important, you’ll maybe stop trying to rub the pattern orf that plate and shift yourself so we’ll be done in time to listen to Tommy Handley! And maybe it’d be better if our Joannie sent you someone different next time.’
‘No!’ She said it much, much too quickly. ‘I mean – well, I promised Bill and Sam I’d see them both again next week. We got on well together the three of us, and Sam is such a help with Bill. I couldn’t go back on my word, Sparrow. Not the word of a Sutton.’
‘Well, if you say so. Only don’t go filling your head with day dreams or you’ll get hurt again – especially if he’s married. And there was a letter for you from Liverpool. I left it on the hall table. Did you see it?’
Sparrow knew Daisy’s handwriting; had known Daisy since she was a little thing in her mother’s arms, and living in Hampshire.
‘Sorry – I didn’t look, actually. I’ll read it later. And don’t worry about me, Sparrow – though I’m glad, really, that you do. It was just that meeting Bill Benson last night was a bit of shock, that’s all. I’m fine now. It’s all under control. I know what I’m doing.’
But did she know what she was doing, she thought that night as she lay snug and cosseted in bed and thought about Tim Thomson and Bill Benson. Because she didn’t know what she was doing if she were scrupulously honest, and to say she did was like spitting into the wind, which was a very unladylike thing to do – apart from being messy!
She turned over with an exaggerated sigh, then plumped up her pillows. Frightening though that meeting had been, she knew there could never, ever, be another man in her life after Tim. And that was a pity, really, because never to be able to fall in love again was a terrible thing to have to accept; like becoming a nun and not being able to go back on your word.
But those three wonderful months she and Tim spent together were worth a lifetime of being alone. Indeed she was, she thought, very lucky to have met Tim at all. If she hadn’t gone to the dance at Holdenby Moor aerodrome she would never have have known the joy of loving completely and being completely loved in return.
She smiled softly and sadly and said good night to Tim as she always did, then made her mind a blank, because she must not think about Bill Benson. Perhaps Sparrow was right and Joannie should ask some other volunteer to take him out on the town.
Trouble was, she had promised, and anyway, next week she would most probably wonder why she had ever thought Bill Benson was in the least like Tim. There could never be another Tim Thomson. Not ever. It was as simple – and awful – as that.
Drew and Kitty leaned against the landing-stage railings, thighs touching, hands clasped, gazing across the river to the Cheshire side. Sharp against the skyline the jagged outlines of bombed buildings were gentled by a setting sun that scattered the river with a sparkle of rubies.
‘Kind of beautiful, isn’t it?’ She smiled up at him. ‘If it wasn’t so sad, I mean. Wish I could paint. It’s so dramatic.’
‘Then I’m glad you can’t because knowing you, your canvases would either be terrible, or very good indeed.’
‘And in this case,’ she pointed to the wartime skyline, ‘scary. Y’know, honey, it’s like we’re standing back, looking at something we’ve no power to do anything about; all of us puppets, having our strings pulled.’
‘We’re nothing of the kind! You and I are living, breathing people. We have minds of our own and we’re going to be married,’ Drew said firmly. ‘And one day, all this will be behind us. Last time, Mother said, when they thought their war would never end, it was suddenly all over.’
‘Sure, and they had to pick up the pieces and wonder if it had all been worth it, just as our generation will wonder.’ She turned her back on the stark outlines that were already being dimmed and softened around the edges by the blocking out of a scarlet sun behind a tall, distant building. ‘And I know we have minds of our own, darling, but sometimes there’s no choice but to do things we don’t want to.’
‘Like?’ He pulled sharply on his breath.
‘Like me coming over here to work with ENSA and being willing to go anywhere, kind of …’
‘So you are leaving Liverpool! Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because I didn’t want to spoil tonight, I guess. Because in a few hours you’ve got to be back on board and next time you dock I’ll be gone. To London.’
The river ferry came broadside on to the landing stage and they looked down, not speaking, to watch the gangway fall with a clatter and people hurrying across it.
‘Let’s not go dancing.’ It was Drew who broke the uneasy silence.
‘No. Let’s go back to the digs.’ To Ma MacTaggart’s cheap theatrical lodgings; to Ma, who never thought to remark that the bed in the room Drew took for the night was never slept in.
‘Mm. You can tell me about it, then.’ It wouldn’t seem so awful when they lay close, and warm from loving, Kitty telling him she was to be based in London as they feared she might be; would not seem so bad when they were so relaxed they could imagine London to be only a sixpenny tram ride away. ‘And London will be good for your career – all the theatres.’
And the bombing, his mind supplied, because it would start again, nothing was more certain. When Hitler was done with Russia the full force of the Luftwaffe would be hurled at Britain once more. Not that Hitler was getting all his own way there now. The German armies had been halted and held, and in some places thrown back. And Moscow was no longer threatened, though Leningrad’s siege had yet to be broken.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Kitty whispered. ‘You sure were scowling.’
‘I was thinking about the war in general and Russia in particular and how it might not always be very safe when you get to London.’
‘I’ll be just fine, darling.’ There was a churning of water between the landing stage and the ferry as it made its way back towards the Cheshire side. ‘For one thing, I’ll be with Sparrow and Tatty, and for another I’ll be out of London on tour a lot of the time.
‘On tour,’ she giggled. ‘Sounds like I’ll be doing the provincial theatres before the show opens in the West End, when really we’ll be playing gun sites and aerodromes and village halls; any place there are men and women in need of cheering up. You’ve no idea, Drew, what a wonderful audience they are. They stamp and whistle like crazy. It makes me feel real good, like I’m a star and they’ve all paid pounds and pounds just to see me.’
‘You always did like an audience, Kitty Sutton. You knew even when you were little how to play to the gallery. Do you know what a precocious brat you were?’ Smiling, he tweaked her nose.
‘Guess I must’ve been pretty awful,’ she laughed.
‘You still are. You come into a room like a force-eight gale, demanding to be noticed – just like you slammed into my life that night on the dockside. Suddenly I knew what it was like to be hit amidships by a torpedo.’
‘And I love you too.’ She reached on tiptoe to kiss his lips lingeringly which was something nice girls shouldn’t do in public, then they began to walk towards Bold Street and the little street off it, where Ma MacTaggart lived. Now, Drew thought, he had another picture of Kitty to store in his memory and take out and live again when they were apart.
Kitty, silhouetted against a red evening sky and the stark, bombed buildings on the far bank of the river; Kitty so beautiful that it made him wonder why it was him she loved and not someone as good to look at as herself; Kitty’s English half that loved the Mersey and to stand at the Pierhead watching the river ferries that churned across it. Kitty, warm and flamboyant, whose lips silently begged him to make love to her each time they kissed.
He had been so ordinary before the night he saw her behaving so badly in the too-small, too-cheap red costume. That night he fell in love with his Kentucky cousin; deeply, desperately,