George smiled lovingly at her. ‘I knew the minute I met you that you were the girl for me,’ he told her, ‘and I was right. I do wish, though, that I could have made tonight a bit more special, taken you somewhere we could have been on our own.’
‘It will be spring soon, and then summer,’ she told him softly. ‘Maybe we’ll be able to arrange to have a few days away together.’
‘Yes,’ George agreed, his voice thickening and then cracking slightly, his arm tightening around her.
They both knew what was being said, what was being offered and promised. There was no need for either of them to spell it out in actual words. She wasn’t a girl, Sally told herself. She was a modern young woman living in a country at war. They had already agreed that they wouldn’t marry until the war was over, and no one knew when that would be.
They looked at one another in the heavy intimate silence they themselves had created with their unspoken feelings.
In the room she was sharing with Sally, whilst Sally was still outside with George, Dulcie undressed quickly with her dressing gown draped round her shoulders to keep out the cold of the chilly bedroom, deciding as she did so, that she was looking forward to seeing David again. George’s comments about David’s parents and his wife had aroused her curiosity. She liked the thought of hearing how badly Lydia had behaved and thus being able to criticise her with justification. The thought that talking about Lydia might be painful for David simply didn’t occur to her. The thought of David’s injuries didn’t put her off, either. He still had his handsome face, after all, and even if he hadn’t, Dulcie wouldn’t have shrunk from him. Her sense of self-preservation protected her from concerning herself about the emotional pain of others. She had decided very young that it was up to her to protect her own emotions because no one else was going to do that for her, especially not her mother. So she had simply cut herself off from thinking about things that were hurtful. She just wasn’t the sort to look beneath the surface of things in order to find out how another person felt.
In Olive’s front room, Ted and Agnes were sitting on the sofa together holding hands, having just finished listening to a romantic play on the wireless that had made Agnes cry. Ted had mopped up her tears, gently reminding her that it was only a play. It was lovely being with Ted, Agnes thought. He always made her feel so safe and happy, and so proud now that she was wearing his engagement ring. Being engaged made her feel like she’d got her own special place in life, a proper place, not just Agnes the orphan, but Ted’s fiancée and wife-to-be.
Agnes smiled at Ted. It was Valentine’s Day evening and she and Ted were together, and later on, after he had had his cocoa and before he left, when she walked with him to the door to say good night to him, Ted would take her in his arms and kiss her and she would kiss him back. Just thinking about kissing Ted and being kissed by him gave Agnes a lovely squidgy happy and excited feeling in her tummy. They wouldn’t kiss here in Olive’s front room, of course; that would not be proper. There was no need for that thought to be put into words. It was understood between them and, like so much of their relationship, did not need to be talked about. It was just the way things were, and accepted by them both.
‘You’ve been out there ages,’ Dulcie complained when Sally eventually came in to the bedroom, ‘and now you’ve gone and woken me up switching on that lamp. What are you doing?’ she demanded, when Sally sat down on her bed and spread the photographs from the letter George had given her on the bedspread, and began to reread George’s mother’s letter. Her mouth dimpled into a warm smile as she recognised again the warmth of George’s mother’s welcome into their family.
‘Looking at these photos,’ she answered Dulcie without taking her gaze off the letter.
About to turn her back and try to get back to sleep, Dulcie suddenly noticed Sally’s ring.
‘You’re engaged?’ she demanded
‘Yes,’ Sally confirmed. ‘George asked me before Christmas but he wanted to wait until his mother had sent him his grandmother’s ring before we made it official.’
‘Well, for myself I’d rather have me own ring and not an old one that someone else has worn,’ Dulcie sniffed, ‘but if you’re happy with it then I suppose it doesn’t matter.’
‘I’m very happy with it,’ Sally assured her, lifting her gaze from George’s mother’s letter to look down at her left hand. Her ring was special to her because it was special to George. She knew how much it meant to him to give her his grandmother’s ring, and how much he loved her.
So now Sally and Agnes were both engaged, Dulcie thought when Sally had eventually turned off the bedside lamp. And anyone could see that Tilly was head over heels with Drew. Who would ever have thought that the three of them would be spoken for before her? Not that she couldn’t have been spoken for if she’d wanted to be. There was John, who had always had a soft spot for her, and Wilder, of course. Dulcie didn’t want to settle down with anyone at the moment, but by rights Wilder ought to have recognised that a girl like her needed to be treated a bit special, like. He could have proposed just so that she could have told the others that he had, even though she’d have turned him down. He was going to have to pull his socks up a bit if he wanted to keep her, Dulcie decided. Mind, if she were ever to wear an engagement ring it would have to be a lot better than Agnes’s, and Sally’s. She’d want diamonds, three of them all together like she’d seen on the ring fingers of the rich women who came into Selfridges to shop. Women like Lydia …
Tilly had had the most wonderful evening. She had felt a little bit out of her depth at first when she had realised that Drew had brought her to the Savoy for their evening out, but Drew had soon seen to it that she recovered her confidence, telling her that she looked far far prettier than any other woman there, and that he far preferred the sparkle in her eyes to the glitter of the expensive jewellery other women were wearing.
In no time at all they had been ensconced in their very private table in the restaurant, chosen by Drew so that they could watch what was going on all around them whilst remaining relatively private themselves, and within half an hour of their being seated, Tilly was thoroughly enjoying herself as she and Drew playfully fought to see who could recognise and identify the most VIPs.
There was nothing she and Drew enjoyed more than people-watching, Tilly thought happily as they sat together at their little table, and if the meal they were being served – a rather thin soup followed by a fish dish followed by the promise of a ‘truly romantic’ pudding, was probably rather a long way from the Savoy’s famed pre-war standards, Tilly was far too much in love and far too happy to care.
In between courses they got up to dance, joining other diners on the floor, Tilly feeling so very proud to be with Drew, whom she believed was the kindest and the very best man there, making her quite the luckiest girl.
In between talking about themselves and the wonder of their love for one another they talked about Drew’s book and about the war.
‘Are you still planning to write about the gangs that go around looting after the bombs have fallen?’ Tilly asked him as she sipped her wine and felt very grown up and sophisticated.
‘Oh, yes,’ Drew confirmed. ‘I’ve found out that some of the looters are so well organised that they don’t even wait until the all clear sound. Instead they follow the emergency services and are even breaking windows themselves under cover of the falling bombs in order to get into shops and homes.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Tilly told him, both shocked and angered.
‘The trouble is that most of these looters are so quick and so good at using emergencies that it’s next to impossible to catch them red-handed, and so they get away with it. There are even stories of looters actually removing not just watches and jewellery but also clothing from the bodies of the dead.’
Tilly shuddered, and Drew reached across the table to hold her hand.