The Grafton Girls (33 page)

‘Trimmings,’ Diane scoffed. ‘And you’d probably have found that someone you knew was staying in the same hotel, and that they wanted you to join them, and that—’

‘OK, OK,’ Lee grinned, wrapping his arms around her. ‘You win. We’re in the right place; the best place; the only place we could possibly want to be…’

As he spoke he started to kiss her, slow lazy kisses strung out along her jaw and then her throat as he walked her backwards towards the bed until she could feel it behind her.

‘God, but I want you,’ he groaned as he stopped playing and cupped her face, kissing her fiercely and possessively.

This was what she had wanted and yearned for, Diane told herself as she closed her eyes and clung to him, kissing him back. As she leaned into him she could feel the thick ridge of his erection and her body quivered. Not with the nervous apprehension with which it had quivered when she had
first permitted this intimacy with Kit, but rather with eagerness and impatience.

Lee was sliding his hands inside her jacket, caressing her body over the top of her blouse. She could feel the callused heat of his palms against her breasts through her clothes. Her nipples tightened with the tiny quivers of sensation sensitising them, that same sensation miraculously mirrored deep down inside her body, making her want to melt into him and press herself up against him just as hard and close as she could. She arched her neck, inviting the caress of his kisses, wanting to moan out her pleasure but careful of the reality of the bar downstairs. Would the bed squeak like the one she and Kit had once had, and which had made them collapse with laughter after their third attempt to defeat its giveaway springs. In the end they had put the eiderdown down on the floor along with the pillows, and made love there rather than risk the ribald comments they knew they would have to face if they went ahead in the bed. Kit swore that one of his friends had put the landlord up to giving them that particular room.

This bed was blissfully silent, though, she acknowledged when Lee lowered her back onto it and she sank into its delicious softness.

He undressed her slowly and tenderly, kissing her in all the right ways and places, not hurrying things, but at the same time not drawing them out too long either. She liked the way he moved so efficiently and naturally, familiar enough with female clothes not to fumble, but not so used to
the female form that he didn’t register a flattering appreciation at each freshly revealed bit of her.

She liked it even more that he undressed himself when she wanted him to do so, whilst encouraging her to make as free with his body as she wished.

He was more heavily built than Kit, but then of course he was older, with more flesh padding his muscles, and more body hair, but she liked it that he was different, she told herself. It meant that she wouldn’t be thinking about Kit whilst she was with him.

Was her own high-breasted, narrow-waisted, pale-skinned body different from that of his wife? Was he looking at her full, creamy-fleshed breasts with their dark nipples and imagining another woman’s breasts? Diane pushed away her disturbing thoughts. They had no place here in this bed with them, just as those other partners had no place here. Here in this room, this bed, it was just them and the way they felt about one another; the way Lee made her feel when he lay next to her and cupped her breasts in his hands, looking down at them as though he thought he was observing a small miracle; the way she felt about the fact that they were sharing an intimacy that once she had thought belonged and would always belong exclusively to Kit.

A huge lump suddenly and inexplicably formed in her throat. How had she managed to travel so far down this road, which prior to the war would have been one she would never have imagined would have any place in her life?

Kit had wept the first time they had made love. For the men who had not come back with him, for the beauty of her body and for the perfection of their love, he had told her. And she had wept too, just listening to him.

Kit. Out of nowhere the pain came and slammed into her, taking her breath, numbing her body and then ripping it apart with fresh pain.

Lee was leaning forward to kiss her breasts. Abruptly she wriggled away and then sat up.

‘I can’t,’ she told him bleakly, filled with too much guilt to be able to look directly at him. ‘I can’t do it, Lee. I’m sorry. Please take me back.’

For a moment she thought he was going to argue or, even worse, actually try to force her. She held her breath and his searching gaze, and then exhaled as he gave a brusque nod.

Ten minutes later they were dressed and ready to leave.

‘Which of them was it?’ he asked her heavily, breaking the silence. ‘My wife, or your ex?’

‘It was Kit,’ Diane admitted, uncomfortably aware that, having come this far, the existence of Lee’s wife would not have been enough to stop her. Facing up to the truth about oneself with such brutal honesty wasn’t easy, but she owed Lee that much at least.

‘I wasn’t going to tell you but I’ve had the offer of a transfer. I guess now I’ll accept it,’ he informed her.

Tears stung her eyes. Even now, a part of her wanted to turn back and tell him that she had
changed her mind. The question she had to ask herself, though, was how was she going to feel when all this was over and she looked back? Which would she regret most – having an affair with him or not having one?

Only time could give her the answer to that, she told herself as Lee held open the door for her.

