‘And now they’re saying that women over the age of twenty who aren’t married will have to register for munitions work before long, and that once you do you can be sent anywhere, and that you have to go. It was on the news, and then Drew brought us the papers to show us that it was in there as well. He reckons that after a while they’ll make it that more women have to do it by adding in more ages. Not that Sally or Tilly or Agnes will have to do it on account of them all being in protected jobs. Well, I don’t care what anyone in the Government says, I’m not leaving London. I’m just not,’ Dulcie told David determinedly.
It was Easter weekend and she’d arrived at the hospital half an hour ago, having travelled down from London early Saturday morning, and now, as she made herself comfortable on the chair at David’s bedside, she was eager to air her grievances about the proposed new law to be brought in by the Minister of Labour, Mr Ernest Bevin, which called for all young women between the ages of twenty and thirty to register for essential wartime work in munitions.
‘It was bad enough having to do that ruddy fire-watching, without this,’ Dulcie continued. ‘I was talking to one girl and she’s got a sister who’s in munitions, and she says that it turns your skin yellow working with all that stuff, and that you have to wear a scarf round your head. Mind you, the money’s good. Not that I’m going to let anyone tell me what to do, and I’m certainly not going to let anyone send me away from London.’
‘Well, in that case, Dulcie, I suggest that you find out where your nearest munitions factory is and then go round there and have a word with someone on the quiet to make sure you can get in there before you have to register. That way you’ll be able to choose where you work rather than waiting to be sent somewhere,’ David responded.
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Dulcie agreed. ‘There’s a place at Woolwich I could try. ’Cos if they was to send me out of London then I probably wouldn’t be able to come and see you. And if you was to ask me then I’d say that me coming to see you is just as much doing my bit as working in some munitions factory. Because like Sister was saying to me when I arrived, she doesn’t know how you’d go on now without having my visits to look forward to. Bin a tonic for you, I have.’
‘Yes, you have,’ David agreed gravely, after he had recovered from the small spluttering sound he’d had to choke back behind his hand.
That was the thing about a man like David, who was a proper gentleman: he knew how to treat a girl right. Not like Wilder, who she hadn’t seen hair nor hide of
for over a week, although he had sent her a brief scribbled note telling her that the RAF had said that the Eagle Squadron, manned by American volunteer pilots, was now officially operational.
Not that a scribbled letter was anything much. You’d have thought after the way he’d just gone off and left them, and then all those bombs falling, that he’d have come up to London to see how she was. Not that Dulcie was going to tell David that she felt that Wilder was neglecting her. She didn’t want David to think that Wilder was anything other than totally besotted with her.
‘Yes, I’ll do as you suggest and take meself along to Woolwich and have a word with them there,’ she told him instead. ‘I dare say they’ll be only too pleased to have someone like me offering to work for them.’
‘I’m sure they will,’ David agreed, somehow managing to keep his expression deadpan.
Against all the odds he was discovering that he was actually looking forward to Dulcie’s visits and enjoying her company. There was something about Dulcie that always lifted his spirits without him being able to say what exactly it was. It certainly wasn’t her interest in him or her concern for his health.
David smiled to himself. He reckoned he must be the only patient in the entire hospital whose visitor did not, upon arrival, ask how he was but instead started to talk about herself. That, though, was one of the things that made him look forward to Dulcie’s visits. With Dulcie there was no false emotion, no faked sympathy, no embarrassment or discomfort. His injuries might simply not have existed, because Dulcie
was far too wrapped up in herself to be concerned with them. It meant that with Dulcie he could be himself. His real self, not the injured, helpless, dependent, pitiful David that Lydia and his mother saw when they looked at him, but the David who still existed inside his damaged body. In short, Dulcie treated him as though there was nothing wrong with him at all. Not out of compassion or because she was deliberately avoiding a difficult subject but because, being Dulcie, she was totally oblivious to everything and anything that did not concern her directly. Other people, other men in his position, might have found her selfish and self-centred, David knew, but he much preferred what others would have called selfishness in her to the sickly patronising concern of those who were fortunate enough to be sound in body and mind. Acknowledging that reminded him of something he still had to tell her, once he could break into her monologue about her own life.
