‘I hoped that it would,’ Olive agreed, watching Alice laugh and cuddle up to Sally as she sat in her half-sister’s lap. ‘For your sake as well as for Alice’s, Sally. I understood how you felt, and the terrible shock you’d had, not just because of the arrival of Alice but also the news of the death of your father and Alice’s mother. You loved them both very much, and love doesn’t always die as conveniently as we want it to.’
‘I’ve felt such a strong sense of my mother these last few days, as though she’s watching over both of us and urging me to … to love Alice and look after her.’
Olive reached for Sally’s hand. ‘I’m sure that she is, Sally. I never met your mother, but from everything you’ve told me about her I don’t doubt for one minute that she’d want Alice to be with you and that she would love her herself.’
‘She would. She was like that. She loved people so much and they loved her. Everyone loved her.’
When Olive didn’t say anything Sally challenged her shakily, ‘You’re thinking that my father and Morag must have loved her as well, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Olive acknowledged.
Sally gave a small sigh. ‘I hope that one day I’ll be ready to believe that, for Alice’s sake.’
‘I’m sure you will.’
‘I don’t know what I’m going to tell George, though,
Olive. That’s part of the reason I didn’t want her. I love George so much. I didn’t want to sacrifice the happiness I know I’ll have with him to look after Alice. I know that’s selfish of me.’
‘No it isn’t. It’s only natural. From what I know of George, though, I’m sure that he’ll be as ready to take on Alice as you now are, Sally.’
Sally shook her head. ‘I can’t expect him to do that. It wouldn’t be fair. Besides, once he knows how much I’ve kept from him … We’ve both always said that honesty between us is important, and now …’
In Sally’s lap Alice made a small sad sound as though she sensed Sally’s distress. Automatically Sally cuddled her closer to soothe her.
‘I’ve got to go and see him and tell him everything. I’ve got to offer him his ring back, Olive. Anything less than that would be wrong.’
‘… and since then our Edith’s started wanting to tag on with us when me and Wilder go out, and she’s bin writing to him. The cheek of it,’ Dulcie complained to David as they sat outside in the June sunshine, where she had wheeled him in his chair.
Whilst other amputees were getting to grips with their new false limbs, the complications David had had with his amputation wounds after he had first been operated on meant that it was likely that he would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Not that Dulcie thought that should bother him.
‘After all,’ she’d told him on her first visit after the news had been broken to him that he would be wheelchair bound for the rest of his life, ‘I dare say it’s much more comfortable being pushed round in a chair than having to try to walk on them artificial legs. Ever so difficult, they look, and painful too. No, I think you’re lucky that you can’t manage them, David.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ David had agreed, ‘although it will mean me having to have ramps and the like put in when I move back to chambers and my rooms at Lincoln’s
Inn, once I’m discharged from here. I’ll have to find a decent-sized ground-floor flat, of course, and not too far from chambers either.’
Dulcie couldn’t really understand why David was insisting on going back to work as a barrister, especially when it turned out that he had inherited so much money from Lydia after she had been killed, and her having all that money from her grandparents. But then men had their own funny ways, and right now it was Wilder’s ‘funny ways’ that were occupying Dulcie’s thoughts and exacerbating her ire.
‘I’ve told Wilder that he’s just got to ignore Edith, and that she’s just making a play for him because he’s going out with me. Always been like that, she has, wanting what I’ve got, and of course our mum always letting her get away with it. Well, I’m not going to.’ She scowled as she thought of her sister and how aggravating she was being, writing to Wilder after he’d taken those friends of his to see her show, and actually daring to suggest that he took her out for dinner one night. The cheek of it! Of course, Wilder had agreed with her that Edith had had no right to suggest what she had. After all, he was her boyfriend, not Edith’s. And just to prove that, Dulcie had allowed him to kiss her far more passionately than she normally did the last time he had taken her out. Just to let him know which side his bread was buttered on, so to speak.
‘So you want to talk to me about something?’
Sally nodded, deliberately walking slightly apart from George as they set off on their favourite walk around East Grinstead, instead of tucking her arm through his.