‘’Ere, Cedric, hang on a sec’

The two men had been the last to leave the bar, and now one of them turned into the alleyway, drunkenly intent on taking advantage of the blackout to relieve himself. He staggered forward and then recoiled as he almost stumbled over Myra’s body.

‘Ruddy hell, Cedric, bring that ruddy torch, will yer?’ he called out shakily. ‘There’s summat here.’

His companion shone the torch down the alleyway onto Myra.

‘’Ere, I don’t like this. Let’s scarper.’

‘We can’t do that. She’s still alive – look, she’s breathing. You wait here, I’ll go and get help,’ Cedric, abruptly sobering up, told his companion.

‘I can’t see no breathing. She looks like she’s a goner to me. Why don’t we—’

‘Stay here,’ Cedric repeated.

Half an hour later, when the ambulance arrived, summoned by the ARP unit Cedric had alerted, one of the ambulance crew gave a low shocked whistle.

‘She might be breathing now,’ he said, ‘but from the looks of her it’s the morgue we’ll be taking her to. Someone’s really laid into her, and no mistake.’

‘They’ll be putting the clocks back in another couple of weeks. I’m not looking forward to them dark nights with this blackout still going on, I can tell you.’

Diane smiled sympathetically as she listened to her landlady.

‘Going down the hospital later on to see Myra, are you?’ Mrs Lawson asked.

‘I expect so.’

Over the last few weeks, following on from the shocking news that Myra had been found up a back alley behind a seedy bar, unconscious and so badly beaten up that initially the doctors hadn’t thought she would live, they had been taking it in turns to visit Myra as often as they could.

‘Do you reckon they’ll ever catch up with that GI wot beat her up and killed that poor Walter?’

‘I doubt it now,’ Diane told her landlady.

Diane knew from Ruthie, who was now blissfully counting off the last few weeks to her November wedding to Glen, that it was believed
that Nick had either managed to leave the country or was living somewhere in England under an assumed name with the help of his connections with the American Mafia, although Ruthie had also stressed that Glen had been warned that the US Army did not want to have public attention drawn to this connection, and that officially Nick was simply recorded as AWOL – absent without leave.

It had been raining on and off all morning, a thin drizzle, which, combined with the mist that had rolled in over the Liverpool bar, was giving the whole city an air of closed-in grey, dank misery. It was Diane’s day off but she did not feel in a holiday mood as she huddled up inside her uniform greatcoat, worn to protect her from the weather despite the fact that she was not on duty.

She had become such a regular visitor at the hospital that the porter on duty recognised her, giving her a cheery smile.

During her early days in Mill Road, Myra had been put in a small side room on her own, such had been the severity of her injuries and the doctors’ belief that she could not survive them.

Now, though, she was in a bed in a large ward surrounded by other female patients, several of whom called out chirpy ‘hellos’ to Diane when she walked in.

Because they were both in uniform and because Myra had no family to come and visit her, the normal rules about visiting hours had been stretched to allow for Diane’s on-duty hours, but
she tried,
apart
from a few exceptions, to keep to them. Today, though, was one of those exceptions.

From her bed halfway down the ward, Myra raised her hand in welcome. Poor Myra, Diane reflected sombrely as she reached her bed and pulled out a chair to sit down next to it. She had paid a dreadful price for her foolish infatuation with Nick Mancini. Her hair had started to grow back now after the doctors had had to shave her head to deal with her wound, but she was not the girl she had been, and had lost that sharp self-confidence that had so marked her out before.

She looked anxious and upset, and Diane could see that she’d been crying.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked her sympathetically. ‘You haven’t been having those bad nightmares again, have you? Only if you have you should tell Sister, because she said—’

‘No,’ Myra said. ‘Well, at least, it feels like a nightmare, and I wish that was all it was and that I could wake up from it.’ Her eyes filled with tears, and she bit down hard on her bottom lip to prevent them from overflowing. ‘I’m having that bastard’s kid,’ she told Diane starkly. ‘I’ve been sick for a while, and they’ve thought it was something to do with…with what happened, but then they asked me if there was any chance I could be carrying, and I had to say yes, so they did some tests and I am. I can’t believe it. It was only the once without a French letter, and even then…’

Diane didn’t know what to say. She was astonished after what Myra had gone through that she
had not lost the baby she was carrying, and privately couldn’t help thinking that it might have been for the best if she had. What was more, she suspected from Myra’s reaction that she felt the same way. Not that either of them could ever say so, of course.

