The September Girls (32 page)

‘I hope you’re not laughing at my stripe,’ he said, pretending to be hurt.

‘No, you, I’m laughing at you.’

‘Is it my nose you find so funny? It must have broken in my mother’s womb. I can’t think of any other reason for its odd shape.’ He twisted his nose, as if trying to straighten it, making Cara laugh even more. ‘You clearly consider me quite hilarious, Miss . . . ? He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

‘Caffrey, Cara Caffrey.’

‘I’m Christopher Farthing, known as Kit, and if you dare call me Penny Farthing, I shall cry - I cried all the time at school. How do you do, Cara Caffrey?’ He held out his hand and she shook it. His fingers were long and brown and his grip so strong it almost hurt. Cara felt a sensation in her breast, a feeling of something she couldn’t describe, perhaps because she’d never had it before.

He was holding her hand for far too long - maybe he would have held on to it for ever had the door to the café not opened and Captain Bradford came out accompanied by two other men: one a naval officer, the other in the blue-grey uniform of the Royal Air Force. Cara’s hand was released, Kit Farthing sprang to his feet and saluted, and Cara did the same: there were times when she felt like a jack-in-the-box.

‘We’ll meet again, won’t we?’ Kit whispered as they walked towards the cars.

‘I hope so,’ said Cara.

 

After delivering Captain Bradford to Marzipan Hall, Cara parked the car and was heading in the direction of the workshop when she came face to face with Sybil Allardyce who was just coming out. Sybil’s eyes narrowed and she said coldly, ‘I should put you on a charge for that, Caffrey.’

Cara groaned inwardly as she gave a rather limp salute. ‘For what, ma’am?’

‘For removing your jacket and rolling up your sleeves.’

Ever since the day in Bedford when she’d demanded they salute her and they’d refused because she wasn’t in uniform, Sybil had borne Cara and Fielding a grudge. She picked on them constantly and hadn’t appeared to notice that she usually came off worse, particularly where Fielding was concerned. It was real bad luck that they’d all been transferred to Malta.

‘Captain Bradford told me to take my jacket off, ma’am.’ Cara cursed herself for not putting it on before, but she’d had something far more important on her mind while she’d driven back - in the shape of a young airman with the wonderful name of Kit Farthing.

‘He had no right to,’ Sybil barked. ‘And why have you been gone for so long? It must be two and a half hours.’

‘The captain asked me to wait, ma’am.’

‘He had no right to do that either.’ She marched away, having come off second best, as usual. Stationed in Marzipan Hall, she was the officer in charge of transport, her job to ensure that all vehicles were regularly serviced, that there was always enough petrol in the pump and spare parts available in the workshop for minor repairs. Requests for a driver were directed through her office and passed on to Corporal Culpepper, whose own office was in a sectioned-off corner of the workshop next to the women’s rest room. Unfortunately, the girls had to pass through his office to get in and out, and were at the mercy of his roving hands.

‘Your friend’s been looking for you. She looked on the verge of apoplexy,’ Fielding said when Cara went into the poky little room. There was another girl there, Adele Morgan, who was deeply engrossed in a book. She looked up and gave Cara a brief smile.

‘How many times do I have to tell you, Fielding,’ Cara said mildly, ‘that Sybil Allardyce is no friend of mine.’ She threw herself into a chair. ‘I’ve brought you a prezzie.’

‘What’s a prezzie?’

‘A present.’ She took the lace hankies out of her pocket. ‘I got one for meself at the same time. Now listen here, Fielding, on no account are you to blow your dinky little nose on this. It’s to be kept for best.’

Fielding curtsied as she took the handkerchief and made a great show of weeping into it. ‘Aw shucks, ma’am,’ she cried - she’d recently got into the habit of speaking in the American vernacular - ‘I’m touched, I truly am. Fancy you thinking of little ol’ me.’

Cara groaned. ‘Why I ever made a best friend of an actress, I’ll never know.’

‘Am I, Caffrey? Am I really your best friend?’ Fielding looked at her curiously.

‘Of course you are.’

‘I love you, Caffrey.’ The pretty, impish little face was serious for once.

Cara looked at her uncertainly, never quite sure whether Fielding was pretending or not. Because she genuinely loved this maddening, irrepressible, garrulous person as much as she would have done a sister, she was about to say, ‘I love you too,’ when Fielding said gruffly, ‘When this war’s over, I’d like us to get married and have children.’

