Unforgettable (26 page)

The man howled like an animal as he realized what Roger meant, but by then the two sailors had turned back to see what was happening with Gracie and Dolly. It was still difficult to see properly, but as dust stung their eyes and dried their throats they could make out the two girls huddled together.

‘Are you all right?' Norm said hoarsely, trying not to gag.

‘One of us is,' came a terrified voice. ‘I'm not sure about her though.'

Dolly awoke with a blinding headache. She had no idea where she was, and it felt as if her brain had been scrambled. It hurt like stink to look at the light, so she decided it was far better to keep her eyes tightly closed.

She was surrounded by horrible antiseptic smells, but there were even worse ones that she didn't care to identify. It made her want to puke, momentarily taking her mind off the feeling that her arm was being stabbed by red-hot needles.

She realized that she
was
being stabbed by red-hot needles, or at least, by one very sharp and very long needle, and she risked opening one eye to look at the vampire in nurse's uniform bending over her.

‘What are you doing?' she croaked. ‘And where the hell am I?'

‘You're in hospital, my dear,' the nurse said briskly, not pausing in her efficient stabbing with the needle that made Dolly's senses swim. ‘Do you remember your name?'

‘'Course I do. I'm not bleedin' stupid,' Dolly said crossly, and then paused, her
stomach turning cartwheels. What the hell
was
her name?

‘Never mind,' the vampire continued. ‘It'll come back to you soon.'

‘Oh really?' Dolly said, trying hard to be her usual sarcastic self, and failing miserably as the stuff in the needle was already doing its job.

She made one last effort.

‘All right, Nursie, have I been in an accident, or is this a fancy dress party and you're the chief ghoul?'

The nurse laughed, but the bravado was slipping away from Dolly by the second. She was starting to feel stupid and close to tears, and whatever she was told after that was lost on her as she lapsed into dreamland again.

The nurse reported to the ward sister that the one the young men had called Dolly was still very vague, and as for the other one …

‘It's a bad business altogether,' the older woman said. ‘Were they travelling together on the train?'

‘It looks like it, though the young men discharged themselves smartly to return to their ship in Portsmouth.'

Sister made a few choice comments about flighty young men who couldn't be bothered to stay at the hospital long enough to see how their girlfriends fared after an accident in
which four people were killed, including an elderly lady in the same compartment.

‘Don't speak to any newspaper reporters,' the sister warned the nurse. ‘Doctor Grayson will give an official statement in due course, but we don't want those scandalmongers cluttering up the wards.'

* * *

The news about the derailment of the excursion train half-way to Margate made headline news for a day and was then relegated to the inside pages with the usual news that an investigation was in progress. Considering that the train had been packed with day-trippers, fatalities were few, and those who had been taken to a local cottage hospital were said to be recovering quickly from their ordeal.

Mrs Warburton assumed that Dolly was staying with Gracie, and when she didn't turn up for work on Monday, her boss decided she'd taken the huff at being rebuked lately, and if she wasn't such a good worker, he'd be bloody well tempted to give her her cards.

Since Gracie was completely self-contained in her flat and worked alone, nobody realized she wasn't there. The Fosters, in the shop and flat below, kept themselves to themselves, and
were more than happy with their quiet new tenant.

A week later a young man came looking for Gracie's Glad Rags. Confronted with a shop window full of shoes, he checked the newspaper advert, wondering if he'd got it wrong. He stood outside for so long that he attracted attention, and the proprietor came out to ask if he needed any help.

‘I'm not sure,' Charlie said. ‘I was looking for a young lady called Gracie. I think her name may be Gracie Brown.'

He realized he was being studied carefully, and knew that he didn't look the type of person to be looking for a seamstress in an out of the way location. He was smartly dressed, his dark hair shining as usual, both with health and the required brilliantine for musicians.

‘Perhaps I've made a mistake, but the advert in the paper gave this address.' He held out the piece of paper to show the man, embarrassed at the greasy state of it. But Mr Foster concluded that the chap looked too sincere to be a gigolo, despite that glossy black hair that was a shade too long, in his opinion, but he had also noticed that his shoes were polished to perfection, and that meant a lot to a man who had spent his life in shoes, so to speak.

‘You've come to the right place, young man, and it's up the stairs to the flat above. I'm not sure if the lady is at home though, as I haven't heard her moving about recently. But you try ringing her bell.'

And I'll stand at the foot of the stairs to see there's no funny business going on when she answers
, he said to himself.

Charlie resisted the urge to bound up the stairs two at a time. As he rang the doorbell, the delicious thought spun through his mind that there was now only a thin piece of wood between him and the girl whose image had been haunting him all these months. He knew he had been tardy in trying to find her, but something always seemed to get in the way; a tour with the band; the excitement of the show; the need to make some money; the urge to write his song and prove himself … and besides all that, why should she even remember him?

He knew her name, because it had been given in the newspaper after the fire at the Palais, together with her photo. He wished he had kept the photo, but the band had been on the move, and it had simply disappeared, just like her. Sometimes the Gracie of his dreams seemed little more than a beautiful mirage that he had danced with and held in his arms, her fragrance filling his head and his heart.
But now she was almost a reality.

Like a lovesick calf, he was aware that his heart was pounding, but it slowly dawned on him that nobody was answering. The pounding quickly turned to sick disappointment when he heard the old boy's voice calling to him from the foot of the stairs. Keeping a check on him, he thought without humour.

‘I don't reckon she's there, young fellow. She often goes off to visit clients, and she goes out a lot with that friend of hers.'

‘Friend?' Charlie said, fearing the worst. But why wouldn't she have a friend, a gentleman caller, a good-looker like her …?

‘A young lady. But if you want to leave a message, I'll see that she gets it.'

