanded herself for being foolish. However, she didn’t want to dwell on what Archie, a married man and serving police sergeant, would think. Instead she concentrated on a couple of children stretching a length of rope across the street and wondered where they came about such a good length, as everything was needed for the war effort.
‘Hello, Olive,’ Archie Dawson said with that usual warmth in his kind, mellow voice as he held her securely until the cart had passed. ‘You look a little flushed, is everything okay?’ He used the latest expression that seemed to be doing the rounds due to the huge influx of American soldiers, who the young ones referred to as GIs on account of the initials on the padded shoulders of their very smart uniforms which stood for Government Issue.
Olive smiled. She never would have imagined someone as upright and respectable as Sergeant Dawson using American slang, but it showed that he was keeping up with the times and that he wasn’t as buttoned-up as the impression he gave to the rest of the community. And if she was honest, she thought it sounded quite good coming from him.
‘Oh, I’ve just had a bit of a run-in with Nancy Black,’ Olive explained. ‘That woman would try the patience of angels.’
‘Oh, you don’t have to say any more, the old witch gave me chapter and verse about …’ He stopped abruptly and Olive could see he was trying to be tactful when he continued ‘… about Tilly and Drew carrying a suitcase and going off in a taxi cab. But we’ll talk no more about it,’ Archie Dawson said gallantly, taking his hand from her waist and giving a low rumbling laugh that seemed to soothe Olive’s bubbling indignation. ‘Suffice it to say, Olive, you are right, she would try the serenity of a saint.’
‘Oh, Archie.’ Olive smiled for the first time that day and in doing so felt all her tension slip away.
‘Not that I’m saying you are not a saint, Olive, you are a very good woman, hardworking, a pillar of the community …’
‘Oh, Archie, you flatter me, I’m nothing of the sort,’ she laughed in that carefree way he always provoked in her. ‘You will have my head swelling.’ Olive could feel little sparks of delight shoot through her. However, they were quickly followed by a heaviness that reminded her she was a busy widow and he was a respectably married man with a young, impressionable foster son who needed the close eye of a decent man to keep him on the straight and narrow. Suddenly, her attention was drawn to Nancy, who was now hurrying up the street resplendent in her carpet slippers.
‘Some of us haven’t got time to stand around indulging in idle chit-chat,’ Nancy said as she hurried by. ‘There is a queue forming outside the butcher’s shop; Mrs Finlay just told me he’s got oxtails on the go.’ In seconds she had passed them and was halfway up the street before turning and saying in a loud voice, ‘Oh, Sergeant! Was that your wife I heard calling just now?’
Olive and Archie watched in stunned silence as Nancy scurried past them in the direction of the butcher’s shop. As she disappeared their gaze remained fixed on the corner of the street. Then, slowly, they turned to each other and, just for a moment, there was a shared intimacy as their eyes locked. But then the spell was broken when Archie’s attention was caught by a passing pigeon swooping down and landing on the road. It was an insignificant thing, but effective in reminding Olive she had things to do.
The lingering connection between herself and Archie … Sergeant Dawson … all at once consumed her with an overwhelming feeling of guilt. However, if she was truly honest, only to herself, even the feeling of guilt was deliciously pleasurable. Turning away quickly now, afraid her thoughts would be plain for Archie to see, Olive took a deep breath, hoping it would calm her obvious raging flush of colour.
They had never done a thing wrong. Nothing improper had ever occurred between them. But Olive had been a married woman. She knew the delights of a man’s strong arms holding her securely through the night. She knew the intimacy of an unexpected stolen kiss. And if she was honest she was finding it increasingly difficult these days to disguise the longing she felt whenever Archie was anywhere near her.
But disguise her feelings she must as Archie was a married man and pillar of the community as well as a serving police sergeant who must uphold all that was decent in these tragic times, in a world gone mad through the ferocious needs of a madman. What would happen if they all gave in to their desires? Everything would fall apart in no time.