‘Oh,
you
!’ Cara looked for a cushion to throw, but there weren’t any - Fielding must have had more cushions thrown at her than anyone else on earth. ‘I’m hungry,’ she announced instead.

‘Shall I fetch you a sarnie - or is it a butty? I’m not sure,’ her tormenter asked.

‘Neither am I, but I’d like one, and a nice cold drink.’ One big advantage of Marzipan Hall was that the canteen was open from early morning until late at night.

‘How about you, Morgan?’

‘I wouldn’t mind a cold drink, thanks.’

‘Your wish is my command.’ Fielding bowed and was gone.

‘Is she all there?’ Morgan enquired. She was a dreamy Welsh girl whose head was always buried in a book.

‘I don’t think she is, no.’

‘Was she really an actress back in Blighty?’

‘Yes. Apparently she was on the West End.’

‘Oh, well, I suppose that accounts for it.’ Morgan returned to her book.

It was easy to get irritated with Fielding, but she was the least boring person Cara had ever met and she was glad to have her as a friend.

 

Sybil ground her teeth as she walked back to her office. She thought of asking Captain Bradford if he’d really given Cara permission to remove her jacket and asked her to wait in Valletta, but on reflection it seemed a rather petty thing to do and it might look as if she were questioning his decisions. He seemed to have taken a shine to Cara and always asked for her when he wanted a driver.

She would never forget that day in Bedford. She’d felt so proud of herself, her first day as an officer completely ruined by Cara, Fielding and that other woman whom she’d never seen again. If she closed her eyes, she could still hear the sound of their helpless laughter. They laughed at her still, although it might have been just her imagination that she could hear them chuckling when she walked away.

She was sitting behind her desk, still fuming, when Lieutenant Alec Townend popped his head around the door and she forgot all about Cara and Fielding. ‘Is it still on for tonight?’ he asked.

‘Why yes, of course,’ she twinkled.

‘Drink first, film second, meal third,’ he said briskly. ‘OK with you?’

‘You sound as if you’ve got it all organized and it’s fine with me,’ Sybil said admiringly. ‘Are we going to Rabat or Valletta?’

‘Rabat. We can walk that far, save organizing transport.’

‘Do you know what film is on?’

‘An old musical with George Raft and Alice Faye:
Every Night at Eight
. I hope you haven’t seen it.’

‘No, and I adore George Raft.’

‘I think Alice Faye’s rather the bee’s knees, so it looks as if we’ll both enjoy ourselves.’

‘I’m sure we will.’

Alec winked and closed the door. He wasn’t a very attractive man, being short and rather tubby with a nondescript face and an overweening sense of his own importance. He was twenty-four and had been a solicitor in his father’s firm before being called up. Tonight would be their first time out together. Sybil didn’t particularly like him, but she’d sooner go out with a man any day, even one she didn’t like, than a crowd of tedious women. Flirting was a much more satisfactory way of passing the time compared with gossiping, and she scorned all-women gatherings: there was nothing productive or enjoyable about them and she refused all invitations from the female officers to join them for dinner or a drink or the pictures, preferring to stay in her room and read a book if there was no man available. She’d had a few women friends: Betsy Billington-Clarke, for instance, who’d been useful in her way and had a very good-looking brother, but Betsy was a rare exception.

She sometimes wondered what Mummy and Daddy would say if they knew what she’d been up to when she was at school in London. Weekends, they were allowed to do as they pleased and Sybil used to go to a bar in one of the best West End hotels and allow herself to be picked up - men seemed to find her enormously attractive in her prim, schoolgirlish clothes. It was one of these men who’d taken her to see the review that Fielding had been in. Afterwards, they’d gone back to the hotel and she’d slept with him. Any minute now, she’d sleep with Alec Townend. It was the way she liked the evening to end, and it couldn’t end that way with a woman!

 

Cara was staring into the black, oily engine of a lorry, and trying to deduce why it wouldn’t start, when a voice said, ‘One of the leads to the distributor is loose.’

