London Belles (20 page)

Whilst Olive put Tilly’s growing air of tension and excitement down to the fact that her daughter would be wearing her new dress at the coming church dance, Dulcie, who knew better, observed it with slightly malicious glee.

Oh, it was going to be one in the eye for Tilly’s mother, who treated her, Dulcie, as though she didn’t really want her there, when she found out that Tilly had defied her. Olive’s protective manner towards Tilly still irked Dulcie, reminding her as it did of her own mother’s favouring of Edith. Well, let Olive go around with her nose in the air, thinking that her Tilly told her everything and thought she was wonderful; she’d soon find out that she was wrong. Dulcie knew instinctively that Olive would be hurt by Tilly’s deception but she didn’t care. Olive needed bringing down a peg or two. The fact that Dulcie’s machinations might cause a rift between mother and daughter wasn’t something that weighed on her conscience. Why should it? It was plain daft of Olive to try and keep Tilly a kid for ever. In a way she was doing them both a favour.

On Friday evening, when Tilly announced casually that she and Agnes were going to the pictures on Saturday night, Olive didn’t think anything of it. Her head was full of all the things she needed to do for Christmas, only a month away now. She’d got a goose on order, and luckily she’d been able to get in a bit of a supply of butter from the grocer she always used, ahead of the rationing.

‘I expect you’ll be going home for Christmas, Dulcie?’ she asked, her question causing Dulcie to frown. She hadn’t really given much thought to Christmas, but now that Olive had mentioned it and made it plain that she expected her to go home because no doubt she didn’t want her here, Dulcie felt like digging her heels in and being awkward.

‘Well, I’d like to, of course,’ she agreed, giving an exaggerated sigh as she added, ‘especially with my brother expecting to be coming home from France on leave, but I don’t think there’s going to be room for me. Of course, if you don’t want me here . . .’

‘Of course we do, don’t we, Mum?’ Tilly immediately jumped in. ‘It will be more fun if you’re here, Dulcie. We always have a bit of a party on Boxing Day, don’t we, Mum?’

‘I’d hardly call it a party, Tilly, at least not the sort of party Dulcie would enjoy,’ Olive responded pointedly, giving Dulcie a sharp look as though she guessed what she was up to. ‘It’s just a few of our neighbours, that’s all.’

The news that Dulcie’s brother would be home on leave over Christmas had brought a pink glow to Tilly’s cheeks. She could hardly wait for tomorrow night and being able to ask Dulcie more about her brother without her own mother listening in and giving her that disapproving look.

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to put you out,’ said Dulcie with pretend concern.

‘You won’t be putting me out, Dulcie,’ Olive felt obliged to deny. ‘I just thought you would want to be with your own family.’

‘But, Mum, Sally’s going to be staying, and Agnes, of course, and it wouldn’t be the same if Dulcie wasn’t here,’ Tilly protested.

It certainly wouldn’t, Olive thought grimly, but with Tilly such a staunch supporter of Dulcie there was nothing she could say or do other than allow the subject to be dropped, and rework her shopping plans to make sure that she bought in enough to feed all of them.

As she said to Sally later, if it wasn’t for all the inconvenience of the blackout rules, the ugliness of sandbag buildings, and the sight of so many ARP posts and air-raid shelters everywhere you wouldn’t think there was a war on at all.

‘It’s no wonder people are calling it a phoney war.’

‘It may be phoney for us here in London,’ Sally agreed, ‘but we had a young merchant seaman in today whose arm had to be amputated thanks to the wound he’d suffered when his ship was torpedoed by the Germans. He was telling us that the Germans are inflicting serious losses on our merchant fleet, and that the Government aren’t letting on how bad the situation is. He reckons that it will be much more than butter and bacon that goes on ration soon, with so much having to be brought in to the country by sea.’

‘Poor boy,’ Olive sympathised.

‘Yes,’ Sally agreed. The young seaman had been visibly shocked when he’d been told that he would have to lose his arm or risk losing his life because of the gangrene that had set in to the crushed limb. He’d told her worriedly that merchant seamen, unlike men in the Royal Navy, did not get paid when they weren’t actually working at sea, and she had really felt for him, his situation making her aware of how lucky she was, which reminded her . . .

