Mena closed her mouth.
“You do remember me, don’t you? Eddie brought me home for supper. You were late and missed all the eggs.” He laughed.
As if I could forget you,
Mena thought. She smiled, more to herself than to Danny. Then she let her smile flourish and said, “Of course, they’re all fine. But what are you doing here? Are you with someone?”
“Sort of, I guess. I’m with the band. We’re on a break until Miller’s finished. Then I think we’re set to join in. They sure are something, aren’t they?”
Mena nodded. “I didn’t know you played.”
“Oh, I’m just a hack really. I’m standing in. Making up the numbers, you know. It’s no secret around camp that I like to play. The band was a couple of boys down so they invited me along. I was tucked away at the back there, where I could do least damage.”
“What do you play?”
“Trumpet, ma’am. Say, do you mind if I call you Mena?”
Mena took a deep breath at hearing Danny speak her name; at knowing he remembered it after hearing it only briefly almost two months ago. Suddenly aware that her lips were parted again and that no words were coming out, she just shook her head.
“Swell,” Danny said. “And what about you? Are you with anyone?”
“My friend, Joan Cartwright,” Mena said. “We came with her parents.” She looked around for Joan and had to laugh when her eyes found her, still on the dance floor. She had a GI on each arm and a big grin on her face. “That’s her there,” she said. “In the red dress.”
Danny laughed with her when he saw Joan. “Those boys’ll be too tuckered out to play another note by the time she’s finished with them,” he said. “Do you like dancing?”
Mena nodded.
“Well, would you care to?”
I’d like that very much,
Mena thought as she watched his hand extend towards hers. She took it and smiled, and a moment later they were dancing and she wanted Joan to come over and pinch her, to know that it was all real and not just some hallucination brought on by her first taste of gin. He spoke again from that perfect mouth and she knew that it was not.
“So Mena’s gotta be short for something, right?”
“It’s Philomena.”
“Wow, that’s a heck of a name.”
“I know, but everyone calls me Mena - apart from my mother.”
“I like Mena a whole lot better.”
“Me too,” Mena said. She closed her eyes and she was turning, turning with the music, wondering how fate could have singled them out so perfectly for this romance she knew was coming. She opened her eyes again, having recalled what Danny had said when he’d first introduced himself at the house. “You said people call you Danny because of your surname,” she said. “Danny’s not your real name then?”
Danny shook his head. “Uh-uh. Mine’s a heck of a name, too.”
There followed an expectant pause while Mena waited for Danny to tell her. When he didn’t, she said, “So what is it?”
Danny laughed. “I don’t think I know you well enough for that yet.”
Mena stopped dancing. “Then I don’t think I want to dance with you any more,” she said, hoping that her wounded smile told him enough to know that she didn’t mean it.
Danny looked like he wasn’t taking any of it seriously. “If you don’t dance with me you’ll never know,” he said.
“I’ll ask one of your friends. You must have hundreds.”
He laughed again. “Heck, they don’t know!” He held her again and she fell into his eyes. “Dance with me until the band stops playing and we’re the last couple out here and someday I’ll tell you.”
She took his hand again. “Someday then?”
“That’s a promise.”
Behind them, the band began to play
Stardust
and as she felt Danny’s arms pull her closer to him it was like she was in one of her Hollywood movies, ready to steal her first screen kiss as the melody lifted and swept her off her feet.
Later that evening, when Mr Cartwright pulled up outside the Lasseter house and dropped Mena off, Joan walked with her to the door.
“So,” Joan said, “are you going to tell me what you two were talking about all night?”
Mena’s excitement, which had been subdued by her thoughts since leaving De Montfort Hall and Danny Danielson, suddenly rekindled, like she’d been holding everything in, waiting for Joan to ask her that very question.
“He asked if he could see me again,” she said. “He wanted to call for me at the house. Well, you can imagine my reaction.”
“What did you say? Did he kiss you?”
