Daughters of Liverpool (32 page)

‘Nearly going home time, thank goodness. I’m whacked,’ Carole complained, pushing her hair back from her face and leaning back in her chair to stretch her neck muscles, and then lifting her hair clear of the white collar of her pink and white striped shirtwaister dress.

It had been a warm sunny day and the late afternoon sunlight coming in through the windows showed the drowsy dance of the dust in the air.

‘Thank goodness it will soon be the weekend. Me and Andy thought we might go and have a look at that dancing competition that’s being held. Mind you, I reckon that two and six a ticket is a bit steep.’

‘What dancing competition?’ Katie asked.

Carole shook her head. ‘You must have eyes only for your Luke if you haven’t seen the posters for it. They’re all over the place, and there’s been an advertisement for it in the paper as well. You and Luke ought to enter; I reckon the pair of you would have a good chance of winning.’

Katie smiled obediently, but it wasn’t easy. Things had been very tense between her and Luke since the Easter weekend. Not that anything had been said by either of them, but Katie just knew that Luke somehow blamed her for the motorcyclist having stopped, whilst she still felt desperately hurt that he so obviously didn’t trust her after the way they had been together and the promises they had made one another.

Carole yawned. ‘I’ll be ever so glad for a bit of a lie-in as well. I overslept this morning, and of course Frosty caught me coming in late. I reckon she was hanging round hoping to catch me out.’

The supervisor probably had been, Katie acknowledged. ‘You really must be careful,’ she warned Carole worriedly.

Carole laughed and shrugged dismissively. ‘I know she’s got it in for me, but I reckon she won’t do anything.’

Katie certainly hoped not. She liked Carole and would miss her bright and breezy company if she were to be dismissed.

She was looking forward to going home time herself today. She had been called into the supervisor’s office earlier and given instructions to write another letter to the spy, using the code she had been given and keeping to the dance music theme he used, and she was already feeling anxious and worrying about bearing the responsibility for something so important.

She already had the beginnings of a headache, and felt hot and uncomfortable, despite the fact that she had caught her hair back from her face
with a bandeau to match her royal-blue and white patterned skirt. Her short-sleeved white blouse, which had felt so crisp this morning, now felt tired and wilted – like her, Katie admitted, and having to wear her court shoes without stockings because of the rationing had resulted in an uncomfortable blister on her left heel. All the girls were wearing their summer clothes, filling the room with a riot of brightly patterned fabrics, which normally would have lifted Katie’s spirits.

Was it wrong of her to wish that she hadn’t seen that coded letter and recognised what it was?

Whatever she wrote would be checked, of course, but whilst the code could be checked she was the one who knew the most about the actual musicians and dances that formed such a vital part of it and if she got that wrong then it could alert the spy to the fact that he had been found out and was now being fed useless information.

Katie knew that she wouldn’t be seeing Luke this weekend and she was both disappointed and relieved.

‘I dare say them twin sisters of your Luke’s will be entering the dance competition,’ Carole remarked.

‘They wouldn’t be allowed to,’ Katie told her. ‘Their dad is very strict about things like that, and they are only fifteen. Mind you, I’m surprised that they haven’t said anything about it, or tried to get permission to give it a go.’

‘Perhaps they have but you was too busy with their big brother to notice,’ Carole teased her.

Katie managed a stilted laugh but her eyes were stinging with tears. It had been a week since she
had last seen Luke, and then only briefly when he had dashed home to explain that he’d volunteered for extra duty so that one of the other corporals could have leave to go home to Shrewsbury to see his wife and their new baby.

At Jean’s insistence Katie had gone to the door with him but the brief kiss they had exchanged hadn’t really done anything to ease her misery. It had even occurred to her that Luke might have deliberately tried to pick a quarrel with her because he had changed his mind about her. In the cold light of day, had her behaviour the previous night put him off her? Had he decided that she was too fast perhaps? The kind of girl he couldn’t trust because she had allowed him such intimacies?