Olive drew her fervent thoughts to a close. There never would be anything between them, she knew. There couldn’t be. He had a foster son who looked up to him and needed a stable home life in these uncertain times and she had the girls to look after.
‘Well,’ Olive said, uncomfortable now, ‘I’d better be off before those oxtails have all gone. Good day, Sergeant Dawson.’
‘Good day, Olive,’ Archie said, and she could feel rather than see his lingering look as she hurried up the street.
TWO
‘Will you be able to manage at home on your own?’ Dulcie asked in a rare moment of empathy, taking hold of David’s hand. His head was bent and she couldn’t quite see his expression as the sun was in her eyes. Slowly, she tilted her face to one side to try to take a peek.
‘Under Mr McIndoe’s instructions,’ he said, ‘the hospital has put into place a system whereby I can manage at home with the help of a daily nurse.’
Dulcie noticed he looked rather pleased with the news. However, she wondered if it was too soon and couldn’t keep the erratic feelings of alarm from her voice. ‘I should think you need more time, David.’ It seemed to her that he hadn’t long been sitting out of his hospital bed and now they were throwing him onto the street.
‘Hardly,’ David smiled. ‘Anyway, I can’t wait to get back amongst my own things and wallow in my own bathtub without having a nurse wash me. A man has to have some privacy, you know.’ He gave a guarded smile and Dulcie watched him quietly for a while, as if seeing him for the first time. He was the bravest person she had ever met, though more reserved now, unlike Wilder, the brash, dare-devil fighter pilot who paid her little attention since they discovered her sister, Edith, hadn’t been killed after all and who made a beeline for Wilder every chance she got. Whereas David always listened patiently whilst she poured her heart out. Now why couldn’t Wilder be like that, she wondered.
‘Seen something you like?’ David said, offering a beaming smile.
‘Sorry, I was miles away.’ Dulcie laughed, knowing she’d always had a short attention span, especially when other people were talking about themselves, it was so boring. ‘You were saying?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ David, sitting regulation upright, smiled and slowly shook his head.
With one arm of his striped pyjamas pinned against his proud shoulder, so it didn’t flap around getting in his way, and a plaid woollen rug across his knees, he looked just like any other patient and that was how Dulcie treated him; nobody would have known they were socially and economically worlds apart. David, being landed gentry, was distinctly upper class whereas she came from a terraced house in the backstreets of the East End. But that didn’t bother David or Dulcie; they were just good friends and she knew he would always be there to listen to her grumbles.
‘Did I tell you that Wilder is acting very oddly at the moment, David? He never listens to a word I say.’ She gave a half-smile of confusion when David took a deep, long-suffering breath of air.
‘What?’ Dulcie asked when she saw him smile. However, saying nothing, he indicated with a nod of his head that she should continue, which Dulcie was only too happy to do.
‘It’s not fair, really it isn’t,’ she resumed and then, seeing David’s quizzical expression, she explained. ‘It’s that blousy cat, Edith.’
‘Your sister?’ asked David, his face the picture of easy-going amusement.
‘The same,’ said Dulcie, eager to get on with the character-slaying. ‘She’s got no right carrying on the way she does with my boyfriend and her being my sister makes it even worse. Oh, I can’t stand her at times, she’s always been Mum’s favourite and doesn’t she know it.’ Dulcie gave an emphatic nod of her perfectly styled curls and carried on. ‘Edith’s been getting away with all sorts from the minute she was born, Mum can’t see any wrong in her – well, she should look at her through my eyes, that’s all I can say!’
Dulcie was forced to stop talking in order to breathe as they sat together in the beautiful sunshine, David in his wheelchair and she on the wooden seat next to him in the gardens of the hospital where he was staying whilst he recovered from his injuries and subsequent amputation of his lower legs which had been badly damaged when the aircraft he been piloting had been shot down.
He viewed her with grateful amusement. Dulcie, his little cockney sparrow – if sparrow could ever be used to describe a girl as stunningly beautiful as blonde-haired, brown-eyed Dulcie, with her luscious curves combined with a manner that told a man that he’d be very lucky indeed if he ever got close to actually touching those curves. She always cheered him up and took his mind off his own problems when she made him laugh. There were no such things as molehills in Dulcie’s life; all upsets were mountains.
