Olive repressed a small sigh. Her refusal to allow Tilly to become engaged to Drew, never mind marry him, had only intensified their relationship.
‘You shouldn’t neglect your friends just because you’re dating Drew,’ Olive had tried to counsel her. ‘You should still go out with Agnes, Sally and Dulcie. You used to have so much fun together.’
‘I don’t want fun any more, I just want to be with Drew,’ Tilly had retaliated, adding, ‘and, anyway, it isn’t just me. Agnes wants to be with Ted, and Sally wants to be with George. You must have felt the same about
Dad – at least, you must have done if you loved him as much as I love Drew.’
Had there been an accusation in those words? Olive didn’t know. She had loved Jim. She had loved him dearly. But not with the fierce turbulent passion she could sense in Tilly. She just wasn’t the passionate type. Some women weren’t. She had been grateful to Jim, and happy in the quiet gentleness of their love. Tilly’s intensity worried her because she feared that where there was the capacity for so much love there was also the capacity for a great deal of pain. If only Tilly could see and accept that it was her mother’s desire to protect her from that pain that motivated her instead of insisting that Olive didn’t understand her and, even worse, was deliberately standing in the way of her happiness.
Finishing her tea, Tilly kept one eye on her watch. Drew would be coming round for her soon. They were going to go for a walk in Hyde Park, despite the chill in the air.
Thankfully they hadn’t had heavy bombing since the two dreadful raids in April, and already some kind of order had been restored to the city.
Drew, who was interested in such things, had told Tilly that every brick, every piece of wood – everything, in fact, that could be salvaged to be used again – was being, whilst the ships that came over from America with much-needed supplies for a beleaguered Britain were returning to the United States carrying some of the rubble, which was also being used in Britain itself, to make runways. Nothing was to be wasted.
‘How’s Sally?’ Tilly asked her mother.
They’d heard that Sally’s home of Liverpool was being
targetted by the Luftwaffe, who had started bombing the city on 1 May, and now, six days later, were still doing so.
‘She isn’t saying very much,’ Olive answered, ‘but she’s bound to be upset. Liverpool is where she grew up, after all.’
‘But she hasn’t got anyone there now, has she?’ Dulcie pointed out. ‘She hasn’t got any family left.’
That was what the other girls thought, but Sally had told Olive in confidence that she did have family in Liverpool, though she had chosen to cut herself off from them. She had a father, a stepmother and a baby half-sister, and, knowing Sally as she did, Olive didn’t believe that she didn’t care about her father any more. She would be worrying about him.
Olive was right. Sally was thinking about her father, even though she kept telling herself that she mustn’t and that she didn’t owe him any concern after the speed with which he had rushed into marriage to Morag after her mother’s death. It was just because she was a nurse, and trained to care, a nurse who had seen what bombs could do to human bodies and human lives, especially the bodies and the lives of small children, that her heart had hammered when she had first heard that Liverpool was suffering a dreadful blitz, nothing else. To allow herself to feel anything else, anything personal, especially for the child who was the result of her father’s betrayal of her mother, would mean that she too was betraying her. She was the only custodian and guardian of her mother’s precious memory now, the only one who really cared about her, and who hadn’t betrayed her.
Not that there was very much news coming out of Liverpool. In fact, it was almost as though the Government didn’t want anyone to know what was going on. Sally had asked Drew if he could find out what was happening, explaining away her concern as being for her old home city, and Drew had asked amongst the other reporters for her. Sally then learned that the city had experienced the most dreadful bombing.
‘Excellent work, Sister,’ the surgeon praised her, as he stood back from the operating table so that the patient on whom he had just operated was wheeled away. ‘You run a good team.’
‘Thank you, Mr Brett,’ Sally responded.
It still gave her a small thrill to be addressed as ‘Sister’, but for some reason today that thrill was tempered by a sense of loss as well. Because she was thinking about her father? No. If she felt any sense of loss then it was because her mother couldn’t share in her pride at being praised for her work. Her father meant nothing to her now. How could he when she so plainly meant nothing to him? She had begged him not to marry Morag …
As she walked into the canteen, a discarded newspaper headline caught her eye. ‘An unnamed British city is cut off from the rest of the country by Hitler’s bombs.’
