The Grafton Girls (20 page)

The requirements of the Eighth Army seemed to grow with every day that passed, and Diane thought it was no wonder that the British forces were growing increasingly resentful of the priority accorded to their allies. Sometimes it seemed as though the Americans were behaving more like an occupying force than an ally.

‘I appreciate, of course, that this is outside your normal duties,’ Captain Barker told Diane, almost as though she had seen into her head and read her thoughts. ‘But needs must, I’m afraid. Please report to the major at ten hundred hours, outside the main entrance to the building.’

‘How long—’ Diane began, unable to stop
herself from voicing the question uppermost in her turbulent thoughts, but the captain shook her head, telling her crisply, ‘For as long as the major needs you. He hasn’t specified how long that will be.’

Diane was too well trained to do anything other than salute smartly. She knew better than to imagine that the major could have specified that he wanted
her
to accompany him. Group Captain Barker wasn’t the sort to sanction
that
sort of request. However, half an hour later, when the major drew up outside the building in a US Army Jeep, if he was surprised to find her waiting for him he didn’t show it.

Diane stepped forward, saluting formally before saying crisply, ‘Leading Aircraft Woman Wilson reporting for duty, sir.’

Somehow she managed to withstand his silent cool-eyed scrutiny without betraying how on edge he was making her feel. What was he thinking behind that impenetrable look that shut her out as effectively as a steel door? Never mind that, what was
she
doing, allowing herself to think of him in such personal terms?

‘Jump in, soldier,’ he told her with a brief inclination of his head as he reached across to push open the passenger door of the Jeep.

Soldier.
Was he desexing her deliberately or was his term of address simply American custom? Burying her self-consciousness beneath an outer air of professionalism, Diane approached the Jeep. It surprised her that the major should be driving himself. Taking aside the fact that most of the
high-ups used staff cars with drivers, she wouldn’t have thought that he would want to drive on English roads. Those who had heard their allies’ scathing comments about their roads knew the irritated contempt in which the Americans held the narrow winding country lanes and the main roads choked with men and war machinery on the move.

‘Have you been told what this is all about?’ Major Saunders asked her when she had climbed into the Jeep and closed the door.

‘Captain Barker said that you needed a stenographer, sir.’

‘That’s right. We’ve got a shipload of army personnel, including officers, about to arrive, and since the word “liaison” happens to appear in my title, someone has got it into their head that that means I’m the best person to sort out billets for the officers.’ There was an open mix of irony and irritation in his voice, and this time when he looked at her she could see his annoyed impatience quite clearly in his eyes. That too surprised her. She wasn’t used to hearing an officer express his or her feelings so openly to someone of a lower rank. But then they had all noticed the different and far more relaxed behaviour within the US forces, where the ordinary servicemen never stood to attention when they saw a senior officer, unless they had a specific reason for doing so. No British officer would lean back in his seat in the casual way the major was now doing, but no amount of relaxed deportment could take away the fact that everything about the major warned that he could be a
very formidable opponent. Opponent? They were supposed to be allies, Diane reminded herself, wondering if she would have been so on edge if he hadn’t witnessed her making such a humiliating fool of herself.

Somehow she had to forget that, and focus on the reason why she was here. She couldn’t blame him for finding the task he had been given unappealing. It was not going to be an easy assignment, she could tell.

‘The good news is that most of the ground work has been done already,’ he told her, ‘and I’ve been given a list of the places I need to go and check out. The bad news is that they seem to be spread over half of Cheshire, and by my reckoning it’s going to take us the best part of a week to get round them all.’

A week! Diane dipped her head, not wanting him to see how horrified that made her feel.

‘So I guess we’d better make a start otherwise the Eighth is going to find its officers sleeping under canvas in a Burtonwood field. How well do you know this area?’ he asked her.

‘Not well at all, sir,’ Diane replied, sitting bolt upright in her seat and looking straight ahead.

‘OK then, how well can you read a map?’