They had known each other since the beginning of the war, when he had been a good-looking young barrister with the world at his feet and a wife-to-be with an eye on his future title. Dulcie had been a shop girl working on the perfume counter at Selfridges and very ready, he knew, to flirt with the fiancé of her upper-class colleague to whom, she later admitted, she had taken a distinct dislike.
Now his wife was, like his lower legs, feet, and most of one arm, destroyed by the cruelties of war. But they weren’t his only injuries; Dulcie was also privy to the information that the damage to his groin would, as far as anyone knew at this stage, prevent him from fathering a child. Such a shame, she thought, as David was one of the most devastatingly handsome men she had ever set eyes on.
Lydia, his wife, lay in her grave, having been caught up in the bombing raid on the Café de Paris where she had been dancing with her current lover, whilst he had lost his legs in the gun battle between his Spitfire and a German Messerschmitt.
Now he was a patient at the famous Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead under the care of the pioneering plastic surgeon Mr Archibald McIndoe, whilst Dulcie worked in a munitions factory and lodged at number 13, Article Row in Holborn, where she lived with the owner of the house, Mrs Olive Robbins, a widow, and her daughter, Tilly, who worked in the Lady Almoner’s office at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Two other girls also rented rooms: Sally, a Liverpudlian nurse who worked at Bart’s, and Agnes, a mouse of a girl who worked in the ticket office at Chancery Lane underground.
In the way that things were now happening during wartime David knew that those girls and the house on Article Row had become Dulcie’s mainstay and he also knew that communities, friendships and relationships destroyed by the war were reformed by its survivors. He also knew Article Row well, as it was very close to the Inns of Court where he had lived and worked before the war and where he intended to return once he left hospital.
‘And as for Wilder …’ Dulcie, aggrieved, was still talking and David realised he had to pay attention. ‘Well, I had a thing or two to say to him, I can tell you, especially after he asked Edith to come dancing with us next week.’
‘London is full of newly arrived Americans from what I’ve heard, Dulcie, why don’t you find yourself one who will treat you better than this Wilder chap?’ David suggested. He knew that she had been dating the American pilot, who had originally come over to England to join the Eagles unit of Americans attached to the RAF, for quite some time. He had never met him, of course, but from the way Dulcie talked about him and his wandering eye, David doubted he would like him very much if he did, and he certainly didn’t approve of the casual, not to say occasionally openly unkind, way in which he treated Dulcie.
‘What?’ Dulcie looked outraged. ‘Give him up and let Edith think she’s won and that Wilder prefers her to me? Never.’ Her response was determined. ‘Edith only wants him because she wants to get one up on me. I said as much to our brother, Rick, when he came home on leave from the desert and he insisted on taking me and Edith to see Mum and Dad.’
‘So your mother has been reunited with Edith, then?’ David said as the hot sun beat down on his face whilst Dulcie dabbed her cheeks with powder.
‘Oh yes,’ Dulcie said, pausing momentarily and looking over her gold compact. ‘Mum was all over her, carrying on as you’d expect. I was completely ignored for the whole afternoon; nobody would have known that it was thanks to me that they’d been reunited. I have the feeling that Edith would have been just as happy to leave her own family in the dark.’
‘What makes you say that?’ David asked, always interested in Dulcie’s chaotic lifestyle.
‘Well, it stands to reason, never once did Mum or Dad ask Edith why she hadn’t made a bit of an effort to find out where they lived after they left London at the beginning of the Blitz.’
‘Well, Edith knew where you lived, surely she could have contacted you?’
‘Exactly,’ said Dulcie with an emphatic nod of her head. ‘That’s precisely what I said, but no, it was all “how wonderful” to see her and Mum called it “a miracle” but did I get one word of gratitude? Not likely! And to think if I hadn’t seen her in the chorus line review they’d still be thinking she was a goner now.’