‘And as if that weren’t bad enough I got a letter from Jim this morning – the first I’ve had from him since they wrote to tell him what happened to me. He’s due back on leave any day now and he says he’s ready to talk about us having a divorce.’ Myra gave a bitter laugh. ‘He’ll be the one wanting to divorce me when he sees the state I’m in and he finds out what’s going to happen. That means that me and Nick’s little bastard are going to be managing on our own.’

‘But you’ve got your mother,’ Diane protested. ‘I know she hasn’t been able to come and see you but—’

Myra shook her head. ‘She won’t want to know. Settled now, she is, with her cousin, living in some boarding house down Brighton way. The last thing she’s going to want is me turning up on her doorstep with a bastard grandchild.’

Diane didn’t know what to say. She reached for Myra’s hand, patting it awkwardly, whilst reflecting inwardly on how easily the situation Myra was now facing – being a young woman carrying the child of a man who had deserted her – was one that was becoming increasingly common. And one she could potentially have been facing herself if she had gone ahead and had an affair with Lee.

But she had not done, had she, and if sometimes at night she lay in her bed and ached with loneliness and need, well, at least she could comfort herself with the knowledge that she had done the right thing.

‘Have they said yet when you’ll be able to come out of hospital?’ Diane asked.

‘Another couple of weeks,’ Myra said, looking off into the distance, obviously fearing what the future held.

‘There’s Billy waiting for you,’ Ruthie told Jess unnecessarily, giving her a nudge as they walked out of the church hall where they had been to check up on the final arrangements for Ruthie and Glen’s wedding.

‘I don’t know why,’ Jess responded grumpily.

Ruthie laughed.

‘What’s that for?’ Jess challenged her.

‘Well, if you can’t see that Billy’s mad for you, Jess, then you want to go and get those eyes of yours tested,’ Ruthie told her with the forthright-ness that had come with the new confidence Glen’s love for her had given her.

‘Huh. He might make out that he is, but then that doesn’t mean owt, not with a lad like Billy.’

‘Maybe it’s up to you to make it mean something, if that’s what you want,’ Ruthie suggested.

Jess stared at her. ‘What, me go chasing after him, you mean? Not on your nelly.’

Ignoring her grumpiness, Ruthie replied cheerfully, ‘What I was meaning was that if that was
what you wanted, you could perhaps give him a chance to come chasing after you instead of pushing him off all the time. If that’s what you was wanting…’

‘Well, it isn’t,’ Jess snapped, but Ruthie was well aware of the yearning look in her eyes that she couldn’t quite conceal as she looked towards where Billy was standing waiting.

Ruthie knew that she would never ever forget how close she had come to losing Glen. He had brought so much happiness to her life that it was only natural, surely, that she should want her friend to have the same happiness. Even when that friend kept on claiming that it wasn’t what she wanted.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she told Jess. ‘Glen will be waiting for me at home.’

‘Hang on,’ Jess began, but it was already too late: Ruthie was hurrying away from the hall, leaving her standing on her own with Billy between her and the gate.

She watched as he came towards her.

‘Bin sorting out the wedding, have you?’ he asked her.

‘No, I was looking for the Majestic Picture House and I took a wrong turning,’ Jess told him witheringly.

‘Vicar still in there, is he?’ Billy nodded toward the church hall. ‘’Cos if he is, how about you and me going and having a word wi’him and asking how he fancies doing us as well?’

Jess’s face was difficult for him to read.

‘Doing us as well? One day, Billy Spencer, them
jokes of yours are going to get you into big trouble,’ she warned him angrily, making to walk past him. But as she did, Billy reached out and caught hold of her arm, stopping her.

‘Who said anything about a joke?’ he asked her abruptly.

Jess could feel her heart pounding like one of those bomb fuses Billy was always talking about to her stepfather. She felt a bit like a bomb inside, as well, she admitted – a bomb that was about to go off!

‘I mean it, Jess,’ he continued seriously. ‘I’m fed up wi’us messing about.’

‘Us messing about…’ Jess began and then was forced to stop as suddenly Billy took hold of her. ‘Stop it, Billy,’ she protested. ‘You’re nearly squeezing the breath out of me, holding me so tightly like that.’

‘Well, I’m going to go on holding you tightly, and I’m going to kiss you as well,’ Billy told her ruthlessly. ‘And I’m going to keep on kissing you until you tell me that you and me are going to get married.’

‘You can’t—’ Jess began.

‘Oh, yes I can,’ Billy told her softly, and then proceeded to kiss her so thoroughly that she felt as though she could no longer think, never mind try to speak.

Ten minutes later, as they stood wrapped in one another’s arms, Jess looked up into Billy’s eyes, her own bright with love and happiness.