‘I’d just noticed that for meself,’ she said tartly. Turning, she found Kit Farthing staring into the engine with her and the strange, unidentifiable sensation that she’d had when they’d shaken hands returned with a vengeance. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said shakily, self-consciously patting her turbaned head and wishing she was wearing something more attractive than a pair of greasy overalls that were too short in the leg. Kit looked very smart and spruce in his well-pressed uniform. His hair had grown a fraction since the other day and looked curlier. He was very slim, almost gawky, and about four inches taller than she was - it made a change to be looked down on. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘My chap had the minutes of that meeting typed up and asked me to deliver them to your chap. Now that my mission has been accomplished, I thought I’d seek out Sleeping Beauty and say hello.’

‘Hello.’ Her tongue seemed to have frozen in her mouth.

‘Hello, Cara.’ Kit sounded completely normal, so she clearly wasn’t having the same effect on him as he was on her, although there was an expression on his agreeable, verging-on-ugly face that was as unidentifiable as the feeling in her chest. ‘Are you likely to have a break soon?’ he asked lightly.

‘What time is it?’ She’d forgotten she had a watch.

He consulted his own. ‘Nearly eleven.’

‘Half eleven I stop for a drink.’

‘Can we go for a walk then?’

Cara dropped her eyes. ‘All right.’

‘Don’t forget to put the distributor lead back,’ he reminded her when she was about to close the bonnet of the lorry.

She’d forgotten all about it. Lorries, engines and their various parts no longer seemed all that important.

 

He was twenty-one and from Lancaster, he told her on the short stroll through the arid countryside as far as Marzipan Hall. ‘It’s the capital of Lancashire and hardly any distance from Liverpool.’

‘What did you do there?’ she asked. She’d already told him she’d worked in Boots and had described her family and the house in Shaw Street.

‘I was a librarian. I love books,’ he said simply. ‘All I ever wanted to do was work with them. When you think of all the information they hold, the stories they tell, the time and commitment that’s gone into writing them, the pleasure they give, the good they do - teaching people everything from how to repair a car to understanding Einstein’s theory of relativity, and - oh, all sorts of things.’ He stopped and looked at her uncomfortably. ‘I sound a bit like a book myself. I’m going on about it too much.’

‘No, you’re not.’ He’d made her think of books in an entirely new way. ‘I must say, you don’t look like a librarian.’

‘Oh, please don’t say you thought I was a boxer!’ he said, scandalized. ‘Or a rugby player. It’s this damn nose! At school, I always avoided rugby like the plague. I can’t stand games where people are likely to hurt me.’ He gave a pathetic sniff. ‘I’m not nearly as tough as I look.’

Cara burst out laughing. ‘I’m glad. I far prefer librarians to boxers.’ She would never tell him he looked far more like the latter than the former.

They arrived at Marzipan Hall. ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked. ‘Captain Bradford told me to have a beer in the mess and put it on his bill - he’s a decent old stick, isn’t he?’

‘Really nice,’ Cara agreed. ‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t be allowed in the mess in overalls.’ She’d removed the turban, combed her hair, but there hadn’t been time to change her clothes. ‘Any road, I’d better be getting back.’

‘Can I see you again? I’m off duty tonight.’ She could tell from the way he said it - slightly anxious, a little bit nervous - that the invitation, casual though it was, meant as much to him as it did to her.

‘I’m off duty too,’ she said.

‘Then I’ll pick you up at about seven,’ he said eagerly. ‘I think I can get my hands on a car. We’ll go to Rabat. Would you like to see a film or have a meal?’

‘I’d love a meal.’

‘We can talk while we eat.’ He took her hand in his and, by the time they’d got back to the section where she worked, Cara had the strongest feeling that she was in love with Kit Farthing and, as he told her a month later, he’d fallen in love with her before they’d even spoken: ‘When you were sitting outside that café, fast asleep, my Sleeping Beauty, my one and only Cara, snoring her adorable head off in the heat of the midday sun.’

‘I never was snoring!’ she protested.

‘Yes, you were,’ he insisted. ‘I could hear you from miles away. When we get married, we’ll have to have separate rooms or I shall never sleep a wink.’

Cara took the mention of marriage calmly in her stride. It was the way things happened in wartime when you weren’t certain where you’d be this time next week, or even if you’d be alive. The uncertainty, the feeling of danger, induced in people a sense of urgency and they made decisions within an hour that would normally have taken weeks, and courtships that, in less hectic times, would have continued a whole year, lasted a mere month because people needed to know where they stood.