As Time Goes By. Annie Groves

out loud when she recognised that the man Lynsey was drooling over was none other that her own bête noire, Sergeant Johnny Everton. And what was more, he had seen her too, Sam realised as she tried to flatten herself into her chair.

      ‘Gawd, Lynsey, stop showing us all up, will you? Any chap seeing you look at him like that is more likely to make a run for it than make a grab for you,’ Hazel warned irritably, as Lynsey continued to look pointedly and invitingly in the direction of the uniformed Bomb Disposal sergeant.

      ‘That’s all you know. Look, he’s coming over,’ Lynsey crowed triumphantly.

      If her chair hadn’t been hemmed in so tightly between those on either side of her she would have been on her feet and bolting for the sanctuary of the powder room, Sam admitted, and yet there was no reason for her to feel like that. She wasn’t on duty and answerable to him, and he certainly wasn’t coming over here because he wanted to socialise with her, so why was she in such a silly panic?

      ‘Oh boy …’ Lynsey murmured ecstatically. ‘Now that is what I call a man. I bet he dances divinely. Hands off, the rest of you, he’s mine.’

      ‘As if any of us had a chance anyway, with you making big eyes at him the way you are doing, Lynsey,’ May whispered.

      ‘I’m not at all happy with this,’ Hazel muttered to Sam. ‘Lynsey thinks she can get away with anything, but it’s the rest of us that will end up getting a bad name along with her, if we don’t watch out.’

      ‘Would you like to dance?’

      Sam could see the shock on the girls’ faces, especially Lynsey’s, as the sergeant stood in front of her and asked her to dance. She could feel that same shock zigzagging through her body like a hail of tracer bullets, illuminating the sharp rawness of her most private feelings. What was he doing this for? Was he deliberately trying to make fun of her, to humiliate her? A mixture of anger and misery gripped her.

      ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she told him shortly.

      She could see the way his chest compressed as he breathed in sharply.

      ‘Why don’t you ask me instead?’ Lynsey offered flirtatiously. ‘I’d love to dance with you …’ She was already on her feet, and reaching out to put her hand on his arm whilst she looked up at him, batting her eyelashes.

      As though his appearance had opened the floodgates, within seconds the other girls, apart from Sam, Hazel and Mouse, had taken to the floor, dancing with one another, laughing and giggling as they watched Lynsey act the vamp with her partner.

      ‘You were fearfully rude, turning that sergeant down like that, you know,’ Hazel told Sam quietly.

      ‘He didn’t really want to dance with me,’ Sam answered her. ‘I could tell that from the way he was looking at me. He’s already told me—’

      ‘You know him?’ Hazel stopped her, if anything looking even more disapproving.

      ‘Not really … that is, I have met him before … he was introduced to me … by … by someone …’

      ‘Oh, Sam, that makes turning him down like that so much worse.’

      Sam could feel her face starting to burn. ‘I didn’t want to leave Mouse on her own,’ she tried to defend herself.

      ‘Mouse isn’t on her own; I’m here,’ Hazel pointed out, adding sternly, ‘I really think you owe him an apology, you know.’

      ‘An apology!’

      ‘Yes,’ Hazel insisted. ‘It’s awfully bad form to turn down a chap in uniform when he asks you to dance, don’t you know? Not the done thing at all. Not …’

      ‘… when there’s a war on,’ Sam chanted, causing Hazel to give her another stern look.

      Outwardly she might be stubbornly defending her actions but inwardly she felt horribly guilty. She knew that had she been asked to dance by anyone other than Johnny Everton she would have accepted, and somehow or other forced herself to overcome her own self-consciousness at her lack of dancing skill. If it had been Frank who had asked her, for instance … Don’t think about that, she warned herself. Sergeant Frank Brookes was married, and besides, all he had ever shown her was just a bit of good-mannered kindness, nothing else, and even if he hadn’t been married she would have been a fool to have gone making something out of that that just didn’t exist.

      Sally could feel her hands trembling slightly as she folded them together behind her back and joined the other girls in their set line-up for ‘You Are my Sunshine’, the number that was proving to be one of the year’s most popular songs. She wasn’t going to look over to the doctor’s table and risk getting caught in the glower of disapproval he had given her during their earlier number. Patti had given her a real old telling-off backstage, justifiably perhaps, Sally admitted. She hated being anything less than professional but what she hated and feared even more was that for the first time ever, something and someone had broken through the protective screen that singing had always previously allowed her to hide behind, away from whatever was troubling her. It was true that the ‘something’ and the ‘someone’ weren’t related. After all, the summons to appear at ‘the Boss’s’ party had nothing whatsoever to do with Dr Alexander Ross. Heavens, Sally could just imagine how a man like him would react to someone being in debt! He would treat them like they were a bad smell under his nose, she decided. And yet despite the resentment she felt towards him for showing her his obvious contempt, underneath Sally acknowledged there was pain. She had longed so much for her and Ronnie and their children to be a family who could hold up their heads; a decent respectable well-thought-of family who kept themselves to themselves and whom others admired, not like the families she had grown up amongst in Manchester. Good-hearted people she knew, but living on the breadline, never knowing if they would have enough money to pay the rent and often seeming not to care, taking their best clothes down to the pawn shop when they were short of cash, and then having to borrow from whoever they could to get them back again when they needed to wear them. Sally had spent her childhood anxiously aware that the very fine line that divided her mother’s smiles from her tears and anger was because of her struggle to manage the family budget. Her parents may not have got themselves into debt but the threat that they might be had hung over her childhood like a dark cloud. Now that fear was hers, and she could feel the shame of having succumbed burning deep into her soul. Somehow the doctor, with his smart clothes, his posh furniture, his well-dressed wife and children, underlined for her all that hurt the most in her own marriage and life.