His mind flooding with relief, Charlie knew he couldn't stand here for ever, like a spare part at a wedding, so he went down to the shoe shop again.

‘I need to be sure I've got the right person first. Would you mind describing her to me—Mr Foster?' he added, remembering the name above the shop door.

‘Why don't you describe the person you're wanting?' the reply came keenly. He wasn't born yesterday.

Charlie gave a slight smile, seeing right through him, but appreciative of the man's
caution. He imagined that the Gracie he remembered would attract that kind of fatherly concern. He wished again that he hadn't lost the photo of her and her friend in the newspaper, so he could have proved his credentials, but she might not have cared for her landlord to know she was involved in the fire at the Palais.

‘Well, the Gracie Brown I'm looking for is quite small and she's very pretty and softly spoken. She has curly auburn hair and blue eyes.'

He could have added that she danced like an angel, and that she had fitted under his heart as if they were two halves of the same person, but he didn't think that was something the man needed to hear either.

‘There was another girl with her the last time I saw her,' he went on hastily. ‘I think she had fair hair with stiff waves in it. She might be the friend you're talking about, but it's Gracie I remember the most.'

‘I can see that,' Mr Foster said, ‘and it certainly sounds as if it's our Miss Brown, so if you want to leave a note for her, I'll see that she gets it when she comes back. I can give you some writing-paper and an envelope.'

If Charlie had his way, he'd have waited around all day, knowing he was so near to finding her again, but he couldn't do it. He
had an appointment that very day with his agent and a music publisher, and although he had hoped to achieve the two things he wanted most in the world on the same day, it wasn't to be.

So he did the next best thing and wrote her a note as the man had suggested. He merely said he thought she was the girl he remembered from that night at the Palais in the spring, and that he'd like to see her again and to know that she was well. It sounded trite and stilted, but he could hardly vow undying love to her and frighten her off for good.

He tucked a front row ticket for the show at the Roxy inside the envelope, adding that any time she could use it, she should present it at the box office with his compliments, and be sure to come backstage afterwards.

And that was that. It was probably best to keep things as informal as possible. He couldn't overlook the fact that Gracie Brown might well have a young man by now, who would be irate that a musician was contacting her. Some people had the weirdest idea of what musicians did and how they behaved, but he had lived and worked among them for so long, and he knew very well they were ordinary people earning their living, just like everybody else.

* * *

The music publisher, Barnaby Jordan, was as round as he was tall in his expensive silk suit. He immediately made Charlie revise such mundane thoughts as he pumped his hand up and down, his own hands bristling with gold rings.

A little bemused, Charlie thought it was a very different reaction from the way nobody had wanted to look at his song before Feinstein had finally decided to use it in the show.

‘You have real talent, my boy, and
Someone I once knew
is going to make you rich. I've spoken with your agent, and there's a light-music programme on the wireless that's willing to give it airtime, and several popular singers interested in giving it a hearing. We should also get a gramophone recording deal out of this, Charlie boy. But you can't afford to rest on your laurels, so what else do you have up your sleeve? We need to cash in on it quickly. Being a musicman yourself, I don't need to tell you that the public is very fickle, so we need a follow-up song in the same style. More, if you have them.'

Charlie's brain was starting to reel as the man went on talking so enthusiastically. In his
wildest dreams, this was exactly the way it went. But he had never expected his dream to become such a thrilling possibility—and he had never got as far as considering a gramophone recording, which would definitely put his song on the map. It was logical though. If one of the popular crooners of the day was willing to sing it on the wireless with one of the big bands, he would also be keen to have it made into a gramophone record.

It wouldn't be Charlie's band, and it would be the singer's name that sold the record. The singer's picture would be on the record sleeve, because that was the way these things were done, but Charlie could live with that, knowing that without him, there wouldn't be a song at all.

Barnaby Jordan was still rabbiting on about royalties and airtime, and half of it was going completely over Charlie's head, until at last the man gave a large grin. ‘I can see you're a bit overcome, my boy, so I'll be in touch with your agent about contracts, and things will start moving from there. Congratulations, Charlie—and you be sure to let me have that next song just as fast as you can.'

The interview was finished on a handshake, and Charlie still couldn't quite believe it. His stomach was turning somersaults with all that he was hearing. The man didn't just
want one song, he wanted more. It was better than he had ever dreamed of—and once he could get his brain thinking normally again, he knew that pretty damn quickly he had better dig out all those pieces of paper on which he'd scribbled abortive lyrics and written scraps of music!

* * *

Dolly couldn't make sense of the image hovering over her. It was indistinct, with no clear outlines, like something in a watercolour painting. She couldn't really be bothered to decide what it was. Her head still hurt, and her brain was fogged up from the stinging injections the vampire nurse kept giving her. She'd much rather keep her eyes closed, and hope that the hazy image would disappear. Unless she was dead, of course, and it was a blooming angel come to spirit her away …

The thought was so unnerving that her eyes flew open at once.

‘Thank goodness,' Gracie said. ‘I thought you were going to sleep for ever.'

‘It's you!' croaked Dolly, unwilling to admit, even to herself, how the thought that she could be dead had petrified her.

She'd also started to think Gracie was dead. Nobody would tell her anything, no
matter how often she asked them. Or maybe they had told her, and she had just drifted off again, blocking the awful news she couldn't bear to hear.

‘Of course it's me, and doing a bit better than you, by the looks of things.'

Dolly registered now that Gracie was sitting in a wheelchair. Her leg stuck out in front of her, swathed in a heavy bandage and supported by some sort of splint. The toes that peeped out from the bottom of the bandage were swollen and black. Another bandage was held on by sticking-plaster at the side of her face, and there was a lot of ugly bruising around her eyes and cheek.