In order to get Dulcie’s attention David had already learned that one needed to focus with determination on one’s target, and once one had spotted a potential gap in the conversation one had to take aim with all guns blazing. ‘My mother came to see me last week,’ he broke into Dulcie’s diatribe against Mr Ernest Bevin, and his Ministry for Labour.
‘I thought you said she never came to see you?’ Dulcie challenged him. It wasn’t in her makeup to question why she should feel so antagonistic towards the idea of a mother visiting her son. If she had done she would have told herself that her anger was on David’s behalf because his mother had previously ignored him, and had nothing
whatsoever to do with her own relationship with her mother or the fact that she felt let down by it.
‘She doesn’t normally, but she had something to tell me that she thought I ought to know,’ David responded.
‘And what was that?’
‘She wanted to tell me about Lydia being at the Café de Paris the other weekend.’
Dulcie digested this statement warily. Lydia had obviously told David’s mother about seeing her and the row they had had because she had wanted it reported back to David. Instinctively Dulcie reacted just as she had done as a child when Edith had gone running to tell their mother about something Dulcie had done that would get her into trouble.
Leaping to defend herself, she said sharply, ‘Well, of course Lydia would tell your mother about her seeing me there and what happened. Not that it was much of a row or anything, us having words, but—’
‘You were at the Café de Paris the night it was bombed?’ David stopped her. He was surprised at the intensity of the surge of relief he felt that she had obviously escaped from the bombing and was safe. Not that he was going to dwell on that feeling. What was the point? Dulcie might be willing to come and see him. She might even give the impression of enjoying her visits to him, but David wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t the man she had flirted with any more, and Dulcie certainly didn’t have any female interest in him as the man he now was.
‘Yes, Wilder took me to make up for not taking me out on Valentine’s Day. Not that we stayed long, and
that was just as well, seeing what happened there. Horrible, it was. Sally said they had that many coming in injured from it they could barely cope. And I don’t know how Lydia could have the brass face to complain to anyone about me. She wasn’t even with that chap I saw her with at the Ritz. She was with some young officer, and—’
‘She’s dead, Dulcie. She was killed. Lydia’s dead. She was one of those who got it with the bomb. That’s why my mother came to see me. She came to tell me that Lydia is dead.’
For once in her life Dulcie was truly lost for words. Stumbling uncertainly she told him, ‘Well, that must have been a shock for you, and no mistake. Must have upset you as well, her being your wife and everything—’
‘Not really,’ David stopped her. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t feel a damn thing. Shocking of me to say that, I know,’ he continued when Dulcie simply sat and stared at him, ‘but it’s the truth. Now I have shocked you.’ He pulled a face, his voice bitter. ‘But then of course I dare say it is far more shocking that a young woman like Lydia should be killed whilst she was out enjoying herself than a man like me should lose his legs. After all, I was only doing my duty and serving my country. I dare say there are even those who’d think I deserve what happened to me.’
‘Don’t be daft.’ Dulcie tried to stop him, grabbing hold of her scattered thoughts, and well aware what Sister would have to say if she thought that one of her patients had been upset, but David ignored her.
‘If I hadn’t joined but stayed at home instead, in a
safe job, then Lydia would be alive now,’ he continued, ‘at least that’s what my mother seems to think.’
‘Sounds like your ma is a bit like mine,’ Dulcie told him stalwartly. ‘Always thought more of our Edith than me, our mother did, and since she was reported missing and presumed dead, all Ma has ever done is go on about how much she misses her.’
‘Do
you
miss her?’ David asked her. ‘Your sister, I mean.’