‘I’ll be going out straight from work tomorrow afternoon,’ she told Olive. ‘One of the other nurses has got tickets for several of us for the matinée of the ENSA Drury Lane show. Apparently the theatres are really good about letting nurses have seats at a cheaper rate and when she asked me if I’d like one of them it seemed silly not to say yes.’

‘I should say so,’ Olive agreed. ‘It will do you good to go out and have a bit of fun.’

‘Yes, I think it will,’ Sally agreed happily.

‘Tilly, I don’t think I want to go dancing after all.’

They were in their bedroom after what had felt like the longest day Tilly had ever known. So tense with nerves and excitement was she that she’d barely been able to eat her tea.

Agnes’s words, along with the distinct tremor in her voice, had Tilly putting down the hairbrush to give Agnes an anxious but determined look as she told her firmly, ‘Of course you want to go.’

‘But what about your mother? She’s been so kind to me.’

‘Mum will be fine about it once we’ve been. We just aren’t telling her because she doesn’t understand yet that we’re grown up. Once we’ve been then everything will be all right. You wait and see.’

Tilly had convinced herself of the truth of what she was saying and her belief in it propped up Agnes’s wavering courage, although she did protest, ‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. If I wasn’t then we wouldn’t be going, would we?’

Her hair brushed, Tilly dipped her forefinger in her precious pot of Vaseline and then, with her tongue tip protruding slightly as she concentrated, she smoothed her dark eyebrows down and then very carefully Vaselined the ends of her long dark eyelashes as well.

Watching her, Agnes was impressed. Her own eyelashes and eyebrows were a plain mouse brown and she shook her head when Tilly offered her the jar of Vaseline.

‘Knowing me, I’d probably end up sticking my finger in my eye.’

Her eyebrows and lashes done to her satisfaction Tilly reached for the Tangee lipstick that her mother had only allowed her to wear once she had started work. The lipstick looked orange but once on Tilly’s lips it gave them a satisfyingly rosy-pink lustre that Tilly was convinced made her look much more grown up.

‘Here, you have some,’ she invited Agnes.

Hesitantly, Agnes took the lipstick. Living at the orphanage, she had been denied the opportunity to experiment with growing up in the way that other girls did and the movement of her hand as she applied the lipstick to her own mouth was shaky and uncertain.

‘We’d better get a move on,’ Tilly warned, turning to their shared wardrobe and opening its doors. ‘Here’s your bag and your dress.’ She thrust both at her so that Agnes had no alternative other than to take them from her whilst Tilly removed her own dress from its hanger and quickly folded it up to put it into her own bag.

‘Your mother is bound to ask what we’ve got in these,’ Agnes warned Tilly as she eyed the over-filled bags.

‘Not if we take them down into the hall and leave them there whilst we say goodbye. She’ll be listening to the radio so she won’t get up to see us off. She said how tired she was at teatime after Sergeant Dawson had her driving through the afternoon traffic. Come on,’ Tilly urged. ‘We’ve got to get changed yet into our skirts and jumpers as though we were going to the cinema.’

Upstairs in her own room on the top floor, Dulcie was also getting ready for the evening ahead, surveying her appearance in the full-length mirror. The dress she was wearing – pale blue silk, its V neck trimmed with a slightly darker shade of velvet ribbon, the same ribbon trimming its puffed sleeves – was cut on the bias, skimming her curves but not clinging to them. Dulcie knew where to draw the line and which side of that line she intended to stay. Other girls might make the mistake of dying their hair a too brassy blonde and wearing clothes that were too tight, but Dulcie never would. They could make themselves look cheap but she was certainly not going to. That sort of girl more often than not ended up having to get married quickly with a baby on the way and a life of hardship ahead of her.

Piling her curls up on top of her head and securing them there with some Kirbigrips that she’d been holding between her teeth, Dulcie paused to admire her own reflection. Classy, that’s how she looked, she decided triumphantly. Her smile widened as she reflected on her other triumph of the evening – Tilly and Agnes’s illicit attendance at the Palais. Olive might think that her precious daughter wouldn’t listen to anyone but her, but Dulcie was going to prove her wrong.

‘That’s Dulcie going downstairs now,’ Tilly told Agnes as she heard the tap of Dulcie’s heels crossing the landing outside their room. ‘Come on.’

