When Persephone tried to refuse, she told her firmly, ‘I’m a nurse. You didn’t eat anything on the train, and you need to keep your strength up. I realise that you might not feel like eating, but you must.’
‘Mummy and Daddy are both so upset about Roddy’s accident that we’ve just got out of the habit of … well, with rationing and everything, and then Cook leaving because her married daughter’s had a baby …’
Listening in, Dulcie raised her eyebrows at Sally behind Persephone’s back but Sally firmly ignored her. She felt sorry for the young girl, who looked so worn down and apprehensive.
Of course, once they had all finished their supper, had had a cup of tea and then cleaned up it was time for George to leave. Sally naturally accompanied him to the door and outside into the darkness of the blackout where, beneath the bare branches of the climbing rose that covered the small porch, they were able to exchange a few precious kisses.
‘Come and sit in the car with me for a few minutes,’ George begged Sally, taking hold of her hand.
Uncertainly she looked back towards the closed door to the house. ‘I shouldn’t really,’ she began.
‘Please, Sally. We may not get another chance to be properly alone together, and there’s something I want to say.’
Silently Sally nodded her head.
As George led her towards the car she could almost feel the air of determination that surrounded him, and a responsive tremble of emotion made her own insides feel all fluttery in a way that she considered to be most unlike her normal self.
Mr MacIndoe’s car smelled of good leather and wood, and it was certainly warmer and rather more private than the shelter provided by her landlady’s front door, Sally had to admit. Not that she suspected for a single moment that George had anything improper in mind. George, bless him, simply wasn’t like that. One of the things she liked most about George was his reliability and his decency. Decency in a person meant a lot when you’d experienced a lack of it in someone of whom you’d thought better.
Inside the car, she shook her head when George offered her the warm plaid car rug, but she didn’t turn away when George moved as close to her as the car seats would allow, her knee touching his, her flesh warmed by the comfort of that contact with him.
George reached for her hands and Sally let him hold them.
‘There isn’t room for me to go down on one knee to you here,’ he began ruefully. ‘Sally, you know how much you mean to me, how much I love you and want you to be mine. At Christmas you didn’t want us to become formally engaged because you didn’t want to steal Agnes and Ted’s thunder, but today is Valentine’s Day, even if this isn’t the kind of setting I’d have chosen for my proposal, so please will you agree to be my wife now, Sally? I promise you that I will be the best husband I can be. I love you so very much.’
His voice broke over those last words, the simple heartfelt emotion making Sally’s eyes fill with the sting of tender tears.
‘George, darling, yes, of course I will,’ she answered.
His kiss betrayed how much her answer meant to him, her own senses responding both to the moment and to George himself with an answering passion that told her how right her answer was, and how right they would be together.
‘I’ve got the ring.’ George told her gruffly once he had stopped kissing her. ‘It arrived last week. Ma’s sent a letter for you as well, but if you don’t care for it, then …’
The ring to which George was referring was his grandmother’s ring, which she had left to him for his bride-to-be. He had told her about it when he had first asked her to marry him, just as he had also told her all about his family in New Zealand – his doctor father, and his mother, who had been a nurse, and how they would welcome her into the family as his wife.
‘I shall love it,’ Sally told him truthfully. Wasn’t this what life should be all about? The gift of love, and respect for that love passed down through the generations, signifying the importance of family? Wasn’t that what she had once felt she had had in her own family and what she felt so bitterly devastated about losing? When they married, George’s family would become her family, and the children she and George would have would be children of that family, and that mattered very much indeed to Sally.
‘Here’s Ma’s letter,’ George told her, reaching into his inside pocket to pass her a bulky envelope with her name written on it, and then diving into that same pocket again to remove a small dark green leather box.
A small tender kiss, and then he was opening the box and reaching for her ring finger.
How different this occasion was from the one she had imagined the day she had looked into another young man’s eyes and believed she had fallen in love. It was time to put the pain and betrayal of the past behind her for ever now, Sally knew. She owed it to George and their future together to do so. Morag, Callum and her father weren’t worth a single one of her tears and never had been. She looked down at the ring George was sliding onto her finger and knew that the tears that were filming her eyes were not for the past, but instead were tears of happiness.
The ring, with its oblong emerald stone flanked by two small diamonds, was beautiful, and all the more so, Sally truly felt, because of the way the gold ring was worn and thin from its previous use, surely representing the love with which it had originally been given and worn.
‘If you don’t care for it …?’ George was saying.
But Sally shook her head and told him truthfully, ‘I love it.’
It fitted her perfectly, and her first thought when she looked down and saw it on her own ring finger was how much her mother would have loved this moment and all that it represented.
Her, ‘Oh George,’ was soft with love and the emotions inside her heart that Sally rarely allowed other to see.
There was just time for another tender kiss, not so much an ardent kiss of longing and uncertainty this time but rather one of contentment and mutual commitment, and then Sally was opening her letter from George’s mother. It was hard to read it properly in the dim light from George’s torch, but she could look at the photographs that had fallen out of the envelope.
One photograph was of a chubby baby – easily recognisable as George himself, as he had George’s curly hair – held in the arms of his parents: George’s father, so like him that Sally would have recognised him anywhere; his mother standing calmly facing the camera in such a way that Sally knew immediately that they would get on and respect one another. The others were of George as he was growing up: a bungalow with a long low veranda in the background and a dog sitting at George’s feet. Happy photographs of a happy childhood with loving parents. The same kind of childhood she herself had had.
George’s mother’s letter was friendly and welcoming, taking their relationship a step further on from the letters she and Sally had already exchanged, making it plain that she was happy to welcome Sally as her son’s future wife. A nurse herself before her marriage to George’s father, she was, she wrote, looking forward to meeting Sally once the war was over. There was nothing in the letter to suggest that George’s parents expected their son and Sally to make their future lives in New Zealand, but Sally already knew that that would be what they and George himself would want. Without a family of her own to tie her to England any more she knew that she would not want to stand in George’s way, even if right now the thought of that new life felt just a little bit alarming.
‘I’m sorry that this evening hasn’t been as romantic as you deserve,’ George told her.
‘Not romantic? Being proposed to here, in this very expensive car, and given this beautiful ring, never mind being kissed so very, very well?’ Sally teased him gently.
‘You know what I mean,’ George protested. ‘I would have liked to have come up to London and taken you out somewhere swish where