The sunlight glinted on her engagement ring. The engagement ring she would be giving back to George before she left him today. Oh, she knew he would say that it didn’t matter about Alice and that he loved her – he was that kind of man – but it did matter. It would certainly matter to George’s family – to his mother, who had been so welcoming to her; how would they ever be able to feel they could trust her now, when she produced a half-sister she had never let them know existed? Last night when she had bathed Alice, the little girl had reached for her ring, her innocent delight in touching it tearing at Sally’s heart. How could she ever have thought of George as just a pleasant young man? How could she not have known the minute she had met him how much she would love him and have told him everything there and then?
She looked at him now. His dear honest face was creased with concern – for her, she knew – and anxiety. He reached for her hand but she shook her head and, being George, he didn’t fuss or object, simply watching her with even more concern.
She took a deep breath.
‘I … I’ve lied to you, George. Deceived you. I’m so sorry. I wish that I hadn’t. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t realise when we first met what would happen between us, and I was too … I didn’t want … I let you think that both my parents were dead, because … because to me they were, but it wasn’t the truth.’
Quietly she explained the events that had followed her mother’s death and the anguish and anger they had caused her.
‘I didn’t mean to deceive you. I just didn’t want to talk about what had happened – to anyone. Then when
Callum came to London to tell me … to tell me that there was to be a child, I had to explain to Olive what had happened but I didn’t tell anyone else. To me, my father was dead – at least the father I had known and loved, the father I had thought I’d had was dead. I couldn’t bear the thought of what he had done, of what they had done. I hated them both,’ Sally admitted in a small guilty voice. ‘I hated them and I hated the very thought of the child they were to have.’
‘And Callum – did you hate him as well?’
For the first time in their relationship Sally could hear anger in George’s voice and it confirmed everything she had known and feared would happen when she told him of her deception.
‘Yes. If anything, I hated him even more than my father and his sister, because …’
‘Because you loved him?’
Why were they talking about Callum? He wasn’t important any more. The love she’d once thought she had had for Callum was nothing compared with the reality of the mature grown-up love she felt for George.
‘I suppose so …’ She brushed aside George’s question. Her heart was thumping and it ached with the pain of the parting she knew must come. She was anxious to get to the end of her explanations, anxious to give him back his ring and walk away from him, leaving him free to find someone to love who would not be deceitful and who he could trust as she knew he would now never again be able to trust her, before she broke down completely, begged him to forgive her and never ever to leave her. That was how much he meant to her. He meant everything to her.
Everything
.
He was the very best of men, and he deserved the very best of fiancées.
‘I thought it didn’t matter that I hadn’t told you about my father. After all, he wasn’t part of my life any more, and as far as I was concerned he was dead to me, but then …’ She stopped walking and so did George, so that she could turn towards him to stand in front of him and tell him what she must as bravely as she could.
‘My father and Morag were killed in the May blitz on Liverpool, but Alice, their baby, survived. Callum brought her to me on his way to rejoin his ship. I’m all she’s got, George. I wanted to have her adopted and never tell you about her. I was going to. I’d got it all planned, but I couldn’t. She needs me. Please don’t hate me.’ She pulled off her engagement ring as she spoke, and held it out to him, her hand trembling. ‘One day I hope you’ll find a girl who’s more worthy of this than I am.’
‘And Callum, do you still love him? Are the two of you planning to bring up Alice together?’ George demanded, as he took the ring from her.
‘What? No, of course not.’ Sally knew she couldn’t cope with much more. ‘I’m so sorry. I know you’d do the decent thing and take on Alice if I asked you to, but I can’t do that to you or to your family. Not when she’d always be a reminder of my lack of honesty. Every time you looked at her – every time your mother looked at her – you’d both wonder if you could really trust me to be honest with you and I couldn’t bear to have that barrier between us.’
‘Sally …’
‘No, please don’t say anything, George. I can’t abandon her. I couldn’t live with myself if I did.’
And she didn’t know how she would live without George and his love either, but somehow she must.
‘I’m back on duty in ten minutes,’ he told her. ‘We can talk more about this later.’
Sally nodded, but she knew that ‘later’ she would be on her way back to London. What was there, after all, for them to say to one another that could put things right and miraculously give them back the security of the loving trust they had now lost?