‘I can’t go yet. I need the lav,’ Agnes protested.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Olive too heard the tap of Dulcie’s heels on the stairs and then the sound of the front door opening and closing, and frowned to herself. Tilly and Agnes were cutting it fine if they weren’t going to miss the beginning of their film. She’d better go upstairs and hurry them along, Olive decided. Tilly could be such a daydreamer at times.

In her room, Sally hummed one of the tunes from the review to herself. She’d really enjoyed her outing with her fellow nurses, right from the moment at the hospital in the room where they’d all changed with Sister’s permission, when Rachel had complimented her with a teasing, ‘Well, don’t you scrub up well?’ as she admired Sally’s appearance in her pretty hyacinth-blue dress, with its neatly fitted bodice closed by tiny pearl buttons and its softly gored full skirt.

‘If I do I’m not the only one,’ Sally had laughed in response.

It had been true. Eight of them had gone to see the show, and seeing her fellow nurses out of their uniforms, with their hair down, anticipation of a happy afternoon out adding a soft glow to their skin and eyes, and wearing pretty clothes, made Sally think how attractive everyone looked.

‘It should be a good show,’ Rachel told Sally, linking up with her after they had all pulled on their coats and were heading for the door. ‘Of course, some of the jokes will probably be a bit warm . . .’ She paused and Sally laughed.

‘Yes, I expect they will,’ she agreed.

‘Thank heavens you aren’t the stuffy sort,’ Rachel told her with evident relief, adding, ‘Since the tickets haven’t cost us anything I reckon we can splurge a bit and go by taxi. You go and hail a couple, Brenda,’ she commanded one of the other girls. ‘That blonde hair of yours is bound to have them stopping. A London cabbie never misses a blonde.’ Rachel had been proved right a couple of minutes later when two cabs pulled up a few yards from them.

‘What’s this then?’ one of the cabbies asked cheerfully. ‘Nurses’ day out? Matron know you’re escaping, does she?’ he joked as they split into two groups of four and piled into the cabs.

The show had turned out to be excellent, the comedian so funny that Sally had laughed until her insides ached. Best of all, though, had been the music and the dance routines, and Sally had itched to be twirling on a dance floor herself when the music had got her feet tapping.

After the show had ended all of them had agreed that the afternoon had been a success and that they should go out again together. Now, Sally hummed a few more bars of one of the songs . . .

The first thing Olive saw when she walked into Tilly and Agnes’s bedroom was the bags on the beds. An attempt had obviously been made to fold the girls’ new party dresses up small enough to fit inside them but it had not been successful, the dresses easily visible and recognisable.

The second thing she saw was the expressions on the girls’ faces. In Agnes’s case that expression was one of anxiety and guilt, but on Tilly’s . . .

Disbelief followed by a pain as sharp as if someone had stabbed a knife into her heart gripped Olive as she looked in her daughter’s face and saw defiance and, yes, the angry resentment.

Olive could hear her heart racing and pounding. She badly wanted to sit down, so great was her shock and distress, but she knew she mustn’t, just as she knew she must not let Tilly see not just how shocked she was but how devastated and wounded. That her daughter to whom she had always been so close, whom she loved so much, should look at her now as though they were enemies shocked Olive to the core of her being. A part of her wanted to beg Tilly to tell her that it was all a mistake, to see her daughter smile at her and to feel her arms close round her, but another part of her reminded her that she was Tilly’s mother and that she had a duty to her and to their relationship that must not be shirked.

So instead of pleading with Tilly not to look at her as she was doing, she asked coldly instead, ‘Would you like to explain the meaning of these to me?’ gesturing to the dresses but without removing her gaze from Tilly’s face.

Whilst Agnes gulped with distress, Tilly showed no sign of guilt or remorse as she answered her boldly, and with some hostility.

‘We were going to take them with us to the Hammersmith Palais and change into them there.’

Olive wanted to recoil as though she’d been struck, but she forced herself to say instead, ‘So, you were lying to me when you said that you were going to the cinema tonight?’

‘Yes,’ Tilly told her, continuing fiercely, ‘we had to. It’s your fault for not seeing that we’re grown up enough to go. Dulcie said.’

Now the pain inside Olive had turned to white-hot lava burning through her as she stopped Tilly with a sharp, ‘
Dulcie
said? I see. And what Dulcie says is more important than what I say, is it?’

She had known all along that Dulcie would be trouble and now she had been proved right.

On the other side of the room Agnes had started to cry quietly.