Mena nodded and felt a blush rise in her cheeks. “I told him I’d rather my mother didn’t know about us just yet. Then he reminded me that it was my mother who’d invited him to call back the first time we met.” She laughed into her hand. “I said I remembered, but that I was sure she didn’t have this in mind.”
“So where are you meeting him this time?” Joan said when they stopped laughing.
“He said he’d meet me at the bus-stop in the village so no one would know we were together - just two people waiting for a bus.”
“Where will you go?”
“I told him I thought
Cover girl
was still showing and that we could take the bus up town. He said he hadn’t been to the pictures in ages - he called it a
flick
- so that settled it.”
Joan looked suddenly thoughtful and then a little puzzled. “You know, you two looked like you’d been waiting all your lives for each other in there tonight.”
“It feels just like that,” Mena said, curious at Joan’s changed expression, yet unable to fathom it.
“I’ll bet,” Joan said. “It’s easy to see why you’re so excited about seeing him again, but I don’t get it. Why didn’t you go out on another date after you met him at St Peter’s in May? Why wait to chance like this if you liked him so much.”
Joan’s earlier words replayed in Mena’s head.
Where are you meeting him
this
time?
The significance suddenly struck home and her face dropped. As far as Joan was concerned tonight was, albeit unexpectedly, hers and Danny’s second date, not the first date that it truly was. She felt Joan take hold of her hand and squeeze it tight.
“And why won’t you tell me where he took you that night?” she added. “Why won’t you talk about it?”
In that instant, Danny Danielson, the dance at De Montfort Hall and the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band were far away. In their place all Mena could see was Victor Montalvo’s slick black hair and those impossibly white teeth grinning back at her. She turned to go inside the house, but Joan held her.
“I thought we were best friends, Mena. You know you can tell me anything.”
Mena wanted to tell, but she couldn’t. She felt the blood drain from her cheeks so fast she felt giddy. She shook her head, fighting her emotions as her eyes began to fill with tears. She tried to pull away again, but Joan wouldn’t let her. A horn tooted by the roadside. A light came on inside the house.
“Mena. What is it? Tell me.”
The door opened and Pop was there, puzzlement and alarm cutting chasms across his face. “Mena?” he said. “Whatever’s the matter?”
Joan backed away then and Mena ran upstairs to her room.
Chapter Twelve
M
ena didn’t see Joan again that month. She’d called at the house several times, but Mena couldn’t face her. She knew that if she did they would get around to talking about Danny and Joan wouldn’t be able to stop herself from asking about that night at St Peter’s again. And Mena knew she would have to tell her; tell her what a silly little girl she’d been and where it had got her. They were best friends after all. If she couldn’t tell Joan, whom could she tell?
But how could she?
Best friend or not, Mena knew Joan Cartwright well enough to know that she wouldn’t be able to help herself. She was such a gossip that Mena thought she might as well put a poster up in Mr Hendy’s shop window as to tell Joan such a thing. No, it would have to be her secret. Of course, she would tell her friend all about it someday - she knew that, too. Only not now. Not for a long time if she could help it.
None of that was on her mind today though as she lay on her bed late one afternoon towards the end of July. Today, she had something far worse to concern herself with. She tried to shut reality from her mind as she lay there. She thought about Danny as she often did, and they were good thoughts, which helped. She had been on two proper dates with him since the dance. They went to the pictures as planned and sat high up at the back in the ‘kissing seats’, and she knew as soon as the picture started that she would have to go and see it again sometime to fill in everything she’d missed. They left the matinee in bright sunlight and they held hands and just walked until her feet were sore. They didn’t need anything more to do with their time than that. Mena recalled that they hardly even spoke.
Danny couldn’t get out of camp every day. Sometimes he couldn’t get out all week, but they found ways to be together if only for half an hour at a time. Not all of the fence space around Camp Stoughton was in regular use by the soldiers and the local girls, so there were quiet spots to be found and Mena and Danny had theirs. When Mena wasn’t wheeling her books around the hospital wards she’d be out on her bicycle, heading for Shady Lane where she would wait for Danny.