‘No I don’t,’ Dulcie responded truthfully and emphatically. ‘Not one little bit. Of course I wouldn’t have wanted her to die – but I don’t miss her. Her and me never got on. Always our mum’s favourite, she was, and didn’t she know it. Mean and spiteful, I always thought her, running to our mum to tell tales and get her sympathy. Spoiled her rotten, Mum did, putting her up on the kitchen table when she was little and getting her to sing for the neighbours. Never said one word to her, Mum didn’t later, when Edith started borrowing my good clothes without a by-your-leave. Shared a bedroom, we did. That’s why I got meself a room at number 13, ’cos I was sick of Edith parading around in my things. Rick, our brother, wot’s out fighting that Rommel in the desert was the only one who understood how I felt. If Mum hadn’t encouraged her to think she could be a singer she might even be alive now because it was on account of her going to sing in public that she got killed the night the place was bombed. Not that they ever found her body. Mum’s never bin the same since that happened. She might have thought the world of Edith but I never did. I’m sorry she’s gone, for Mum’s sake, but not for me own,’ Dulcie announced defiantly.
‘I feel the same way about Lydia,’ David told her. He looked at her and then admitted, ‘You are the only person I can say that to, Dulcie. I’ve had doctors and nurses in here telling me how sorry they are about Lydia ever since my mother came to break the news. It’s getting on my nerves having to pretend that I care, but I don’t. I can’t, and to be honest I don’t even want to care.’
‘Well, why should you?’ Dulcie responded pragmatically. ‘After all, she went and let you down, didn’t she? Carrying on with that chap I saw her with at the Ritz, and then acting like she was something special and looking down her nose at me at the Café de Paris, never mind that I was wearing me Norman Hartnell gown and her with some other chap in tow, and it plain to see what was going on between them. Mind you, I give her as good as I got,’ she added with some relish. ‘Told her in no uncertain terms, I did, what I thought of her and the way she’d treated you.’
‘Was that what the row was about?’ David asked.
‘Yes. Well, me and her never did get on,’ Dulcie felt bound to acknowledge.
‘Which was why you flirted with me when I saw you in Selfridges, was it?’ David teased her.
Bridling slightly, Dulcie shook her head. ‘I never flirted with you. I’m not the sort to do that, and I won’t have you saying that I was. You were the one that bought me that vanity case.’
‘You know what I think, Dulcie?’
‘What?’ Dulcie asked warily.
‘I think that you and I are two of a kind.’
‘Well, as to that I’m as good as that Lydia was any
day of the week, no matter what your ma might like to think,’ Dulcie was quick to claim. She didn’t really understand what David was getting at, but knowing that he was prepared to talk to her the way he had about Lydia certainly made her feel justified that she had challenged the other girl at the Café de Paris.
‘There, that’s a barrowful of sand ready for the Misses Barker,’ Drew smiled at Tilly as he tipped the final shovelful of sand from the stockpile in the garden of number 49 into the waiting wheelbarrow.
The Easter sunshine slanted across his face, his look of male pleasure in a physical job well done making Tilly smile and filling her heart with so much tenderness that she released the handles of the barrow she had been about to wheel out through the back garden gate and then along the path to the Misses Barkers’. Instead, she went to put her arms around him. The jumper he was wearing smelled dangerously of soap and just a hint of fresh male sweat. Dangerously, because being this close to him always brought home to Tilly all that she was missing because her mother refused to allow them to marry.
Smiling down at her, Drew picked out of her curls the pink blossom that had come from the gnarled apple tree in the middle of the neglected garden.
‘I took the paper into work so that everyone could
read that piece you wrote about the looters,’ she told him proudly. ‘It was so good, Drew.’
‘Not as good as it could have been if I’d been able to speak directly to some of those involved.’
Tilly smiled understandingly. She knew how disappointed he’d been that he hadn’t been able to make contact with any of the looters.
‘Well, you know what Sergeant Dawson said after he’d read your article. He said that even the police are having trouble infiltrating the looting gangs.
‘When are you going to let me read your book?’ Tilly wheedled, changing the subject as she leaned against him. She already knew the answer, but nevertheless she regularly attempted to persuade Drew to change his mind and let her read the book he was writing.
‘Not until it’s finished,’ Drew answered as she had known that he would.
‘But if it’s about the war and all of us, then …’ she began, and then stopped, her face clouding over.
Olive, who had come down initially to make sure that Mr Whittaker was all right, and who had then decided that she may as well pop into number 49 to see how Tilly and Drew were getting on, paused with the back door half open as she witnessed their intimacy.