The trauma of so many deaths had affected everyone in the Italian community. Raphael’s own father had been consumed with guilt about Raphael’s grandfather and the fact that he had died without them being reconciled. Raphael had come to London during his leave to see Caterina Manelli to offer her his condolences. He didn’t know where the sudden impulse to come here to Selfridges to see Dulcie had come from, and had excused his behaviour to himself by telling himself that Dulcie might want to know what had happened to the Manellis.
Watching her now, though, he could see that his presence was hardly likely to be welcomed. So he turned and walked away.
Tugging her hand free from David’s, Dulcie repeated, ‘I can’t,’ adding, ‘I’m already seeing someone this evening.’ It wasn’t a complete lie, because she was anticipating seeing the Canadian. ‘I must go.’ She didn’t want to stay in case David tried to persuade her to change her mind.
‘Dulcie, please.’
There was real anguish in his voice but she refused to listen to it, walking away from him so quickly that she was almost running, the flared skirt of her summer dress swirling round her legs in the speed of her retreat.
Agnes had been lingering so long outside the steps to Chancery Lane underground, that she was beginning to feel sick with anxiety and the fear of disappointment. She was waiting here after work in the hope of seeing Ted, whom she knew would be coming on duty. Agnes knew that what she was doing was ‘wrong’, and that it wasn’t acceptable for a girl to lie in wait for a man, especially when that man had already made it plain that he didn’t want anything more to do with her, but not knowing what it was she had done wrong and why Ted was ignoring her was making her feel so miserable that she had to see him.
It was a busy time of the evening, with people going home from work and others starting evening shifts, in addition to all the people in uniform, so many more of them now than there had been at the start of the war. Even Mr Smith had joined the Home Guard, as the Local Defence Volunteers were now called.
Agnes stiffened as she caught sight of Ted. He hadn’t seen her – yet. Determined not to lose the opportunity to speak with him she screwed up all her courage and plunged into the mêlée of people, her heart pounding so heavily she thought it would burst through her skin. She reached the door to the café at the same time as Ted, the colour leaving his face when he saw her.
Already he was turning away from her. Desperately, Agnes grabbed hold of his arm, pleading with him, ‘Ted, please, what’s wrong? Why don’t you want to be friends with me any more?’
The sight of Agnes’s pale pleading face made Ted want to take her in his arms and hold her tightly, not something he would normally have even considered doing in public and in full daylight, but such was the effect of seeing her after all the weeks of avoiding her that his emotions threatened to get the better of him. But he couldn’t and must not let them, he reminded himself. Things weren’t good at home. His younger sister had been poorly all summer, coughing and wheezing so badly that they’d had to have the doctor, and that had cost money, even though they were in a hospital savings plan. The doctor had said that it was the dry dusty air in London that was affecting little Sonia’s lungs and that she’d be better off living in the country, but there was no way Ted’s mother would allow her two young daughters to be evacuated without her, and they were over the age at which she could have been evacuated with them, so all they’d been able to do was to buy the medicine the doctor had recommended and keep Sonia inside as much as possible. Ted’s sister’s illness meant that his mother needed his wages even more. Only the previous night, lying awake in bed listening to Sonia coughing, Ted had known that the door had finally closed on any chance he might have had of courting Agnes.
Now, manfully, Ted put his own feelings to one side.
‘The thing is, Agnes,’ he began carefully, ‘when you and me used to get together you was still finding your feet at work, so to speak. It was like, well, a sort of business relationship. I couldn’t stand back and see you get yourself in a mess and perhaps leave the underground. I reckoned it was my duty to help you out a bit.’ He could see Agnes’s face crumpling, and he had to harden his heart and deny his own feelings, telling himself that it was better this way and that he was doing it for her. There was no sense in him starting something between them that could never go anywhere. Better to be cruel now to be kind to her for the future.
A business relationship? Did Ted mean that they had never really been friends at all? He must do.
‘It’s different now. You’ve settled in, and there’s no call for you and me to get together any more. I reckon you’re a real credit to what I’ve taught you and to yourself,’ he added, trying to soften the blow. He was hurting her, he knew, but it was surely better to hurt her now?
So now she knew. Ted hadn’t fallen out of friends with her, because he had never thought of them as friends in the first place. Agnes felt mortified. She wanted to run away and hide, but of course she couldn’t. She could only nod her head and accept what Ted was saying to her, and then let him go.
She cried all the way home. In fact she cried so much that she could hardly see where she was going, only managing to stop just before she reached Article Row, extracting her handkerchief from her pocket and doing her best to rub away the signs of her misery.
Olive wasn’t deceived, though. She was alone in the kitchen when Agnes came in, her head down and her shoulders bowed in defeat.
Down at the bottom of the garden the greenhouse door was open and she could see Tilly inside it, picking the tomatoes Olive had told her they needed for tea. Knowing that she would be several minutes, Olive seized her chance, going over to Agnes, taking hold of her hands and telling her gently, ‘I know that something’s upsetting you, Agnes. You haven’t been yourself for weeks now. Why don’t you tell me what it is?’
Olive’s sympathy was too much for Agnes’s fragile composure. Fresh tears started to fall as the story of her feelings for Ted and his lack of them for her came flooding out in fits and starts.
Once Olive had discreetly established that nothing that shouldn’t have happened between them had happened, and that Ted had not taken advantage of Agnes in any kind of way, Olive led Agnes to a chair and pushed her gently into it.
Young love could hurt so much. She could still remember the pain she had felt when she had discovered that the boy she had secretly admired for weeks had sent another girl a Valentine card.
‘I know what’s happened hurts dreadfully, Agnes, but it will get better, I promise you. Why, I shouldn’t be surprised if this time next year there’ll be another boy in your life who makes you forget Ted completely.’
‘No one could ever make me forget Ted,’ Agnes sobbed, crumpling her already damp handkerchief into a wet ball.
‘Oh, Agnes . . .’ Olive kneeled down in front of her and took her in her arms, rocking her as though she were a small child. There was nothing she could say or do to make things better, Olive knew. Compassionately, she stroked Agnes’s head.
Poor child. She was so young and so vulnerable. Somehow Olive couldn’t see her own Tilly being so overwhelmed and cast down with misery in the same situation, but then Tilly hadn’t experienced the same loss and childhood that Agnes had. She’d have to have a word with Tilly, and Sally too, to warn them not to mention Ted to Agnes.
‘Tilly will be coming in, in a minute,’ she told Agnes, releasing her and getting up. ‘Why don’t you go up upstairs and bathe your eyes with some cold water, Agnes, and then when you come down again I’ll have a nice hot cup of tea waiting for you?’
The day did bring some good news, though. Well, sort of good news, Olive thought as they all listened to Winston Churchill’s wireless broadcast to the nation that evening, silence between them as they concentrated whilst he spoke, Olive’s eyes filling with tears as he thundered the words.
‘The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire,