Daughters of Liverpool (25 page)

She’d have to have a new dress, of course. The one she had worn last year wouldn’t do at all. She had been a girl then, now she was a woman – married and widowed, and thus entitled to wear something rather more ravishing and seductive than a mere girl might be allowed do wear. She would need to book a hairdresser’s appointment as well; perhaps have her hair styled like Vivien Leigh. And she’d need a new lipstick, something a bit darker than her usual pink. Maybe she should have lilac satin for her dress. Lilac was, after all, a sort of mourning colour, wasn’t it, and so perfect for someone with her colouring. She would look stunningly pale and fragile, Jan’s protective arm around her as they made their entrance; the handsome Polish Air Force hero and the tragic but oh so very loyal and brave widow, whom everyone wanted to see rewarded for the unhappiness she had endured so courageously and silently in her marriage.

Bella could see it all now. It would be wonderful.
She
would be wonderful.

She came out of her daydream just in time to hear Jan saying that he must leave soon otherwise he would miss his train back to his base.

‘I expect Laura and Bella will want to do the washing-up for you, Mama, by way of a thank you for cooking lunch. That will mean that you and Bettina can come and see me off.’

Bella looked at him, about to announce that there was no way she intended to do any washing-up, but Laura was already agreeing and simpering stupidly at him, leaving Bella with no option but to agree.

‘Well, that was a turn-up for the book, you and Andy’s corporal being at the Grafton on Saturday night. You could have knocked me down with a feather when we saw you,’ Carole announced on Monday morning when the two girls met up in the cloakroom at work. ‘You and him together put on a really good show on Saturday night. Everyone was saying so. Fair gave me a surprise, you did; after all, you never said a word to me about the two of you.’

‘That’s because I didn’t know I’d be going to the Grafton with Luke and his sister and her fiancé until Friday teatime, when they asked me,’ Katie told her truthfully.

‘Andy says that the corporal is ever such a good sort; all his men think well of him. Looks like you thought so too from the way you was cosying up to him during the last dance.’

Katie blushed furiously.

‘Oh ho, like that, is it?’ Carole teased her knowingly.

‘Katie, Anne’s just been asking if anyone’s seen you,’ one of the other girls interrupted them. ‘When I told her you were in the cloakroom with Carole she said to tell you to hurry and that it’s important.’

The enjoyment that had coloured her weekend and lifted Katie’s spirits every time she thought about the dance at the Grafton, and more importantly about Luke himself, was swiftly banished by Rachel’s words. Katie’s anxiety grew stronger when she reached their table to find a grave-faced Anne waiting for her with the news that she was to present herself immediately to their supervisor.

‘What’s going on?’ Carole demanded curiously, then nodding understandingly when Katie shook her head, indicating that she couldn’t say.

She was bound to have been wrong about the letter and now she would no doubt be in all sorts of trouble for wasting other people’s valuable time. Katie was feeling so apprehensive that by the time Anne had guided her to where a supervisor was waiting for her, her knees were knocking and she had convinced herself that she was about to be dismissed in disgrace.

The supervisor, though, was not ‘Frosty’, who was on leave, but a tall thin middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Linda Philpott. She greeted Katie with an unexpected and disconcertingly warm smile, thanked Anne, and then took Katie into a cold windowless room off a long corridor, illuminated only with one bare light bulb, which revealed the wooden panelling on the walls and an oil painting hanging over the fireplace.

Instead of seating herself behind the imposing wooden desk, the supervisor sat down instead on an upright chair on one side of the fireplace, indicating that Katie was to take the other chair.

‘This room was originally the office of one of the directors of Littlewoods Pools,’ she explained conversationally to Katie. ‘I dare say it must have looked very imposing in its day but sadly now the war has stripped it of its glory. War has a habit of doing that. It strips the life of those of us who must bear it right back to the bare essentials. In wartime, Katie, those essentials include loyalty, courage, the ability to put others before ourselves,
the ability to put our country before ourselves. We see those virtues displayed every hour of every day in our country’s brave fighting men, and we see it too in those who have volunteered to do their bit for the war effort here at home.’