Now she did look at him. ‘Group Captain Barker said you wanted a stenographer.’

‘So you can’t read a map.’

The irritation in his voice stung Diane into saying fiercely, ‘I
can
read a map but—’

‘Yeah?’ He pulled in to the side of the road,
bringing the Jeep to an abrupt halt, and then turned to her, commanding, ‘Show me.’

As he reached across to remove a map from the shelf in front of her, he was so close that Diane could smell the clean fresh smell of soap on his skin. Immediately she recoiled from it and from him, appalled by the unwanted ache of yearning that had suddenly and violently seized hold of her. Kit…Kit…She closed her eyes. She must make herself remember that what she was feeling was because of
him, and
not because of this man, who was, after all, nothing to her and never would be. But Kit didn’t want her, he didn’t love her; she was nothing to him now, so she might as well…She might as well what? Throw herself at another man who didn’t want her, just because he made her remember that she was a woman? Did what she was feeling now help her to understand what happened to those women who took up with men to whom they were nothing? Because if it didn’t then it should, she told herself fiercely. This, what she was feeling right now, was surely happening to her because she had lost Kit. Because she was a woman, and there was a war on, and no one knew what the future might hold, and she was filled with an urgency to live whilst she still could. But not through a man like this one, Diane warned herself.

When she opened her eyes she discovered that her unease was causing the major to give her a hard look as he settled back in his own seat and unfolded the map.

‘OK, now show me where we are now.’

She knew perfectly well how to read a map, but his proximity, coupled with what she had just been thinking, was making it a struggle for her to focus.

‘Are you sure you can read a map?’ she heard him asking drily. Damn him, why couldn’t he leave her alone?

‘We’re here,’ she told him, exhaling in relief as she finally managed to pinpoint where they were, and then realised that her relief had been too soon when he leaned across to look at the map, his thigh touching hers, his arm resting on hers as he moved his finger over the map and told her, ‘The first place we need to look at is here…so we need to drive up toward Burtonwood along this road here that goes to Warrington. Have you got that?’

‘Yes.’ She’d have said anything to get him to move away from her.

‘And once we get to this place here then you’ll need to call out the directions to me. Think you can manage that?’

‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ Diane replied, almost lurching into him as he swung the Jeep round to face the opposite direction.

‘Cut the sirring, soldier – and that’s an order.’

‘Yes, sirrrr,’ Diane threw at him through gritted teeth.

It was six o’clock in the evening but no way was Diane going to point out to the major that her eight-hour shift had ended well over an hour ago.
So far they had ‘checked out’, as the major called it, over a dozen of the properties on his list, and with each one, or so it had seemed to Diane, the major’s expression had grown grimmer and his silence more condemnatory. Now, with her stomach aching with hunger, she was beginning to wonder if the major was even human. The joke in the British Naafi canteens was that being on parade for the Americans meant slouching off to the nearest PX to stock up on Hershey bars and the like, but the major had shown no inclination to stop to eat at all. She, on the other hand, was beginning to feel so hungry that she was afraid her stomach would humiliate her by starting an audible protest.

The billets they had seen had ranged from an empty girls’ school – where the major had studied the instruction pinned up on a dormitory wall, ‘Ring for a Mistress if Required’ without betraying even a flicker of amusement – to pin-neat bedrooms in private homes. But the thing the rooms all had in common was their war-weary shabbiness. It was evident everywhere: in the eyes of the people, in the way they walked and talked and the very air they breathed, Diane admitted, and it was in stark contrast to the vigour and smartness of the American forces, in their ‘pinks and greens’, as their dress clothes were known.

The major had certainly been thorough, both in his inspection and his reportage of each potential billet. As the day wore on, his dictation speeded up rather than slowed down so that Diane’s wrist
was now aching from the unfamiliar shorthand writing, and she groaned inwardly at the thought of its transcription and typing-up.

‘It’s coming up for eighteen hundred hours,’ the major informed her, glancing at his watch. ‘I guess we should break for something to eat before heading back.’