‘You’ll have to marry me now,’ Billy said with
great satisfaction, ‘’cos Mrs Harris, three doors down from your ma, has just walked past and seen us. By the time you get home the whole street will know.’

Jess assumed a serious expression. ‘You’re right there, Billy, there’s no help for it now. We’ve got to get wed. Not that I want to wed you, of course. Not if you’re going to keep on kissing me like that.’

‘Like what? Like this, do you mean?’ Billy queried.

‘Mmmm…yes…just like that,’ Jess sighed happily as she snuggled closer to him.

The evening’s visitors were filing into the ward. Myra looked towards the door, her heart thumping heavily as it had done every visiting time for the last few nights since she had received Jim’s letter.

Knowing that he was due home and planning to visit her, Diane had told her that she and Mrs Lawson, her only two other visitors, would time their visits so as not to come during proper visiting hours until after she had seen Jim.

‘Not that seeing him is going to do me much good,’ Myra had told Diane. How could it do, she reflected miserably now. Jim had already as good as told her he was going to agree to a divorce, and that was the last thing she wanted or needed now, with no lover to turn to and an unwanted baby on the way. Agree to it – he’d be the one forcing a divorce on her once he found out what had happened, and no mistake, Myra admitted.

Her stomach, already tied in knots was even more so as she saw Jim’s familiar figure coming through the doorway, his cap under his arm, his greatcoat hanging off his too-thin, desert-worn frame. His sunburned face was creased into an expression of self-conscious embarrassment as he clutched some flowers and tried not to look at the women in their beds as he made his way along the ward.

‘Jim,’ Myra called out to attract his attention.

‘My, your ’usband looks a fine chap,’ the elderly woman in the bed next to her own leaned across to whisper. ‘One of them desert rats, is he – Monty’s boys?’

Myra had just finished confirming that Jim was indeed, when Jim himself reached her bedside.

‘Sit down, Jim,’ she told him after a nurse had bustled up to remove his flowers. ‘I…I got your letter.’

‘Aye, and I got the one the ’ospital sent me, saying as you had been in a right bad way,’ he told her. ‘Got a bone to pick wi’ them, I have. They should have let me know the minute you was brought in here, instead of waiting until you was on the mend. I’d have put in for compassionate leave and been home long before now if they had.’

‘I said not to,’ Myra told him, avoiding looking at him.

‘Well, they had no business paying any attention. It’s not right, me not being here, me being your husband, and all. Give me a right old shock,
it did, when the letter came and I read it.’ He had reached for her hand and somehow or other, without meaning to, Myra had let him take it. Now suddenly, with her hand held firmly within the warm safe clasp of his, her throat had started to ache with pent-up tears. She could feel them pressing against the backs on her eyes, and despite all her attempts to prevent it doing so, she could feel one of them escaping and running down her face.

Surreptitiously she tried to brush it away, but Jim saw her.

‘Aw, come on,’ he chivvied her. ‘I haven’t come here to start upsetting you and reading the riot act, Myra. If it’s a divorce you want then—’ he broke off as Myra started to sob, her whole body shaking convulsively.

‘Gawd, woman, what the hell have I said now,’ he protested. ‘I’m giving you what you was wanting and you start bawling your eyes out.’

‘I’m pregnant.’

Myra expected Jim to let go of her hand immediately but he didn’t. Instead he gripped it a bit harder.

‘This chap, is it?’ he asked her valiantly. ‘This GI you’ve taken up with that wants to marry you?’

Myra shuddered. ‘He never wanted to marry me. It was a pack of lies, all of it. Even the ring he gave me turned out to be a fake, and besides…’ her voice dropped to an agonised whisper, ‘he was the one that put me in here, Jimmy. He beat me up real bad,’ she confessed, ‘worse than Dad ever did Mum.’

Jim had clenched the hand that wasn’t holding hers into a tight fist and there was a hard fiery look in his eyes.

‘By God, when I get hold of him…’

‘He’s gone, scarpered, no one knows where. I’ve been such a fool,’ Myra wept. ‘Such a ruddy, ruddy fool.’ She shook her head. ‘Even if he were to come crawling back here now I wouldn’t have him back. No, sir, I wouldn’t,’ she announced vehemently.

‘So what
are
you going to do?’ Jim asked her gruffly. ‘You’ve got the kiddie to think of now, after all,’ he pointed out, nodding in the direction of her bedding-covered body.

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Myra demanded with a return to her old sharp self. ‘I’m the one that’s going to have the ruddy thing. A proper disgrace that’s going to be and no mistake. Me with no husband and a kid about to be born.’

‘No husband, my left foot. Of course you’ve got a ruddy husband,’ said Jim indignantly ‘Still married to me, aren’t you?’