The supervisor was obviously leading up to something, Katie realised, but what?

‘Sometimes when we think that we are already doing our bit, things happen that require us to do even more, and even to put ourselves at risk.’

Katie’s stomach, which earlier had been churning with the apprehension that she might be dismissed, only to quieten when she had recognised the warmth with which she was being received, had now begun to churn again but with a different fear this time.

‘You have already shown commendable devotion to your work, Katie. Thanks to your quick-wittedness in spotting that error in the letter you referred to the head of your table, another department within this organisation has been able to break the code being used between the letter writer and its recipient. The sender has already been traced and is now under arrest. It is now, Katie, that I must stress to you how important it is that you understand that what we are discussing here must not go beyond this room; it is no exaggeration to say that the lives of many brave men and women may depend on you adhering to that.’

‘No, of course, I shan’t say a word,’ Katie told her quickly. She was beginning to feel rather sick and desperately anxious to escape from the slightly sinister room and the supervisor’s talk of secret codes and people’s lives being at risk.

‘No, of course you won’t. It is obvious to me that you are the kind of young woman who places her loyalty and her duty to her country right at the top of her list of things that are most important to her.’

Was the lecture nearly at an end? Katie hoped so.

‘As I have already said, the person who sent the letter has been apprehended. However, it has been decided that the recipient of the letter – and no doubt others – will now be used as a means of conveying false information to the other side via letters that we shall construct here using the code we have now broken. We shall pass on false information in response to the questions that the letter asks. To that end it has been decided that you will become part of the team that will construct these letters.’

‘Me? But—’

‘Obviously, Katie, I can only give information to you on a need-to-know basis, and that means that whilst I can tell you that it is now clear that a knowledge of popular music and those involved in it plays a vital role in the code within the letters exchanged, I cannot tell you any more than that.

‘Your role within this team will be to write a letter incorporating certain pieces of information that will be given to you by using a code, which will also be given to you. You will write this letter very much in the style of the letter you read, that is to say, in the style of a young woman replying to a letter from a young man in a mildly flirtatious manner that refers back to dances the two of you have attended and music you have enjoyed.’

‘But my handwriting will be different,’ Katie protested, ‘and—’

‘As I have just said, Katie, I can only give you information on a need-to-know basis. Your task is simply to write a letter using the information you will be given. The fact that your handwriting is your own handwriting is not something that needs to concern you.’

The supervisor’s voice was very firm now and Katie could only assume that she meant that someone else, possibly a forger, would copy what Katie had written in handwriting that mimicked that of ‘the person who had been apprehended’.

Another girl might have found the whole thing exciting but Katie found it daunting.

As though she could tell what Katie was thinking Linda Philpott reminded her calmly, ‘It is for your country that you do this, Katie, and for the lives of all those you will help to save.’

She paused for a few seconds and then said briskly, ‘Now, I want you to return to your desk and get on with your work. Not a word about any of this to anyone, mind – not that you will be asked. We all know why we are working here, after all. Your instructions will be passed to you later on today. Just to be on the safe side it has been decided that you should write your letter in your billet. I dare say it will take you several attempts, given the complexity of the code and the nature of the information to be relayed to the recipient of the letter. However, time as always in these matters, is of the essence.’

The supervisor was standing up so Katie did the same.

Having escorted her to the door and opened it so that Katie could step out into the corridor, she shook Katie’s hand and said firmly, ‘Good show.’

As she made her way back to her desk Katie felt almost light-headed with a mixture of disbelief and shock – a feeling that was strengthened when instead of asking her what had happened Carole behaved as though she hadn’t moved from her desk, and instead of questioning her started chatting about the dance at the Grafton, in between complaining about the food they were served in the canteen.

‘Andy’s asked me to go to the pictures with him on Wednesday. What about you? Has the corporal made a date with you?’

‘What? Oh, no. Well, not exactly.’

‘Not exactly? What does that mean when it’s at home?’ Carole teased her.