When Tilly didn’t answer her but instead gave her a sulky challenging look, Olive told her, ‘I’m ashamed of you, Tilly. Ashamed of you because you lied to me and ashamed because you no doubt forced poor Agnes to enter into your deceit with you.’

‘It’s your fault,’ Tilly flashed back at her defiantly. ‘I’m seventeen, I’m not a child any more. After all, I’m old enough to go out to work and do my bit so I can’t see why you won’t let me go to the Palais and why you want to stop me from having fun.’

Sidestepping her daughter, Olive went over to the beds and picked up the bags, her hands shaking a little as she did so.

‘I am very disappointed in you, Tilly,’ was all she could trust herself to say. How could Tilly, her Tilly, her beloved daughter, have done something like this? Tears tightened Olive’s throat. She had never felt more alone, or more at a loss to know what to do. Automatically, as she turned towards the door, she announced emotionlessly, ‘You will both stay here in your room, and you, Tilly, I hope will reflect on your behaviour.’

Standing beside her bed, Sally chewed on her bottom lip. The row going on below had been perfectly audible to her, and had filled her with disquiet. She liked and admired Olive, and of course what Tilly had planned to do was wrong, but the person who was really to blame, in Sally’s view at least, was Dulcie, who Sally suspected had deliberately played on Tilly’s vulnerability as she went through the natural youthful process of wanting to be ‘grown up’ and in charge of her own life.

In the hallway the clock still ticked and in the kitchen, the wireless was still on, Vera Lynn’s voice spilling out into the empty room, familiar sounds in a familiar setting. But their familiarity could not offer Olive any comfort in the alien world she felt she now occupied. Tilly had lied to her, and not just lied to her but justified that deceit by blaming her for being the cause of it. Tears filled Olive’s eyes. Agitatedly she brushed them away and went to the sink, reaching for the kettle and then putting it back. What comfort could a cup of tea give her? None. She sat down at the kitchen table and then stood up again, pacing the floor, wanting to go upstairs to beg Tilly to tell her that she was sorry, that she regretted what she had done and said, she wanted . . . she wanted Tilly to be a little girl again, running to her for the security of her embrace. But Tilly wasn’t a little girl any more. Fresh pain filled her. Was Tilly right? Was she to blame for her daughter’s deceit?

Upstairs in her bedroom Tilly sat down heavily on her bed, the exhilaration that had led to her outburst against her mother draining from her so quickly that she felt as though her legs wouldn’t support her.

Had those really been tears she had seen in her mother’s eyes just before she had left the room? Tilly had to swallow hard against the fear that suddenly loomed up inside her, the shock of it like running into an unexpected towering brick wall. She must have imagined it. Her mother never cried. Not ever.

On the other bed Agnes was gulping back sobs between demanding anxiously, ‘Do you think your mum will send me away now because of us lying to her?’

‘It wasn’t you who lied to her, Agnes, it was me,’ Tilly tried to comfort her. How awful to be afraid that you might be sent away. Tilly couldn’t imagine how that must feel. Not really. Slowly, beginning like a drip of water that turned into a trickle and from that into a stream, Tilly felt the recognition of what she had done seep through her, and with it her guilt and remorse.

The house had settled down into an uncomfortable silence. Sally knew that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She felt too upset, both on Olive’s behalf and Tilly’s. What had happened wasn’t any of her business, and she didn’t want to interfere, but . . . Sally could remember how it felt to be Tilly’s age and so desperately eager to be grown up. There had been an incident, over a tennis club dance she’d wanted to attend, and then another over her desire to be allowed to go out cycling with a quite unsuitable young man, during which she remembered hot words being exchanged.

‘Darling, it’s
because
we love you that we want to protect you,’ she could remember her mother telling her gently. ‘I know you can’t see or understand that now, but I promise you that one day you will, and when you do you will thank us. You may think you are grown up but to us you are just as in need of our care as you were when you were a child, only in a different way. Imagine if, as a baby first learning to walk, we had let you walk without watching your every step, what kind of parents would we have been? It’s the same now.’

Sighing to herself, Sally got up off the bed and opened her bedroom door. The house was still silent. The door to Dulcie’s bedroom was closed. Dulcie had not acted well in encouraging Tilly to lie to her mother, Sally thought, and their landlady was bound to hold that against her.