She would never know, Katie admitted, because Luke obviously wasn’t going to tell her and she certainly wasn’t going to ask him.

Charlie looked at the letter. There was no need for him to read it again. He had already read it twice and his heart was still thudding in fast heavy beats with a mixture of fear and anger.

Dougie had written to him to tell him that two of the rings he had given him were worthless, and that if Charlie knew what was good for him he would make up the difference between what Dougie had got for the remaining ring – a mere twenty pounds, he claimed – and the hundred pounds he had demanded originally as the price of his silence, and by the coming weekend. Otherwise, Dougie would be paying a visit to Charlie’s sister, to talk to her about her
engagement ring, and writing a letter to Charlie’s fiancée and her father.

‘Hellfire and damnation,’ Charlie swore savagely. Now he was going to have to drive up to Liverpool or risk Dougie making good his threat. Not that Charlie was convinced that Dougie was telling him the truth about the rings. More likely he was after more money, but Charlie couldn’t afford to call his bluff. He could insist, though, that he and Dougie went together to have the rings valued. But if they did turn out to be duds, what then?

Charlie looked out through the window of the rough-and-ready corrugated iron hut where he was standing, one of many that served the camp. Across from it he could see the officers’ mess. He’d already been approached by a still-wet-behind-the-ears newly commissioned captain, who wanted to buy his car from him.

Charlie’s scarlet MG roadster was his pride and joy, but not so much so that it meant more to him that his future. He needed the MG to drive up to Liverpool to see Dougie, but Charlie was pretty confident that the young captain would give him a deposit on the car. He could use that to pay off Dougie, get back to camp, hand the car over to the captain and collect the rest of the money, and then he’d just have to convince his father that the car had gone AWOL – ‘borrowed’ by one of the other men and smashed up.

With him due to go before a medical board for assessment of his back injury, followed, with luck, by his dismissal from the army as medically unfit,
his mother would soon see to it that his father got him another car. He’d need it for work and, of course, for seeing Daphne, and the old man could certainly afford to buy him one with the money he was raking in from his military contracts, if all the boasting he’d done to Charlie was to be believed.

Charlie screwed up Dougie’s letter and tossed it into the small stove that served to heat the hut. Just as well he’d got some leave to use up, and who knew, he might even have time to pay a call on that willing little brunette.

‘You’re taking a bit of a risk, aren’t you?’

Bella frowned at Laura’s words.

The crèche had opened earlier in the week and already they were being begged to find extra places by desperate mothers.

To Bella’s own astonishment, instead of being irritated by the children as she had expected to be, she had been surprised to realise just how much she enjoyed having to help out when the nursery nurses were busy. The children made her laugh, with their quaint little sayings, and she adored the fact that they told her that she was pretty. One of the senior nursery nurses had even grudgingly told her that she had a ‘way with the little ones’. It was the babies who drew her the most, though, although she resented her own unwanted feelings, and tried to keep away from them. Sometimes she found that she was standing looking down into one of the cots at a sleeping baby without knowing how or why she had got there, and, even worse, battling against a longing to pick the baby up and hold it tightly.

Bella didn’t like having feelings she couldn’t understand. Far better to pretend that they simply did not exist than to dwell on them.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked Laura.

‘I mean you going out and having dinner with a married man.’

‘I haven’t been out with any married man,’ Bella denied.

‘That’s not what I’ve heard,’ Laura insisted, adding sharply, ‘In fact, Bella, I think I ought to warn you that the person who saw you – one of our mothers – made the point that she wasn’t very happy about the thought of her children being in a crèche where there was a husband-stealer around. She said that it lowered the tone and that other women would think twice about leaving their children here if they thought the crèche was employing the kind of women who thought nothing of breaking up marriages.’

‘The only person I’ve been out with is a personal friend, and I can tell you that he most certainly is not married,’ Bella defended herself and her relationship with Commander Fleming. She had been thrilled when he had telephoned her three days after their initial meeting to ask her out to dinner the following weekend. A man who rang midweek to secure a weekend date had to be keen.

