The Grafton Girls (22 page)

August already, the month Kit had proposed to Diane, and the month they had planned to marry this year. But at least there was one patch of blue about to break through her otherwise miserably grey unhappiness. The major, or ‘Lee’, as she was finally beginning to think of him, had told her yesterday that he thought another few days would see an end to his inspection of potential billets. And that meant she would see an end to having to work with him. And nothing would please her more than that, she told herself, as she struggled to confine her normally obedient hair into a businesslike chignon, and envying the young mother she could see from her bedroom window, free to wear a cool summer frock, whilst she was obliged to wear a thick heavy uniform.

‘You haven’t forgotten that you said you’d lend me your silk blouse, have you?’ Myra demanded, emerging from the bathroom and into their shared bedroom. ‘Only it’s this coming weekend that I’m off to London.’

‘No, I have forgotten,’ Diane replied quietly.

‘All right, I know you don’t approve of what I’m doing,’ Myra told her angrily, ‘but it’s my life, and no one is going to stop me. And before you start going on about me having a husband, well – not that it’s any of your business – I’ve written to Jim telling him that I’m going to America with Nick, whether or not he gives me a divorce, so he might as well make up his mind to giving me one.’

Diane forced herself not to let her face betray how appalled she was by Myra’s callous action in sending that kind of letter to a man who was fighting in the desert for his country. Instead she warned her quietly, ‘You might find it isn’t going to be as easy to go back with Nick as you think. From what I’ve heard, the American authorities are clamping down on British girls trying to marry GIs so that they can go back to America with them after the war is over.’

‘Oh, that’s typical of you. You’re just saying that because you disapprove of me being with Nick because I’m married. Well, for your information, me and Nick have already talked about that, ’cos I can read a newspaper as well as the next person, and Nick’s told me not to pay any attention to any of that. He says it’s all a load of rubbish, and that there won’t be any difficulties, especially with him having the right kind of contacts. Besides, with his family having their own business in New York, there’ll be no problem with the money side of things. Set up for life, I’m going to be, just you wait and see,’ Myra finished with a self-satisfied
smirk. ‘If I was you I’d start looking round for a GI of you own,’ she added. ‘And not a married one like that major.’

‘I’m working with the major, that’s all,’ Diane reminded her sharply. She hated how working at Derby House meant everyone knew everything a person was doing. Living and working with Myra meant there was no escape.

‘I reckon the US Army really knows how to treat people. Nick gets paid five times as much as a British soldier,’ Myra boasted, ignoring her comment.

Diane’s mouth tightened.

‘Nick gets an eight-day furlough every six or seven months and no messing. Like as not the next time we go away it will be more than for just a weekend. And the American Army is putting on special trains for its troops so that they can visit London on their weekend pass outs.’

‘But you won’t be able to travel on that with him,’ Diane pointed out.

‘That’s all you know. Nick’s had a word with someone he knows who owes him a favour and he’s got me a seat. The train goes from Lime Street tomorrow dinnertime and we’re meeting up for a drink first.’

Diane had finally got her hair into its chignon and, as she slid in the last of her precious store of grips, she turned to look at Myra. She didn’t like passing on gossip, but Myra’s own boastful comments about what Nick could do seemed to confirm at least to some extent what Jean had told
Diane. Myra wouldn’t take kindly to any criticism of him, Diane knew, but her own conscience was still urging her to warn the other girl.

‘The kind of favours Nick seems to be able to call in aren’t given for nothing, Myra,’ she told her quietly.

‘Meaning what, exactly?’ Myra demanded, bristling.

Diane took a deep breath. ‘I have heard that Nick could be involved in some pretty dishonest stuff.’

‘You mean a bit of dabbling on the black market?’ Myra challenged her, tossing her head. ‘Is that supposed to put me off?’ She laughed. ‘Good luck to him, is what I say.’

Myra’s attitude told Diane that there was no point in her saying anything more.

‘That silk blouse of yours…?’ Myra was repeating.

Repressing a small sigh, Diane opened the wardrobe door and removed her best blouse from its padded hanger.