She knew from what Drew had told her that that city was Liverpool, and she sank into a chair.
‘Are you all right, Sister?’ a fellow nurse asked her.
‘Yes. Yes. I’m fine,’ she responded.
‘Heavy morning in theatre, was it?’ another sister asked her sympathetically.
‘It was,’ Sally answered truthfully, even though she
knew that it wasn’t the length of the operating list that was responsible for the sudden weakness in her limbs.
She’d be off duty soon. Then she could go back to number 13 and read through the newspapers properly. Drew would have got them for her.
Thinking of Drew made Sally smile. He was another gentle, kind man of the same type as her George. A thoroughly likeable, reliable, admirable man, even if poor Olive was desperately worried about the intensity of Tilly’s love for him. Tilly could certainly have done a lot worse, Sally reflected.
She should get something to eat, she decided, but with that newspaper headline in front of her she found she had lost her appetite.
Alone in the kitchen of number 13, where she was about to paint her toenails, an activity forbidden anywhere than in their bedrooms, when the doorbell rang, Dulcie reluctantly slipped her still unpainted foot back into its open-toed shoe and went to open the front door.
Standing on the doorstep was a good-looking young man in naval uniform clutching a wriggling baby with a bruise on its forehead against his shoulder with one hand and carrying a battered leather case in the other.
Sally, who had gone up to write to George, was halfway down the stairs when she saw him. She’d been about to nip out to the post her letter, but now all thoughts of that were forgotten as she clung to the banister rail, her face drained of colour.
‘Callum!’ she exclaimed.
Here was an older, far more war-weary-looking Callum than the young man who had come to this very house to beg her to make things up with her father. Sally’s whole body flinched at that memory and then flinched again as she focused on the child held tightly in Callum’s arms, and clinging to his dust-soiled uniform.
It was
her
, the child, the result of the abhorrent betrayal of her mother by her father and her best friend.
Fury washed through her in a savage wave, but it was a fury that, despite its strength, could not entirely subdue the sick fear that was jolting her heart into a disjointed beat and crawling coldly through her veins. Logic told Sally that there could be only one reason why Callum was here with that child, but it was a logic that she didn’t want to accept.
Instead she railed at him furiously. ‘You have no right to come here. No right at all, and especially not with that … that child.’
‘You know him?’ Dulcie demanded, turning to look at her fellow lodger, her eyes narrowing as she saw the shock that had taken all the colour from Sally’s face and left her staring from the good-looking naval officer to the child he was carrying and then back again.
‘Yes, she does,’ the man answered for Sally, stepping forward so that Dulcie was obliged to step back.
Once inside the hall he closed the door with his shoulder.
Callum. Callum was here and he was carrying
that
child. Agonising surges of angry pain burned into Sally.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded. ‘Why have you brought that … her here?’
‘You’d better come into the kitchen,’ Dulcie invited, ushering the man – Callum, Sally had called him – along the hall and into that room, ignoring Sally’s outburst. She was enjoying seeing Sally – who was always just that little bit superior, with her nurse’s uniform and her closeness to Olive – so plainly caught off guard and uncomfortable. Besides, there was the exciting mystery
of who the man was and, more important, the identity of the child. Dulcie had seen a lot of life in the raw, living with her parents, but this was the first time she had seen a single man turn up at someone’s door carrying a child. A woman doing the same thing, yes, but a man, never.
‘Come a long way, have you?’ she asked chattily. ‘I expect you’d like a nice cup of tea? Just park yourself here on this chair,’ she told him as she pulled one out from the table for him.
The child eyed her with huge dark brown, thickly lashed eyes. A few wisps of dark curly hair had escaped from the knitted bonnet she was wearing. Since the bonnet was pink Dulcie surmised that the child must be female.