‘Well, Luke did say that he’d enjoyed dancing with me,’ Katie told her, deliberately withholding the fact that Luke had also said sort of casually, in a way that made it clear that he wasn’t being casual at all really, that he’d got a bit of leave coming up and that, since Katie was new to the area, he’d be happy to show her around if she’d like that.

Katie had been equally studiedly casual in her response when she’d replied that her parents had asked her if she’d seen much of the countryside around Liverpool and that she’d like to tell them that she had.

The result had been that Luke had said that
he’d let her know when he could get his leave so that they could sort something out.

It was a prosaic enough arrangement but there had been nothing whatsoever prosaic about the kiss they’d exchanged when Luke had hung back to let Grace and Seb get ahead of them on the walk home, or the other kiss they’d shared when Luke had left his scarf on the table and Katie had seen it and run down the back garden in the dark to give it to him. That kiss had been the sweetest and the most headily intimate of all because when she had shivered in the March air, Luke had opened his greatcoat and drawn her inside its warmth so that they had been standing body to body, her heart hammering and racing at speed against the heavy fierce thud of his.

She’d never French kissed before, nor ever thought she might want to, but somehow it had just seemed so natural and so – so very exciting and wonderful with Luke. She had been trembling when they had finally stopped, and so had Luke. Something special was happening between them, so very special that Katie wanted to hug it to herself for now and only share it with Luke in the way that they had done when they had exchanged special looks and a final brief kiss before they had finally parted on Saturday night.

Fran leaned out as far as she could from the side of the boat taking them along the Nile, through the Valley of the Kings. It had been Marcus who had suggested the three-day trip, and Fran had accepted with a delight that wasn’t entirely due to
her desire to see the archaeological artefacts left behind by the Ancient Egyptians.

‘Oh, I can’t think of anything I’ve ever seen to match this, can you?’ she asked Marcus excitedly.

As he moved closer to her, slipping his arm round her waist, his affirmative and softly emphatic ‘Never’ had her turning her head, laughter in her eyes at odds with the mock disapproving look she gave him as she shook her head and told him, ‘I meant this,’ and waved her hand in the direction of the shore.

‘It is magnificent,’ he agreed, ‘but I would rather look at you.’

‘Be careful,’ Fran warned him softly, her own focus on the shore fading as she looked into his eyes. ‘If you keep on saying such delicious things to me I could start to take you seriously.’

‘I want you to take me seriously, Fran, because I am serious about the way I feel about you.’

He had moved closer to her now, fitting her body alongside his own, his action and its intimacy reminding her of how well they had fitted together last night in her bed.

Even now Fran couldn’t quite believe how quickly and easily she had broken all the promises to herself she had vowed to keep, promises like never ever falling in love again, like never ever again risking the betrayal and then the disgrace she had suffered as a young girl.

But this was wartime and she was living in a different world from the one she had grown up in. Everyone said so, all those men and pretty girls who flocked to Shepheard’s Hotel each night to
escape from the tensions of war and the fear of death. She was a woman now, not a girl, and this time with Marcus there would be no risk of the conception of an unwanted child; both of them were determined to make sure of that.

It had felt so strange at first, discussing the raw brutal facts of sexual intimacy before they had so much as touched one another, but Fran had known from the moment Marcus had suggested this trip and spoken of the elegance of the river cruiser’s staterooms that he wasn’t planning on them sleeping in separate rooms and separate beds, and by that time she had been as fiercely hungry for him as he had been for her.

Both of them had admitted that the intensity of their mutual desire had caught them off guard. It had whirled up out of nowhere like a desert storm, obliterating everything that stood in its path. In fact it had been as though fate had decreed that they should have this time together since it had been a real live desert storm that had put on hold the troupe’s planned trip out to one of the most outlying desert camps, thus giving them an unexpected gift of over a week together. A week in which they had socialised separately and discreetly, but always acutely aware of one another, always managing somehow to be together for a few short precious minutes. And now they had this: three days away from the rest of the troupe.