Bright sunshine bouncing off the pavement made Diane grateful for the fact that her mother had insisted on loaning her her precious pair of pre-war sunglasses. She stood waiting for the major to arrive. Her experience of the first day she had worked for him had taught her to make sure she always made herself some sandwiches to take with her, carefully preserving the precious greaseproof paper in which they were wrapped to reuse each day.

Today’s sandwiches were tomato with a thin shaving of cheese, but she considered herself lucky to have a landlady with access to an allotment.

‘Off out with the handsome major again today, Di?’ Jean grinned as she hurried across the road towards her. ‘Phew, it’s hot,’ she added, removing her cap. ‘I’m not sure whether I should thank you or curse you for giving me this thing,’ she added, touching the roll Diane had given her for her hair. ‘My hair looks better, but it’s dreadfully uncomfortable in this heat, and it’s making me itch like mad. Oh ho, here’s the major now, you lucky thing,’ she grinned enviously.

Giving her a brief smile, Diane stepped forward, hurrying round to the passenger door of the Jeep, but as always the major was there before her, holding the door open for her. Today, like her, he was wearing a pair of sunglasses – aviators, she had heard the airmen calling them – and something about the darkness of the lenses added an extra strength to his air of command. Sometimes she felt that this small act of his of managing to open the Jeep door for her before she could get out by herself had become a silent but fiercely fought battle between the two of them, and a battle in which he had the unfair advantage of longer and more powerfully muscled legs. But winning the skirmish of who could get to the door first didn’t mean that he would win the war, Diane told herself. She had her own battle tactics, one of which was to thank him with freezing politeness and then ignore him, thus, she hoped, making it
plain to him that as service personnel she did not welcome being treated to his American gallantry. His wife might enjoy his acting as though she were as delicate as a piece of rare china, but she, Diane, was different. His wife?
Why
was she comparing herself to her?

To punish herself for this weakness, Diane refused to allow herself to look at him, sitting face forward and bolt upright in her seat until she heard him exhale and say drily, ‘I thought it was a stiff upper lip you Brits were supposed to have.’

Now she had to turn to look at him. ‘It is,’ she agreed coolly.

‘Then relax. The way you’re sitting right now is making
my
spine ache, never mind what it must be doing to yours. These Jeeps aren’t the most comfortable things to ride in. Or is this another way to prove how superior a tough Brit is to us mollycoddled Yanks?’

He was laughing at her, Diane recognised, and the truth was that she could feel her own lips wanting to curve into a responsive smile, but of course she couldn’t let them. That would be giving in, although she wasn’t sure she knew what exactly it would be giving in to, other than her own dangerous desire to let herself enjoy his company.

‘OK, let’s get this show on the road,’ he said. ‘We’re going to be heading out towards Knutsford today, home of the late Mrs Gaskell.’

Diane shot him a surprised look.

‘What’s wrong?’ he queried. ‘Surprised that an ignorant Yank knows about a British writer?’

‘No,’ Diane denied. ‘If I was surprised it was because I would have thought that Knutsford is a fair distance from Burtonwood.’

‘Uncle Sam’s orders are that the top brass mustn’t risk their necks by bunking down too close to the airfield, just in case Hitler decides to come over and drop a few bombs on them,’ he told her lightly, but Diane knew that he was not deceived by her answer and that she
had
been surprised by his reference to Mrs Gaskell. Why was it that he kept on managing to catch her out and make her look, if not stupid, then certainly prejudiced?

‘What will you do when this is all over, Diane?’

His question startled her. They never discussed anything that wasn’t ‘business’, and this was the first personal question he had asked her.

‘I…I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I haven’t really thought about it. What about you? What did you do before you were conscripted?’

‘Drafted, we call it, not conscripted, but I wasn’t drafted. I’m a career soldier. I joined the army straight out of high school. My dad had been a farmer. It’s a tough life and in the end it killed my mother, then him. They lost everything in the Depression. My mom died of hard work and lack of money, and my dad died of shame because of it.’