‘Pretty little thing,’ she commented. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Alice.’
From the doorway Sally, who had followed them into the kitchen, gasped as though a knife had been twisted in her heart, which in a way it had. Alice had been her own mother’s middle name.
‘You can’t stay here,’ she told Callum. ‘You’ve got to go. I don’t want her here either. Take her away.’
Well, well, Sally was getting herself worked up and no mistake, Dulcie thought, recognising a bit of a mystery and, she hoped, a bit of a scandal with it.
‘I can’t do that, Sally,’ Callum responded.
There was a small pause whilst he and Sally looked at one another and Dulcie pretended to busy herself making the tea, still agog and determined to find out what was going on.
‘I had to bring her, Sally. She hasn’t got anyone else anymore. You and I are all she’s got now.’
Sally knew what that meant. It meant that the child’s parents – her own father – were dead. Pain ripped through her. Inside her head she had a mental image of her father before Morag had destroyed their relationship, the tenderness of his love for her, his daughter, so clear to see in his expression. He had loved her so much – both her parents had – and she had loved them. Once she had thought that nothing could ever destroy that, but she had been wrong. The pain of her loss engulfed her, filling her with bitterness and angry resentment, against Morag for taking her father’s love, against Callum for not siding with her in denouncing his sister, and for the child he was holding, who had taken what should have been hers – the love of their shared father. And was there also a feeling of agonised guilt somewhere in that mix, an anguished recognition that now there could never ever be a reconciliation between them? How could they have been reconciled, with the evidence of her father’s betrayal there in the form of his and Morag’s child? Their child, alive whilst they were dead. Alive whilst her father was dead …
‘No.’
Sally didn’t know whether the moan ripped from her throat was of denial against the claim Callum was making on her on the child’s behalf, or of rejection of what she knew his words must mean.
She had known it, of course, from the minute she had seen him. There could be only one reason why Callum would bring this child here.
Out of nowhere an icy cold wave of weakness surged
through her. She swayed slightly, her hand going to her heart, her body crumpling.
Instantly Callum was on his feet, thrusting the child towards Dulcie, who took hold of her, and then going to Sally to place his hands on her arms to support her.
Callum was touching her; holding her; pretending to be concerned for her. His duplicity made Sally feel sick, and gave her the strength to thrust him off and then move to the sink, as far away from him as she could get. If only Dulcie hadn’t been here and she had answered the door, she could have closed it against him, and locked him and that wretched child out. Then no one would have been any the wiser; no one would have known anything.
Against her will Sally’s gaze was drawn to the baby, something painful swelling inside her chest as she watched the tenderness with which Callum took her from Dulcie. There was a familiarity about the baby’s features and colouring. Sally had seen photographs of Callum and Morag as children, and this baby looked just like them. But then it should, seeing as Morag was its mother and Callum its uncle. She was glad that she couldn’t see anything of her father or her own colouring in it, she told herself fiercely. That meant that she had no obligation to feel connected to it in any kind of way.
The baby was reaching for Callum’s finger, closing her fat little baby hand around it and then smiling at him.
‘Aaw, she’s gorgeous,’ Dulcie announced. ‘That’s a nasty bruise she’s got there, though.’
‘She’s lucky to be alive,’ Callum answered. ‘The house
took a direct hit, Sally. Some wretched bomb crew discharging what was left of their bombs on their way back to Germany, according to the officials. It’s a miracle that Alice was found. She was buried under the house. They found her in your father’s arms. Morag was lying next to him. The ARP warden I spoke to said that they would both have died instantly.’
‘Stop it!’ Sally curled her hands into two angry fists. ‘Do you really think that I want to know that my father gave his life to protect her? She should never have been born. Take her away. I don’t know why you’ve come here. I’m sure the authorities would have found a way of letting me know about my father’s death at some stage, even if somehow or other they managed to let you know first.’
‘My ship had put into Liverpool and I’d been given leave to go and see my family – our family, Sally. I thought it was good timing, putting into Liverpool so close to Alice’s first birthday.’