Rick knew what Rita meant all right. It was still light enough for him to see the way her breasts strained against her too-tight top.
He started to turn away from her, repelled by her sexual obviousness, but instead of letting him go Rita moved closer, flinging her arm round his neck and kissing him wetly on his mouth, her free hand moving to his groin.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘you know you want me really.’
Filled with revulsion, Rick shrugged her off, ignoring her outburst of insults and anger as he pushed past her, intent on putting as much distance between them as he could.
‘Coward,’ she called after him, jeeringly. ‘Running away from me just like you ran away from the Germans.’
Rick stopped dead in his tracks. A red mist of rage descended on him, a desire to turn round and shake Rita until she took back her insulting words, not for his sake but for the sake of the men who would never come home, men who knew more about bravery and courage than someone like Rita could ever grasp.
His anger left him as abruptly as it had seized him. All the anger in the world wouldn’t bring those men back, but he would damn well make sure that when he was eventually facing the Germans it would be those fallen men he would be fighting for.
Chapter Nineteen
Dulcie eyed the neat row of lipsticks on the counter in front of her impatiently. It was Monday. They were always quiet on Mondays, her working day seeming to drag, not that there was anything interesting to look forward to for the evening at number 13, not with Olive trying to get them all to give Sally a hand with her vegetable plot. She’d rather go home and listen to her mother praising Edith than do that. And tomorrow night that was what she would be doing, she reminded herself, since tomorrow was her mother’s birthday. She’d got her mother a lipstick for her birthday present, a pretty soft pink, and some powder as well. Her mother never took the trouble to make the best of herself, and having some decent cosmetics was bound to cheer her up. Her present was bound to be more expensive than whatever Edith bought her, Dulcie decided with some triumph. That should show her mother how wrong she was to favour Edith all the time. At least with Rick still at home on his post-Dunkirk leave, there’d be someone there to have a bit of a joke with.
Dulcie frowned as she looked down and noticed a small wrinkle in one of her stockings. Automatically she bent to smooth it away.
As she did so, from the other side of the counter she heard a male voice asking, ‘So what exactly is it you’d want this boyfriend who isn’t a real boyfriend to do?’
The voice and its amused tone were immediately recognisable. They had Dulcie standing up so quickly that she felt dizzy, which was no doubt why her face felt flushed, she decided as she stared up into Raphael Androtti’s brown eyes.
Normally quick off the mark with a retaliatory comment, Dulcie for once was lost for words, finally managing only a defensive. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’
‘A joke? I thought we were supposed to be acting as lovebirds, not clowns. Of course, if you’ve changed your mind, and you’ve found someone else to play the role of doting boyfriend . . .’
He was turning to walk away. Caught off guard, Dulcie reached across the counter to stop him, protesting, ‘No. I mean . . .’
‘I’ve missed you.’
The smile and the not-so-softly spoken words were good enough to have come from the lips of any matinée idol worth his salt, as was the way in which he lifted his hand, about to touch her face, and then dropped it again as though realising where they were.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Dulcie demanded.
‘You said you wanted me to.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ she hissed, ‘but . . .’
‘But what?’ His voice became slightly louder as he demanded urgently, ‘Have you changed your mind about me? About us? Please tell me that it isn’t true and that you haven’t.’
Somehow or other he had taken possession of her hand and was clasping it between his own.
He was enjoying this, Dulcie could see. ‘You’re overdoing it,’ she told him. A quick look round the cosmetics floor showed her that the other girls were goggling at them from behind their counters, and that Arlene was looking astounded – astounded and envious!
Oddly, though, Dulcie felt less triumphant than she should have. That was because she liked being in control. She did not like someone else grasping the upper hand and directing the things she had planned to direct herself. It made her feel . . . Dulcie didn’t want to think about how it made her feel or about being taken over by someone else, controlled by someone else. Didn’t he realise that he was going too far? All she’d wanted was for him to come in and give the impression that he was keen on her, not act like they were already an item. Now she’d end up having to come up with a reason for them breaking up.
‘The shop will be closing in couple of minutes,’ she told him, wanting to get rid of him so that she could manage the impression he was giving when the other girls asked her the questions she knew they would ask.
His warm, ‘I’ll be waiting for you outside,’ wasn’t the response she’d wanted, but she couldn’t say anything, not with Lizzie standing within hearing distance.
Now he was giving her an openly languishing look, before turning on his heel and heading for the exit, just as the warning bell to customers to leave the store started to ring.
‘Well!’ Lizzie announced as soon as the bell had stopped. ‘Who is he and why haven’t you said anything about him?’
But before Dulcie could answer her, half a dozen of the girls were clustering round her, demanding, ‘Where did you meet him, Dulcie?’ ‘Has he got any brothers?’ ‘Cousins?’
Then Arlene came and joined in, her nose in the air, malice in the look she gave her, before she said, with what Dulcie knew was mock concern, ‘I don’t want to spoil things for you, Dulcie, but your young man looks awfully foreign.’
‘He’s Italian,’ Dulcie responded with a small shrug of her shoulders, as though she herself had never for a moment shared the thoughts she suspected were going through their heads. ‘So what?’
‘An Italian!’ Arlene pretended to marvel, before adding mockingly, ‘I suppose you met him when he sold you an ice cream.’
One of the other girls began to laugh.
‘And the way he speaks . . .’ Arlene rolled her eyes.
‘He’s from Liverpool,’ Dulcie defended Raphael.
‘An Italian from Liverpool.’ Arlene dissolved into fits of laughter. ‘Poor Dulcie, but then I suppose you won’t mind. Sometimes I do wish that my own standards weren’t quite so high.’
‘Don’t pay any attention to Arlene, Dulcie,’ Lizzie said stoutly after she and the others had gone. ‘I thought your young man looked lovely.’
‘He isn’t my young man. He’s just someone I know,’ Dulcie told her crossly. Her plan seemed to have backfired on her, and that was his fault, not hers. If she did find him waiting for her outside then she’d give him a piece of her mind.
Only when she did find him waiting for her outside the staff entrance to the building, Dulcie discovered to her own surprise that her curiosity about why he had turned up in the first place was stronger than her desire to blame him for Arlene’s mockery of her.
However, when he told her in response to her question, ‘I was at a bit of a loose end, so I thought I might as well do you a favour,’ Dulcie was more incensed than grateful.
‘You overdid things,’ she said, ‘and now I’ve had to put up with the Miss Snotty Nose looking down on me even more because of you being Italian.’
They had been walking away from the building