David’s heart went out to Dulcie knowing, first-hand, what her younger sister was like. He’d met her briefly when she came down to East Grinstead when Dulcie was on one of her regular visits. If he remembered correctly, Edith was a hard-faced, shallow little madam if ever there was one, he thought, concerned only with herself, and from what he could see nowhere near as pretty as Dulcie. He recalled that Edith had soon lost interest in him and the other men on the ward when she realised how badly injured they were.
‘As for letting another American serviceman take me out – and don’t think I haven’t been asked because I have. Many a time I’ve been invited out by some of those that have finally decided to join us in the war.’ Dulcie gave a small, proud toss of her head, seemingly satisfied that she had been stopped in the middle of the street by the new influx of Americans who had been arriving since last January and had become Briton’s active allies since the December bombing of Pearl Harbor.
‘If I was to see anybody else in uniform I think it would have to be one of them Poles, not another American.’ David watched her for a moment. Dulcie talked in a matter-of-fact way about everything, even her love life, which, he thought, was probably more exciting in her own mind than it ever was in real life – not that she didn’t have a wonderful time when she dressed to the nines and went out on the town dancing, but somehow there seemed a vulnerability in Dulcie that he was sure nobody else could see.
‘You’re too good for Wilder, Dulcie, let your sister have him and good riddance to the pair of them.’ David hadn’t intended speaking the words out loud but when he saw the surprised expression on Dulcie’s expertly made-up face he realised that he had done just that.
‘What! Let her have him? She’d crow till the cows came home and no mistake. She’d be on his arm before it had a chance to get cold, that one.’
‘Would that be so awful?’ David felt really sorry for her now. She didn’t deserve this treatment after all she had done for her sister, reuniting her with her family.
‘You bet your sweet potato it would,’ Dulcie said in an outraged tone. ‘She would make it her business to tell everybody she knows that Wilder dropped me for her and that ain’t gonna happen. You’d hear the crowing halfway over London.’
‘Well, you know best, Dulcie,’ David said with a hint of resignation, as he didn’t like to see her so upset like this.
‘And you’ll never guess what she did last week. She only sent Wilder a free ticket for her new show. Just the one ticket, mind, and Wilder is so trusting he probably thought she’d forgotten to send me one. I said to him, when I saw it fall out of his pocket, that she was trying to get her claws into him and he wanted to beware of her tricks to get him alone.’
‘Good for you,’ said David, realising how naïve Dulcie really was, now he’d been privileged enough to see beneath her brittle exterior. ‘What did you do after that?’ Just listening to Dulcie somehow eased the nagging, ever-present pain in his phantom lower legs. Other people might accuse her of being self-obsessed and even sometimes uncaring but David welcomed the fact that she didn’t make any emotional allowances for him, or treat him as though a part of his brain had been damaged along with his legs.
‘I ripped the ticket into a hundred pieces, that’s what I did.’ Her expression was one of relish, he noted, and then suddenly it changed to a frown when she looked up into the pale blue sky and announced, ‘That sun’s going to be in my eyes any minute now, here, let me turn you round so I can see you properly.’ Dulcie got up from the wooden bench and flipped David’s brake with her foot so she could get a better view of him.
‘Has that mother of yours been in to see you recently?’
David gave a little half-laugh. Nobody else would ask something as directly as Dulcie did, nor with such candour. ‘No, I told her not to come. What’s the point? We can’t agree on anything. She can’t forgive me for not giving her a grandson and heir when it was still within my power to do so.’
‘She can’t hold it against you now, David.’ Dulcie was horrified.
‘You don’t know my mother,’ he said grimly. ‘Furthermore, I cannot forgive her for caring more about the title than she does about her own flesh and blood.’
‘Your mother sounds every bit as stuck-up as your wife Lydia was, if you don’t mind me saying. Serves them both right that neither of them got what they wanted in the end.’
David knew that Dulcie didn’t mean to sound unkind. She was just upset on his behalf, and as she turned his wheelchair around he could hear the regret in her voice. At least she was honest in her emotions, he thought, unlike his mother and his late wife.
