‘Sweetheart, don’t look at me like that,’ Drew protested, reaching for her hand. ‘You know what I’ve promised your mother.’
‘I know that no matter what we promise her, she prefers to believe Nancy than me,’ Tilly objected angrily. ‘She’s proved that. She might say that she accepts that Nancy was wrong and that she’s sorry she doubted me. I think she wants to doubt me so that she’s got an excuse not to let us get married now, like I want to do. She just doesn’t understand. She doesn’t want to understand.’
Drew pulled her closer. He knew how upset Tilly still was about the quarrel she had had with her mother over their Valentine’s Day call at the Simpsons’. He blamed himself for Nancy’s mischief-making and had said so to Tilly’s mother, who had readily accepted his explanation and even apologised to him for doubting them, but that hadn’t been enough for Tilly. Unusually for her she had refused to forgive her mother. Drew had tried gently to persuade her to think again. He knew how much she loved her mother and how much this misunderstanding between them must secretly be hurting her, but Tilly had proved unexpectedly determined not to relent. The reason for that, as Drew knew, was Tilly’s longing for them to be able to marry – and soon. It was a longing he shared, but he didn’t want to make the situation even worse by encouraging Tilly to continue her hostility towards her mother. Drew admired and liked Olive, and in the end he knew that what hurt Olive would hurt Tilly as well, even though right now she would refuse to accept that.
‘Sometimes I think that you’re more on my mother’s side than mine,’ Tilly complained. ‘It makes me wonder if you really do want to marry me, Drew, or—’
‘Of course I want to marry you. Of course I do. You must never think otherwise, Tilly. The only way I could ever stop wanting you to be my wife would be if you told me yourself that you didn’t want that. You must never ever doubt how I feel about you, Tilly. Please promise me that you won’t.’
Tilly’s anger and distress melted away as she heard the genuine emotion in his voice.
‘Very well,’ she agreed, ‘but you’ve got to admit that you do always seem to agree with Mum.’
‘I’m not really taking your mother’s side, Tilly, I just don’t want—’
‘Would you be as willing to understand if it was your mother who was doubting you and refusing to accept that you’re old enough to know your own mind?’ Tilly interrupted him.
The bleak, almost haunted look that suddenly shadowed his eyes suspended her voice, leaving her more concerned about Drew than she was about herself.
‘Drew, what is it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘There must have been something to make you look like that,’ Tilly persisted.
Drew was still holding her hand, and now he began to play with her fingers, stroking them gently, a habit he had when he was thinking deeply about something.
‘Tilly, I don’t—’ he began.
Tightening her fingers comfortingly round his, Tilly interrupted to tell him lovingly, ‘You don’t want there to be upset between me and Mum, I know that, Drew, and so does she.’ Tilly’s voice sharpened, her focus so much on her own grievances that she failed to see the shadow in Drew’s eyes darkening still further before he banished it to listen to her. ‘That’s why she keeps asking you to give her your word about what we can and can’t do. And that’s not fair, it really isn’t. I’ve tried to explain to her how I feel. There are so many women who are alone now because they lost someone during the last war. I see it when I’m typing up records at the hospital of patients’ names and details, I’ve seen it on Article Row with the Misses Barker, and I see it with Mum as well. Now we’re in the middle of another war and if we were to lose one another, Drew, if I were to be the one to have to live on without you, then I know how much I’d need the comfort of my memories of you and our love. Mum’s denying me the opportunity to be happy now and to make those memories because she thinks that us being together properly would make it harder for me. I don’t understand how she can say that. She had her own special time with Dad and she had me because of that.’ Tilly gripped Drew’s hand tightly, her voice blurred with anguish. ‘What she’s saying to me now makes me wonder if she would have preferred not to have had me, Drew.’
‘Tilly, you must never think that,’ Drew protested, anxious to comfort and reassure her. ‘Your mother loves you dearly, anyone can see that.’
‘Yes, she does, but does she secretly wish that she hadn’t had to love me? Does she secretly think that her life would have been easier without me? If she hadn’t married Dad, if she hadn’t had me, then perhaps she might have met and married someone else …’
‘Tilly, your mother would never think anything like that.’
‘How do you know? How do any of us know what someone else really thinks? We can only know what they tell us, can’t we?’
Tilly couldn’t possibly know how guilty those words made Drew feel or how much they cut into his conscience. He should have told her the truth right from the start. If he had … If he had then she wouldn’t be with him like this now. If he had she would have rejected any advances he had made to her, he knew. He mustn’t think about that now, though. He must concentrate on reassuring Tilly that her mother truly loved he.
‘Your mother has always told you that she loves you,’ he reminded her gently. ‘You’ve said that yourself.’
‘She’s said the words, Drew, and I’ve always believed them, but now with her being the way she is over us, I can’t help questioning—’
‘Why don’t you talk to her? Why don’t you tell her what you’ve told me?’
‘What’s the point? She’ll only tell me what she wants me to hear. She wouldn’t want to hurt me, I know that. So she’ll say that I’m wrong, but how can I know that? How can any of us know what another person really feels?’ Tilly moved even closer towards Drew, seeking the comfort of his nearness.
Putting his arm around her as she nestled against him, her head on his shoulder, Drew closed his eyes briefly against the terrible weight of his conscience. He had been so close to telling Tilly everything, so very close. And if he had, would she now be putting him in the same category as her mother, as someone who – she felt she couldn’t trust to be honest with her? If only he’d told her right from the start. But he hadn’t known then that this – they – would happen, and by the time he had known it had been too late to tell her the truth because he had been afraid that the tenderness of their burgeoning new love wouldn’t be able to bear the strain of what he had to say and that she would reject him. Now they must both pay the price of his cowardice – he himself because of the wretched misery he had to live with because he hadn’t told her, and Tilly because his deceit placed in jeopardy her complete trust and belief in him.
‘Come on,’ he told her. ‘We’d better start heading back to Article Row. I’m getting hungry and your mom makes a terrific fish pie.’
Recognising that Drew was trying to lighten her mood, Tilly smiled. It was after all true that her mother was a wonderful homemaker and cook, somehow managing to make their rations stretch to genuinely tasty meals. Drew’s insistence on ‘helping out’ because he was eating so many of his meals at number 13 benefited them all, of course, especially when it came to the boxes of food that came for him from his home in America. Tilly’s mother had tried to refuse this largesse but Drew had simply told her that if she did then it would be wasted because it was far too much for him alone. So her mother had accepted the food but had insisted on donating some of it to the WVS for distribution to those who were homeless.
Friday’s traditional fish pie, though, came from everyone’s rations, even if it was likely to be supplemented by tinned