After the show had ended all of them had agreed that the afternoon had been a success and that they should go out again together. Now, Sally hummed a few more bars of one of the songs . . .
The first thing Olive saw when she walked into Tilly and Agnes’s bedroom was the bags on the beds. An attempt had obviously been made to fold the girls’ new party dresses up small enough to fit inside them but it had not been successful, the dresses easily visible and recognisable.
The second thing she saw was the expressions on the girls’ faces. In Agnes’s case that expression was one of anxiety and guilt, but on Tilly’s . . .
Disbelief followed by a pain as sharp as if someone had stabbed a knife into her heart gripped Olive as she looked in her daughter’s face and saw defiance and, yes, the angry resentment.
Olive could hear her heart racing and pounding. She badly wanted to sit down, so great was her shock and distress, but she knew she mustn’t, just as she knew she must not let Tilly see not just how shocked she was but how devastated and wounded. That her daughter to whom she had always been so close, whom she loved so much, should look at her now as though they were enemies shocked Olive to the core of her being. A part of her wanted to beg Tilly to tell her that it was all a mistake, to see her daughter smile at her and to feel her arms close round her, but another part of her reminded her that she was Tilly’s mother and that she had a duty to her and to their relationship that must not be shirked.
So instead of pleading with Tilly not to look at her as she was doing, she asked coldly instead, ‘Would you like to explain the meaning of these to me?’ gesturing to the dresses but without removing her gaze from Tilly’s face.
Whilst Agnes gulped with distress, Tilly showed no sign of guilt or remorse as she answered her boldly, and with some hostility.
‘We were going to take them with us to the Hammersmith Palais and change into them there.’
Olive wanted to recoil as though she’d been struck, but she forced herself to say instead, ‘So, you were lying to me when you said that you were going to the cinema tonight?’
‘Yes,’ Tilly told her, continuing fiercely, ‘we had to. It’s your fault for not seeing that we’re grown up enough to go. Dulcie said.’
Now the pain inside Olive had turned to white-hot lava burning through her as she stopped Tilly with a sharp, ‘Dulcie said? I see. And what Dulcie says is more important than what I say, is it?’
She had known all along that Dulcie would be trouble and now she had been proved right.
On the other side of the room Agnes had started to cry quietly.
When Tilly didn’t answer her but instead gave her a sulky challenging look, Olive told her, ‘I’m ashamed of you, Tilly. Ashamed of you because you lied to me and ashamed because you no doubt forced poor Agnes to enter into your deceit with you.’
‘It’s your fault,’ Tilly flashed back at her defiantly. ‘I’m seventeen, I’m not a child any more. After all, I’m old enough to go out to work and do my bit so I can’t see why you won’t let me go to the Palais and why you want to stop me from having fun.’
Sidestepping her daughter, Olive went over to the beds and picked up the bags, her hands shaking a little as she did so.
‘I am very disappointed in you, Tilly,’ was all she could trust herself to say. How could Tilly, her Tilly, her beloved daughter, have done something like this? Tears tightened Olive’s throat. She had never felt more alone, or more at a loss to know what to do. Automatically, as she turned towards the door, she announced emotionlessly, ‘You will both stay here in your room, and you, Tilly, I hope will reflect on your behaviour.’
Standing beside her bed, Sally chewed on her bottom lip. The row going on below had been perfectly audible to her, and had filled her with disquiet. She liked and admired Olive, and of course what Tilly had planned to do was wrong, but the person who was really to blame, in Sally’s view at least, was Dulcie, who Sally suspected had deliberately played on Tilly’s vulnerability as she went through the natural youthful process of wanting to be ‘grown up’ and in charge of her own life.
In the hallway the clock still ticked and in the kitchen, the wireless was still on, Vera Lynn’s voice spilling out into the empty room, familiar sounds in a familiar setting. But their familiarity could not offer Olive any comfort in the alien world she felt she now occupied. Tilly had lied to her, and not just lied to her but justified that deceit by blaming her for being the cause of it. Tears filled Olive’s eyes. Agitatedly she brushed them away and went to the sink, reaching for the kettle and then putting it back. What comfort could a cup of tea give her? None. She sat down at the kitchen table and then stood up again, pacing the floor, wanting to go upstairs to beg Tilly to tell her that she was sorry, that she regretted what she had done and said, she wanted . . . she wanted Tilly to be a little girl again, running to her for the security of her embrace. But Tilly wasn’t a little girl any more. Fresh pain filled her. Was Tilly right? Was she to blame for her daughter’s deceit?
Upstairs in her bedroom Tilly sat down heavily on her bed, the exhilaration that had led to her outburst against her mother draining from her so quickly that she felt as though her legs wouldn’t support her.
Had those really been tears she had seen in her mother’s eyes just before she had left the room? Tilly had to swallow hard against the fear that suddenly loomed up inside her, the shock of it like running into an unexpected towering brick wall. She must have imagined it. Her mother never cried. Not ever.
On the other bed Agnes was gulping back sobs between demanding anxiously, ‘Do you think your mum will send me away now because of us lying to her?’
‘It wasn’t you who lied to her, Agnes, it was me,’ Tilly tried to comfort her. How awful to be afraid that you might be sent away. Tilly couldn’t imagine how that must feel. Not really. Slowly, beginning like a drip of water that turned into a trickle and from that into a stream, Tilly felt the recognition of what she had done seep through her, and with it her guilt and remorse.
The house had settled down into an uncomfortable silence. Sally knew that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She felt too upset, both on Olive’s behalf and Tilly’s. What had happened wasn’t any of her business, and she didn’t want to interfere, but . . . Sally could remember how it felt to be Tilly’s age and so desperately eager to be grown up. There had been an incident, over a tennis club dance she’d wanted to attend, and then another over her desire to be allowed to go out cycling with a quite unsuitable young man, during which she remembered hot words being exchanged.
‘Darling, it’s because we love you that we want to protect you,’ she could remember her mother telling her gently. ‘I know you can’t see or understand that now, but I promise you that one day you will, and when you do you will thank us. You may think you are grown up but to us you are just as in need of our care as you were when you were a child, only in a different way. Imagine if, as a baby first learning to walk, we had let you walk without watching your every step, what kind of parents would we have been? It’s the same now.’
Sighing to herself, Sally got up off the bed and opened her bedroom door. The house was still silent. The door to Dulcie’s bedroom was closed. Dulcie had not acted well in encouraging Tilly to lie to her mother, Sally thought, and their landlady was bound to hold that against her.
When Sally opened the kitchen door Olive was sitting at the table, her eyes betrayingly redrimmed, the handkerchief she had been holding in her hand pushed quickly into the sleeve of her jumper when she saw Sally.
‘I suppose you heard me having words with Tilly?’ Olive felt obliged to say.
‘Yes,’ Sally confirmed.
‘I can’t believe that Tilly would do something like this – lie