As the summer sun rose in the sky and cast its scorching rays at the hottest time of the day, Dulcie asked David if he would prefer to go inside and he agreed. He didn’t want to add sunstroke to his list of ailments, he laughed. It didn’t take Dulcie long to settle him into the chair at the side of his bed; she prided herself at getting quite good at the exercise and was pleased that David had every faith in her ability to move him from his wheelchair to the chair or bed. Nobody had ever trusted her that much before.
Once he was settled she poured him a glass of water and unconsciously examined her perfect oval talons for any sign of breakage, her eyes widening when she said suddenly, continuing their earlier conversation as if she’d never had an interruption, ‘I told her straight, I said, “Edith, you lay one paw on my Wilder and there will be trouble,” and she got the gist.’
‘And will she?’ David looked thoroughly amused. ‘Lay her paws on him, I mean.’
‘She wouldn’t dare, I’d scratch her eyes out.’ Dulcie let his obvious cynicism sail over her perfectly curled blonde head.
‘I think you would, too.’ David could hold in his mirth no longer and laughed aloud. ‘Only someone as beautiful as you could say a thing like that and make it sound inevitable, Dulcie. You are such a tonic.’
‘Why thank you, kind sir, I do agree.’ She, too, laughed now. ‘Oh, you are such a good friend, David,’ she said eventually, ‘but you’ve delighted me long enough and I must be off.’ She gathered her bag and gloves from the bed. ‘I’ll see you soon, don’t go home without letting me know what day, I don’t want to waste my time coming all the way down here to see just anybody.’
‘Heaven forfend, Dulcie.’ David’s remark was laced with a tinge of irony but it was lost on her as she bent and gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek.
‘What would I do without you to pour my heart out to, David? Now, have you got Olive’s address?’
‘You gave it to me earlier,’ David smiled, nodding to the piece of paper as Dulcie fussed around the bed, uncharacteristically straightening the cover where she had been sitting – he knew she wouldn’t want people to think she was a slut and couldn’t tidy up after herself.
David nodded, but before he could say anything Dulcie, with swaying hips and the clip-clip heels of her ankle-band peep-toed shoes, moved towards the door at the end of the nightingale ward. When she reached it she turned and blew him a kiss and waved.
‘Toodle-oo for now,’ she mouthed, not waiting to see David raise his one good arm and wave back.
THREE
In the woods beyond the hospital, one of Dulcie’s fellow lodgers, Sally, was walking with her fiancé, New Zealander George Laidlaw. Sally’s two-year-old half-sister, Alice, was between them as, securely, they each held one of her hands.
Sally and George had originally met when she had left Liverpool to work as a nurse at Bart’s hospital in London where George had been training as a registrar. George was now working in East Grinstead under Archibald McIndoe. When the war was finally over they planned to marry and live in New Zealand close to George’s parents.
‘Have you had no word yet from Callum about us adopting Alice when we get married?’ asked George over the child’s head.
‘Not yet,’ Sally answered. ‘I’m not sure where his ship is and it may be difficult to get post to him. But I don’t think he’ll object, he wants what’s best for her, that he brought her straight to me when her parents were killed goes to prove it.’ A small shadow crossed Sally’s face. She had been adamant she would have nothing to do with her orphaned half-sister when Callum brought her late that night. After all, it was Callum’s sister, Morag, who had been her best friend before betraying her in the worst possible way by marrying Sally’s father within months of his wife’s death and had then become pregnant with Alice.
It had come as a great shock and Sally, usually so caring, was determined that Alice should be handed over to the authorities and put into a children’s home. Olive, her wonderful landlady, had taken over in that gentle way she had and before she knew what had happened for sure, Sally discovered the little girl had found a place in her heart.
Now she couldn’t envisage a life without her any more than she could imagine one without her darling, steady and caring George, whom she loved so very much. It seemed laughable that she had once had a youthful crush on Callum, who’d been a school teacher before joining the Royal Navy, imagining herself in love with him.