His voice was clipped and low, empty of emotion, but Diane knew better than to believe that he wasn’t feeling any. She had known too many men use the same defence mechanism -including Kit.

‘Joining the army was my way out,’ he told her. ‘It was the best decision I’ve ever made. The army’s the most important thing in my life.’

‘Apart from your wife,’ Diane murmured.

The look he shot her made her heart slam into her ribs.

‘You’re putting words into my mouth that I didn’t speak,’ he told her curtly. ‘Career soldiers shouldn’t marry.’

‘That’s crazy,’ Diane objected. ‘You can’t mean that.’

‘Why not? If my wife were here she’d tell you straight that the worst thing she ever did was marry a soldier. Hell, she’s told me often enough, and anyone else who will listen. If a soldier does marry then it should be a woman who understands what the army means to him and accepts that, not a—’ He broke off, his mouth compressing so grimly that Diane guessed he had said far more than he had intended.

Well, his silence now suited her, because she certainly didn’t want to discuss his marriage with him, or start exchanging cosy stories of love affairs gone wrong.

An hour later, when the major still hadn’t broken the silence between them, Diane acknowledged that if she had wanted to find a way to get under his skin she had certainly succeeded, but then she had noticed that he had become increasingly snappy and irritable with her over the last couple of days. Because he couldn’t wait to get rid of her? So what if he did feel like that? She didn’t care.
After all, she felt exactly the same way about him, didn’t she?

Diane squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. She was spending far too much time thinking about the major and what he might think about her. Far,
far
too much time.

‘OK, we’re just about finished here.’

Here was an Edwardian house just outside Knutsford, set in a couple of acres of grounds. It had originally been requisitioned by the British Government, who were now offering it to the Americans. That it had once been a family home was still evident in the small beds and the cot they had found in the attic bedrooms.

‘What is it with you Brits that you shut your kids away in the attics?’ the major muttered under his breath in between calling out the measurements he was taking to Diane.

‘We don’t shut them away, and anyway, it’s only the rich who can afford staff and have proper nurseries,’ Diane told him shortly. There was a battered teddy bear on the floor underneath the cot. Automatically Diane bent down to retrieve it, unaware of the way the major was watching her, as she straightened its legs and smoothed the place where the fur had been rubbed away. Poor bear. He looked so neglected and unloved, so forlorn and forgotten somehow. She could well imagine what would happen to him once the military moved in here. Once he must have been some child’s much-loved toy.

A rush of emotion seized her, a combination of her own childhood memories and the knowledge that she would never now hold in her own arms the children she had hoped to have with Kit. They had talked about them together, laughing and teasing one another. ‘A boy for you and a girl for me,’ Kit had whispered lovingly to her, that first time they had been intimate together, as she lay in his arms beneath the low ceiling of the small hotel where they had been able to get a room, selfconsciously registering as ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’, whilst Diane had toyed guiltily with the ‘wedding ring’ she had been wearing. ‘No, a boy for you and a girl for me,’ she had corrected Kit before he had taken her back in his arms.

The bear emitted a soft growl under the pressure of her tight grip on him, making her jump.

The major had his back to her. Diane looked at the bear. By rights she ought to leave the bear here…But those bright button eyes were looking so reproachfully at her. Half ashamed of her own sentimentality, she stuffed the bear inside her bag.

‘Ready?’ The major was holding open the door.

Nodding, Diane turned to follow him.

The next house, strictly speaking, was too far out of the way, since it was situated close to the market town of Nantwich, but the major told Diane that they might as well take a look at it since it was close to a small RAF airfield, which some of the smaller American planes could use in an emergency.

They were on the outskirts of the town, just
driving past a school playing field where children were playing in their summer holiday; when a light plane, its engine stuttering and whining as it plunged into a steep dive, dropped down to earth so fast that it was easy to see the American insignia on the fuselage, and easy to see too the two young men in its cockpit. Diane felt her stomach roil with foreknowledge and sickness. She had spent too much time around airfields and airmen not to know that the plane was out of control and that it would be impossible for the pilot to pull out of the dive, even if by some miracle the engine restarted.