‘There’s a village a few miles down the road,’ Diane told him. ‘It should have a pub but I don’t know if we’ll be able to get something to eat.’

The look she could see in his eyes rubbed painfully against the raw patch of misery that was her pride in her country and her feelings of shame for what it had become, and her equally intense feeling of anger against the man who was forcing her to see it through his own eyes.

The village, when they came to it, was a straggle of houses either side of the road, surrounded by the fields in which Diane assumed the original villagers had once worked. A garage, its solitary petrol pump forlorn and unattended, marked the boundary between fields and village, the houses old and huddled together, the paint flaking off the doors and windows. A group of boys, old enough in reality to be wearing long trousers, but forced by the war to remain in shorter ones to save on cloth, who had been aimlessly kicking a ball around in the road, scattered at the sight of the Jeep, only one of them brave enough to stay where he was and yell out, ‘Got any gum, chum?’

Diane curled her fingers into her palms when she saw the way the major’s mouth tightened as
he flicked a grim look at the boy. No doubt in
America,
that land of plenty, children did not beg from passing strangers. She could feel the pressure of her own defensive tears against the backs of her eyes. ‘This isn’t how we really are,’ she wanted to tell him ‘This isn’t what this country is really about,’ but she knew there was no point.

Typically they found the pub virtually opposite the church, its sign swinging in the evening breeze.

Diane glanced up at it as the major stopped the Jeep, and read the name – the Traveller’s Rest. The village didn’t look as though many travellers passed through it, but then looks could be deceptive.

The major had already got out of the Jeep. A sign of his hunger, or his dislike of her company?

She reached for the handle to the Jeep’s passenger door, cursing herself inwardly for not being more speedy when the major stepped round the Jeep’s bonnet and opened the door for her.

She didn’t look at him as she thanked him, but she could once again smell the scent of his skin, more his skin than his soap now, she recognised. She had no right to be aware of the major as a man. And no desire to, either? She was glad that the necessity of following him into the pub gave her an excuse for not answering her own question.

Inside, the pub was low ceilinged with heavy dark beams and the kind of bar she was familiar with from her days in her previous posting. The usual group of elderly ‘locals’ were grouped round the bar and occupying the wooden settle close to
the huge open fireplace, and with a good view through the old-fashioned mullioned window.

The silence that followed their entrance could have been because she was a woman – the only woman in the place – or it could have been because the major was American. Diane suspected it was probably caused by both.

‘Looking for Burtonwood, are you?’ the landlord asked affably, but Diane had seen the looks the locals were exchanging and knew that his comment masked disdain.

‘I guess you get pretty tired of Americans coming in here to ask the way,’ the major answered him easily, adding, ‘We’d like something to eat, first.’

All the men exchanged looks.

‘Sorry, mate,’ the landlord answered. ‘But no can do. I’m afraid you and your lady friend will have to try somewhere else.’

Diane saw the way the major stiffened. She felt like doing the same herself. It was plain that the landlord thought she and the major were a couple, and of course he would disapprove of an English girl taking up with an American whilst young British men were away fighting for their country.

The major’s silence was lasting just that little bit too long. Diane could feel the growing tension, and diplomatically she told him untruthfully, ‘I’m really not very hungry. Do let’s go and find somewhere else.’

For a second she thought he was going to ignore her and challenge the landlord, but then he looked down at her and gave a small shrug.

They had just reached the door when Diane heard one of the men at the bar telling the landlord, ‘You missed your way there, Pete. I reckon you could have charged him a tenner to let him have that spare room of yours for the night.’

‘Bloody Yanks,’ the landlord swore angrily. ‘I don’t want no truck with them, nor their fancy pieces, not when I’ve got a lad fighting in ruddy Africa.’

The major stopped moving. Quickly Diane yanked open the door, her palms damp with nervous sweat. She walked out into the street and headed for the Jeep without looking to see if the major was following her, not wanting to give him an excuse to stay and challenge the men at the bar.