As he was a commander, Bella had half expected that he would take her to one of Liverpool’s exclusive officers’ clubs but instead he had taken her into the country again, this time to a small hotel. There had been other diners there, of course, but the gardens had been very
private – and dark – when they had gone out into them to ‘walk off’ their meal.

She had permitted Ralph to kiss her but nothing more, even removing his hand from her breast when he had placed it there. He hadn’t objected or said anything, but the smile he had given her when he had lit them each a cigarette had told Bella that he wasn’t going to give up and that he fully intended to seduce her into giving in. A man who wanted her … Really wanted her, not like Alan, who had just used her and then turned his back on her, or Jan, who hadn’t wanted her at all, and who had then been so very unkind and untruthful about her.

Bella had spent the days since their dinner date basking in the pleasure it gave her to know that a sophisticated man like Ralph wanted her. No one was going to take that away from her and certainly not some stupid woman who mistakenly thought that Ralph was married.

‘Bella …’ There was a new note in Laura’s voice, and a look of concern in her eyes that offended Bella’s pride. ‘Look, it’s none of my business, I know—’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Bella agreed sharply.

‘But are you sure that this chap you’re seeing really isn’t married?’ Laura asked her. ‘Only I know that there are some men about who are using the war as an excuse to, well, get what they want with no strings, if you know what I mean, and that they don’t mind lying about being single to get it.’

‘You don’t really think I’m stupid enough to be taken in by that sort, do you?’ Bella challenged
her scornfully. ‘I have been married, you know, and widowed. I dare say this woman, whoever she is, thinks that Ralph is married because she’s seen him with his sister.’

‘Oh, he’s got a sister?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you met her yet?’

‘No,’ Bella told Laura defensively. ‘Why should I have done? We’ve only been out for dinner, that’s all. He just happened to mention her to me.’

It just wasn’t possible that Ralph could have lied to her. She would have known. And she had asked, hadn’t she? He had said straight off when she had referred to him having a wife that he wasn’t married. He was taking her out to dinner again on Saturday and this time he’d suggested that since the hotel he wanted to take her to was a fair distance away, they stay overnight, and she had agreed.

Of course he would be booking two separate rooms, and she would tell him too about that stupid woman who was spreading rumours about him being married.

He had upset Katie, Luke knew. But it was only natural for a chap to want to protect his girl from the attentions of other men. Luke certainly didn’t think there was anything wrong in him doing that. He was aware, though, that he needed to do something to put things right between them and show Katie how much she meant to him. If he had been angry then it had only been because he wanted to protect her – and their relationship, he mentally
defended his own behaviour. That he might have overreacted and be guilty of an unacceptable level of jealousy was something that the stubborn streak in his nature wouldn’t allow him to consider.

Instead he had looked around for a way of showing Katie his love, and when he felt he had found one he had been like a dog with two tails.

Now he couldn’t wait to tell Katie about the treat he was planning for her. It hadn’t been easy wangling another weekend off so soon after Easter, but somehow he’d managed it. Today he’d managed to grab a few hours to catch the ferry from Seacombe to Liverpool; hurry up through the town, walking at top speed, covering the distance in less than half an hour, just so that he could lay his ‘gift’ before Katie and see her excited delight when she learned that he was taking her to London to see her parents. She never said anything, but he knew that she must be missing them, and besides, it was only right that he should introduce himself to them and ask her dad for his permission to court her properly.

He whistled happily, enjoying the extra hours of daylight and the early evening sunshine, as he walked up to his parents’ back door. His dad would be down at his allotment, and Luke decided that he would go down there after he had seen Katie and have a few words with him.

‘Luke!’ his mother exclaimed happily when he walked into the kitchen. ‘We weren’t expecting you.’

After he had returned her hug Luke asked, ‘Is Katie in?’