The other proper date was at the fish and chip shop in Wigston. You had to get in the queue early or the fish, which wasn’t on the ration but was in short supply, would run out, and it was appreciated if you took your own newspaper or any kind of paper you had, although newspaper was best. It surprised Mena how romantic something like that could be.
“It’s where you eat it,” Danny had said, and he’d cycled back out of Wigston with Mena in his lap and the food in the basket until they came to a hay-meadow that was painted with wild flowers. He’d picked her a bunch and sat her down on his jacket. He had a candle for later and a couple of beers and they ate and just watched the sun go down.
That and the dance at De Montfort Hall was the part of July she really liked to think about when she was feeling sad. The part she was trying to deal with now she didn’t like at all. She could still smell the wax polish that hung in the air as she sat in the dining room earlier. The polish tin had still been open at one end of the table and her mother was still wearing her cleaning apron. Mena could see Pop’s hands shaking on the table in front of her; see the determination in his watery eyes as he tried to still the tremor of his lips. She could see her mother sitting beside him with one hand clasped to her mouth, the other clenching her wooden crucifix, and she could still feel the anxiety that caused her mother’s head to shiver.
And, no matter how hard Mena tried not to, she could still see the telegrams that a kind-faced boy in a smart navy-blue postal-service uniform had just delivered. No one was actually crying. She felt bad about that now, but it had only been a matter of time. Perhaps it took a while to sink in. Perhaps she’d needed to read those telegrams for herself to make the words real. Or Perhaps James and Michael had just been gone so long now that they were already part forgotten and the family had become used to the idea that they would never be coming home again.
Mena didn’t think any of that was true.
She could see her mother again, clearly now in her mind. She watched her rise from the table, scraping chair legs slowly back over the floorboards, and she never would forget that sound. She saw Pop stand with her, reaching out to comfort her. Then over and over again she saw her mother fall like an empty dress to the floor. Those things are not easy memories to misplace no matter how hard Mena tried.
Life will never be quite the same, she supposed as she lay on her bed, still staring at the cracks on the ceiling. It goes on, she thought, but it’s a different life from the one you set out on. She imagined that hers and the rest of her family’s, especially her mother’s, would spend its remainder trying to get back to that time before. But of course, it never would.
Two things were certain now in Mena’s mind. The first was that life is a fragile gift that could be taken back at any time and she promised herself never to let a single day slip through her fingers unaccounted for. The second was that her mother needed her and for now at least she wanted to stay. How could she go into the Land Army after this? And in little more than a month’s time? The whole idea seemed too hard on her mother to contemplate.
And there was Danny.
The Land Army would have taken her away from home for a relatively short time, whereas Danny could take her away forever. And she would happily go - Mrs Mena Danielson. She liked the sound of that and besides, she had no idea how long Danny would remain in Oadby. His unit could be off into battle again at the drop of a hat and she wanted to be with him for as long as possible. She thought about those telegrams for the umpteenth time and the reservoir of tears she thought had long since run dry, flooded open again when she pictured herself reading such a telegram with Danny’s name on it.
I must see Joan,
she thought. She was keen to tell her that she wasn’t going away now after all; desperate just to talk to her if she still wanted to after the way she’d treated her. Mary would come straight home as soon as the news reached her, of course she would, and Eddie was still in Leicestershire. She wished Peter could come home too and she thought perhaps he might be allowed to under the circumstances.
Pop had said that they often split family members up to reduce the odds of more than one being killed in action at the same time. James and Michael had been no exception to that rule, but there had been so much fighting in Europe recently and so many casualties pouring into the hospitals that it was perhaps not such great odds that they should both be killed within a few days of each other. At least, that was Pop’s rationale. Not that it lessened the pain in their hearts.