Dulcie tapped her foot irritably on the floor as she watched the three other girls dance off yet again with their partners. Not that she’d have wanted to dance with any of them, not for one minute. She could have been up there on the floor dancing. She’d been asked but she certainly wasn’t going to waste her blue silk frock or herself on any of the no-hopers who’d come up asking her for a dance.
It wasn’t in Dulcie’s nature to question her own actions, never mind find fault with them. It was other people’s fault that she wasn’t dancing, not her own – because there was no one there good enough for her to dance with.
She felt a tap on her shoulder and braced herself, turning round impatiently, the words of sarcastic rejection dying on her lips, her eyes rounding as she looked up into a familiar face, her heart thudding so hard it took her several seconds to vocalise her recognition in an uncharacteristically stunned voice. She stared at the handsome man wearing an RAF uniform, and said in disbelief, ‘You!’
It was David James-Thompson. For a minute she was as shocked as a naïve girl who knew nothing might have been. But, of course, she wasn’t a naïve girl and she had always known that Lydia’s beau was the sort to break the rules, just as she had always known that eventually he would seek her out, she assured herself.
Suddenly the evening was full of promise and excitement, the glitter from the mirror ball twirling over the dance floor and the spotlights reflected in the sparkle of her eyes.
All she allowed herself to say was, ‘You’re in uniform.’
‘You noticed then,’ he teased her. ‘I signed up for the RAF a week ago. Decided I couldn’t bear to stand on the sidelines any longer. Pilot training begins next week.’
The RAF. Far more exciting than if he had joined the army, Dulcie thought approvingly.
‘Thought I’d come on the off chance that you’d be here so we could celebrate together.’
Dulcie was over her shock now, and that fast beating heart had been firmly restored to its normal beat. There was no way she was going to allow him to know how thrilled she’d been to see him.
‘Shouldn’t that be something you’re doing with your fiancée?’ she taunted him instead.
‘Possibly,’ he agreed, unabashed, as he came to sit down beside her, taking the seat that had been Rita’s and turning it round so that he was sitting facing her, his knees brushing against her thigh. ‘Although at the moment she isn’t very pleased with me for joining up. She and my parents think I should have arranged things so that I claimed exemption from military duty. Awfully boring doing that, though, especially when so many other chaps seem to be having so much fun. We like having fun, don’t we, Dulcie?’ he asked her with a knowing smile, reaching for her hand as he did so and then sliding his fingers through hers so that their hands were laced together with an expertise that told her that this wasn’t the first time he had done something so intimate. The very fact that he knew what he was doing made David all the more of a prize and all the more exciting.
‘We’re two of a kind, you and I,’ he told her, his eyes brimming with amusement and appreciation as though he knew what she was thinking.
David watched the battle going on inside Dulcie’s thoughts and reflected in her gaze as caution fought with triumph. He hadn’t intended to come here, after the row with Lydia about him joining up. He’d planned to have dinner with a couple of other chaps who’d enlisted at the same time, and then go on to a nightclub with them, but then suddenly he’d thought of Dulcie and before he’d really known what he was doing he was on his way over here.
She was a looker all right, and classy too, nothing cheap or common about the way she looked. David toyed with the idea of persuading her to leave the dancehall with him. He could take her to one of the quieter and more discreetly managed clubs he knew, somewhere where they could sit in the darkness together, but before he could say anything Dulcie was standing up and tugging impatiently on his hand as she demanded, ‘Well, now that you’re here we’d better dance, hadn’t we?’
At the other end of the dance floor, on the elevated stage with its red curtains, the Joe Loss Orchestra swung into a waltz, and the lights were dipped.
The floor was packed with dancers, giving them no option but to hold each other close. He was a good dancer, leading her confidently, but then he would be, him being posh, Dulcie thought. Really, the two of them looked so good together that they could have had their photographs in one of those gossip columns in the newspapers, which showed you photographs of lords and ladies and the like. She looked far better with him than Lydia would, with her sallow skin and her bad-tempered face with its thin mouth. She wasn’t surprised that David wanted to escape from his fiancée to be with her.
His fiancée. Dancing with another girl’s fiancé was one thing, especially when she disliked that girl as much as she disliked Lydia, but once David was married to Lydia then things would be different. Girls who went out with married men were putting themselves on the wrong side of the respectability line and Dulcie had no intention of ever doing that.
Tilly couldn’t sleep. She knew her mother had come up to bed. She’d heard her familiar footsteps on the stairs and then the opening and closing of her door, followed by the further equally familiar sounds of her mother going to the bathroom and then returning to her room. She’d also heard Sally coming in, humming some tune under her breath, her firm nurse’s tread on the stairs. Only Dulcie was still out, but it wasn’t because of that that Tilly couldn’t sleep. Unlike Agnes, who was now making the small whuffling sounds she always made in her sleep.
Had those really been tears she had seen in her mother’s eyes earlier? Tears caused by her? The weight of Tilly’s guilt oppressed her. Being grown up wasn’t just about doing what you wanted to do, she was beginning to recognise; it wasn’t all about good things, it was about the consequences of those things as well. She had made her mother cry, and now that mattered far more to her than the fact that they had been found out and prevented from going dancing. There was a tight miserable pain inside Tilly’s chest, and with it a fear. Previously she had believed that whatever happened in her life to upset her – like when the Benson sisters at school had started lying in wait for her and making fun of her – her mother could and would make everything all right again. But that had been before she had seen her mother’s tears, before she had known that her mother was vulnerable.
The pain and guilt was too much for her. Throwing back the bedclothes, and trying not to shiver in the room’s chill, Tilly felt in the darkness with her feet for her slippers, burrowing her toes into their warmth in relief. She didn’t want to turn on the lamp in case she woke Agnes, but she was still able to retrieve her dressing gown from the post at the foot of the bed, quickly pulling it on and wrapping its cord round her. Her mother had been talking about making her and Agnes proper siren suits with hoods on them, to protect them from the cold should the air-raid siren go off and they had to spend the night in the Anderson shelter. Tilly had seen one of the suits in the window of Swan and Edgar. Bright red, its hood trimmed with swansdown, it had looked very warm and Christmassy, the pretty cosy image it portrayed very different from the reality of war rationing looming, and the increasing shortages of everything. All the best shops had their Christmas displays in their windows now: hampers with their lids thrown back to show what was inside in Fortnum and Mason; toys, of course, in Hamley’s; women’s clothes in the expensive dress shops in muted shades to tone with men’s uniforms. Christmas had always been such a special time at number 13. Her mother had made sure of that. Quietly and quickly Tilly made her way from her own bedroom to her mother’s.
Olive heard her bedroom door open. She had come to bed in the hope that sleep would stop her from brooding on the events of the evening, but sleep had proved to be impossible. Tonight, for the first time since she had been able to wrap her baby arms round her, Tilly had not kissed her good night. Olive had wept silently over that.
Tilly’s mother’s bedroom was filled with the familiar scents, which, blended together, became the scent that to Tilly was her mother: Pear’s soap, freshly ironed laundry,