‘Oh, Drew, do look out of the window. How pretty the countryside looks, all these fields and trees.’
Drew smiled as he heard a city girl’s wonder in Tilly’s voice as she looked wide-eyed out of the window of their first-class compartment at the countryside through which they were passing. She was as excited as a little girl going on holiday for the first time, he thought indulgently, but of course she wasn’t a little girl, and her pretty red cotton dress, with its bright pattern of black and white Scottie dogs and the sweetheart neckline, revealed a figure that most definitely did not belong to a little girl. A desire to take hold of her and kiss her gripped him, but Drew resisted it. He had promised Tilly’s mother that his behaviour would be impeccable and irreproachable.
Tilly, though, seemed to have a sixth sense where his feelings for her were concerned because she suddenly looked at him and smiled.
‘Since we’ve got the carriage to ourselves, why don’t we pull down the blinds into the corridor and then you can kiss me – properly,’ she suggested softly.
‘Tilly,’ Drew protested, ‘you know what I promised your mother. Look,’ he added quickly when she started
to move towards him, it’s nearly one o’clock – why don’t we have our sandwiches?’
‘Sandwiches? You’d rather eat sandwiches than kiss me?’ Tilly protested.
‘No,’ Drew admitted ruefully, ‘but I’m afraid that if I start kissing you now I won’t want to stop.’
He had looked so handsome this morning when he had arrived to collect her, wearing a navy-blue blazer, which he had now taken off, over a pale blue V-necked sweater and white open-necked shirt, his smart grey trousers perfectly creased. Drew was always well dressed in good-quality clothes – clothes that in London, Tilly knew, were expensive, but she assumed that they must be less expensive in America because she knew also that Drew didn’t earn an awful lot as a junior reporter.
Her own dress was new, made for her by a local dressmaker, one of two she’d saved up for and paid for herself, and a good buy now that clothes could be bought only with clothing coupons. She and her mother had got the fabric in a clearance sale from a warehouse that had been damaged in the April bombing. This red dress had a smart little white short-sleeved bolero, and her other dress, which was made from a lovely floral-patterned cotton sateen in shades of blues and lilacs and purples against a dark gold background, was smart enough with its halter-necked style to wear in the evening, as well as making a very pretty sundress for daytime wear, and it too had a matching bolero jacket.
Of course she’d brought more casual clothes with her in the small suitcase that Mrs Windle had lent her: shorts and a pretty blue and white spotted shirt-style top, which tied at the waist, a dirndl skirt in royal blue
with a white scalloped hem she could wear with a white blouse and cardigan, and, very daringly, a pair of trousers, which had become all the fashion now that girls were having to take on men’s jobs. Her mother had been a bit concerned they might be too modern for a quiet little village but Tilly had insisted they would be perfect for cycling in, and very sensible if the weather turned cold.
Drew had told her that he was packing his tennis whites in case there was a nearby court. Tilly didn’t have a tennis dress, and nor could she play tennis, but Drew had said that he would teach her and that she could wear her white shorts, plimsolls and a white top and she would be fine.
The village where they were staying was several miles inland from the coast. They were to leave the train at Budleigh Salterton, and then take a branch-line train to the village of Astleigh Magna on the River Otter. Drew had planned the whole route, drawing diagrams and showing them all at number 13 the route they would take. Tilly had felt so proud of him for being so organised and manly.
Now, as Tilly unwrapped their egg and cress sandwiches from her mother’s carefully hoarded greaseproof paper, the excitement fizzing up inside her felt as exhilarating as any champagne. Three whole days – and nights – completely alone with Drew. Well completely alone, that is, apart from the owners of the pub and their other patrons.
The sunlight streaming in through the carriage window lightened the shiny rich darkness of Tilly’s curls and glinted on the gold of Drew’s ring as it lay against her
creamy skin revealed by the sweetheart neckline of her pretty dress. She was so wonderful, his Tilly, Drew thought as his heart swelled with love for her. So deserving of the very best of everything. It was excellent to see her restored to her old good spirits after the misery she had endured during the Blitz. All he wanted, all that really mattered to him now that he knew her, was Tilly’s happiness. He was so lucky to have met her, and even luckier to have her love. She was so trusting, so giving, so adorable in every way.