Feeling that Dulcie had enjoyed enough admiration for one day, Sally turned to Persephone, who had returned to the house ahead of them, asking her gently, ‘How are you feeling? I hope you don’t mind, but George was explaining to me about your brother’s condition and how both your parents are too upset by it to be able to come and visit him. You’ve been a wonderful sister to him, Persephone, and it can’t be easy for you. I know from nursing patients who’ve suffered mental damage from the war that they are the very hardest to treat.’
Persephone jumped and looked flustered. The poor girl obviously wasn’t used to anyone paying her attention or showing her any concern, Sally thought sympathetically.
‘Poor Roddy,’ she responded unsteadily. ‘He was to have been a professor, you know. Daddy was very cross with him when he enlisted.’
‘Mental damage? Dulcie asked. ‘What’s up with him, then?’
Sally exhaled silently. Really, Dulcie could be dreadfully thoughtless at times.
‘Persephone’s brother was badly burned when he tried to rescue his men. It’s left him mentally scarred, Dulcie. All the men suffer inwardly, as well as outwardly, because of what they’ve been through, but for some men that inward suffering is very bad indeed.’
‘It was Dunkirk,’ Persephone told them both simply. ‘They were captured when they were heading for the coast. They tried to escape, and my brother was shot and left for dead. The others were locked in a barn and then it was set on fire.’
She was sitting bolt upright, the hands she had folded neatly in her lap shaking terribly. Sally reached out and covered them with one of her own.
‘Sometimes he thinks he’s still there. He doesn’t understand that he’s safe now here in England. He lost his sight so he can’t see anyone. He … sometimes he can be violent. He thinks he’s protecting his men. Then other times he just screams. I think he’d be better if he could come home and have familiar things around him, but Daddy just can’t bear the thought of it. He was so very clever, you see. Brilliant, everyone said, and now …’
Tears rolled down her face, causing Sally’s heart to tighten with angry grief.
There was a good turnout for the dance, with both the nurses and the townspeople there to make sure that the men had as good a time as it was possible for them to have.
Dulcie might have pushed David’s chair into the room where the dance was being held, but naturally she left it to his friends to secure the table of her choice for their party, right slap bang where everyone could see them.
The bunting, despite its age, still managed to put on a brave show, Sally thought, rather like the men themselves, who despite their various injuries were all spruced up and clean-shaven.
Sally, who had lent a hand herself, along with the nurses on duty, to ensure that those men who were not able to help themselves did get a shave, knew how much it meant to these proud young men to feel that they were accepted.
Some of the nurses were already getting their patients up to dance to the swing music records, and Sally quickly joined in, asking a young man who was undergoing some particularly painful facial reconstruction surgery, and to whom George had introduced her earlier in the day, if he would dance with her.
Just wait until she told Wilder about this dance, Dulcie thought happily. She’d certainly make sure that he knew that she hadn’t been sitting around on her own all weekend because he hadn’t been able to get leave. She’d tell him about David too, of course, and she might even just drop into the conversation the fact that one day David would be a sir. Wilder liked to think that because he was American and had money, that meant that she was lucky to be going out with him. Dulcie hadn’t said anything before, but now that David was back in her life it wouldn’t do any harm to let Wilder know about him.
The young owner of the gramophone had a good selection of records, including ‘Whispering Grass’ and ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, and Sally, held tightly in George’s arms when they finally managed to snatch a dance together, certainly didn’t mind the fact that the latter was being played for the third time.
The sight of the stones in her engagement ring catching the light brought a soft smile to her lips and had her moving discreetly closer to George.
‘Happy?’ he asked her.
‘Very. It was so kind of your mother to write to me as she did, George, welcoming me to your family so warmly.’
‘She’d have done that anyway, but I know that having lost her own parents just after she and Dad were married, she’s especially aware of your own loss in that regard.’
For once Sally was glad that George was slightly clumsy on his feet as she missed a step and he apologised as though it had been his fault.
She had never intended actually to deceive George when she had told him that she had no family. That was, after all, what she felt and believed – and very passionately, as well. She had denied her father because she had felt that his betrayal meant that he wasn’t her father any more. Her words, though, were now having unintended consequences. George, and now his family, believed that both her parents were dead, and that wasn’t the truth. George’s mother had written the kindest of letters to her in which she had sympathised with her because of that loss. The reality, of course, was that her father was not only very much alive, but that he had remarried after her mother’s death and that she, Sally, had a half-sister who would be one year old in May.
Sally hated deceit of any kind. It was because of deceit that she had cut herself off from her father. But how could she explain the real situation to George now? She couldn’t. They had initially exchanged family histories as colleagues and virtual strangers. There’d been no need for her to go into detail and she certainly hadn’t wanted to reveal the extent of her own hurt. It had been too raw and she had had no idea then that they would end up loving one another.
And then there was the issue of how George’s mother might judge her – a young woman she had only heard about from the son who had fallen in love with her, and who she was having to trust would love him as any mother would want their child to be loved – if Sally were to attempt to explain her history now, and her reasons for behaving as she had.
Logical and reasonable though her thinking was, nothing could make her feel comfortable about the situation, Sally knew. She loved George. She didn’t want there to be any secrets between them. But even now, Sally also knew that she did not want to talk about what had happened, even to George. The reality for her was that though her father was alive, to her he was no longer her father. She still believed that it would be a betrayal of everything she felt for her mother if she were to accept even within herself that she had a father and a half-sister. She was the only person now to keep loyal to her mother.
One day, she hoped, she would be a mother herself, and when she was … When she was, would she be able to understand and accept a daughter-in-law who had deceived her own son?
George’s teasing, ‘Are you all right? Only you are looking very fierce’ had her smiling. Surely it was true that she did not have a family any more, even if that was by her own choice? She had cut herself off from her past. Her father belonged to that past.
Seven
‘Morning, Mrs Robbins.’
‘Morning, Barney,’ Olive responded with a warm smile pushing back the stray lock of hair that was being tousled by the boisterous March wind.
She’d seen Sergeant Dawson and Barney heading for Article Row as she turned out of it. She was on her way to meet up with Audrey Windle and some of the other members of their WVS group. They were going to help out at one of the refuge centres organised by the Government to provide assistance for people made homeless by the bombing.
She hadn’t planned to stop. Nancy’s warnings to her about her widowed status, and her own shameful thoughts – and feelings – about Sergeant Dawson had made