‘Swing!’ Alice commanded firmly, bringing Sally out of her reverie and causing the two adults to exchange understanding looks before obliging the toddler and lifting her off her feet in a swinging motion that had her laughing with innocent delight before demanding, ‘More, Georgie, more …’
Georgie was her own special name for George and it never failed to touch Sally’s heart to see how much the little girl adored him and how very much she was adored in return.
‘Every day she reminds me more of Morag,’ Sally told him as they strolled through the leafy wood and was quite surprised when he said, ‘She has your mannerisms.’ She had never imagined the child had watched her so closely as to pick up her ways and those of the other girls back in Article Row, where she also loved trotting around in Olive’s heels ‘helping her’ around the house. Sally knew that one day she would tell Alice the story of her parents and her loving home. She was determined now that the child would know the security and happiness of that kind of secure home life.
In Hyde Park another member of the household at number 13 was also enjoying the July sunshine. Tilly, Olive’s eighteen-year-old daughter, was sitting on the grass with her head in her American boyfriend Drew’s lap, whilst she read the newspaper article that carried his by-line.
‘Oh, Drew, it’s sooo good,’ she exclaimed when she had finished. ‘I do wish you’d let me read your book though.’
‘It’s our book,’ he told her, ‘but I don’t want you to read it until it’s finished. You know that,’ Drew reminded her, as he had done every time she begged him to let her read the book he’d started writing shortly after his arrival in London after the beginning of the war. But he softened his refusal with a tender smile and Tilly smiled back.
‘I can’t wait for you to finish and for it to be published. I think it should be published now.’
‘It won’t be finished until the war is over,’ said Drew, ‘and besides, there isn’t any paper to publish new books at the moment.’
‘That’s so true,’ Tilly said with a tinge of regret. ‘Like so much else,’ she mused as the country prepared to enter its fourth year of the war in September. ‘You could get it published if you took it back home to America. Your father owns a newspaper and publishing group after all.’
Immediately Drew sighed and then took hold of both Tilly’s hands, gently pulling her upright so they could face each other.
‘You know I can’t do that, Tilly,’ he said firmly. ‘My father wants only one thing from me and that is to step into his shoes and take over the business – to live the life he wants me to live and not the life I want to live.’ With you, he thought silently.
‘There’s nothing I want more than for you to be here with me, you know that, Drew, but I can’t help feeling guilty sometimes. Your family, especially your mother, must miss you so much.’
Drew sighed again. He knew that he’d never be able to make Tilly understand how different his family values were to those of her own. Tilly might be an only child, but Olive had given her far more love and a happier, more secure childhood than he’d had from his parents and his sisters too. There was a coldness that came ultimately from his father and it affected everything he grasped in his icy, domineeringly cruel embrace in the same way as the warmth that came from Olive’s love for her daughter reached out to all around her.
‘They might miss the person they want me to be, a figment of my father’s imagination,’ said Drew, ‘but that person isn’t me, Tilly.’ He looked away for a moment and then turned to her again, his eyes red-rimmed as if he was stemming unshed tears. ‘Please believe me when I tell you, honey, that I have spent the happiest days of my life here with you and your family.’
Tilly gave him a look of adoring love, although as her mother had brought her up to be considerate to others she felt compelled to say, ‘America is your home though, Drew, and seeing so many of your fellow countrymen over here since America joined the war must make you feel so homesick. I know it would make me feel unsettled.’
It was true, Drew thought as he paused for thought, seeing so many young Americans filling London’s streets had caused him some sharp pangs of patriotism and pride in his country and his fellow man, and as he and Tilly had vowed to always be honest with one another he knew that it would be an insult to Tilly’s intelligence to deny ever missing America.
‘Yes, it does,’ he admitted, ‘and yes, there are any number of things that I love and miss about my homeland, but nowhere near as many as I love and would miss about you if we were to be parted. England is your home and I hope it will one day be mine too. You are my home. You are my life and you always will be. Always.’
