Women on the Home Front: Family Saga 4-Book Collection. Annie Groves
‘So then why the dropped handbag trick?’
He wasn’t going to stop questioning her until he’d got the answer he wanted, Dulcie recognised, and the only way she was going to get rid of him was by telling him the truth. That way she could satisfy her own pride by making it clear to him that it wasn’t him she was interested in.
‘Someone I work with has recently got married. Her husband – before they were married – was showing a bit too much interest in me, and I thought she’d feel better if she thought I was involved with someone else,’ Dulcie lied smoothly.
‘By seeing you dancing with me?’
‘No,’ Dulcie corrected him. ‘By coming to Selfridges, which is where I work, on the makeup floor. If you’d danced with me and asked to see me again then I could have suggested that you come into the store.’
‘Funny how wrong you can be about a person,’ he told her. ‘Somehow you don’t strike me as the kind of girl who puts another girl’s feelings before her own.’
‘Well, that just shows what a poor judge of character you are,’ Dulcie informed him, before stepping past him and marching back to her chair, her back stiff with disdain.
No one had ever spoken to her as the Italian had done, and now Dulcie was angry with herself for telling him as much as she had done. Still, she’d rather have him knowing the truth, or at least a fictionalised version of it, than have him thinking that she had actually been interested in him as a man. The girls in Liverpool could do what they liked, but at least she’d made clear that in London things were different and that she wasn’t in the least bit interested in getting his attention.
At Barts Sally prepared to finish her shift. She had already worked two hours longer than she should have to help with the influx of wounded soldiers. Of the supposedly walking wounded, many had turned out to have far more serious injuries than they had wanted to admit to.
There’d been an awful lot of cleaning of hastily bandaged wounds to do, a lot of removing shrapnel from men who had borne the probing of tweezers with stoic silence, their tears only coming when they spoke in the darkness of the night about fallen comrades and those who had not made it.
Sally was supposed to have been going to the pictures with George Laidlaw after his own shift finished but when they finally met up in the main entrance to the hospital it was so late and they were both so exhausted that they agreed that a cup of tea at Joe Lyons was all they felt up to.
Their friendship had grown over the months. Sally enjoyed George’s company and, of course, they had a shared interest in talking ‘shop’ and a shared understanding of what it meant to be dealing with young men whose battle scars weren’t always only from their physical wounds.
Sally loved her job and the extra responsibility she had been given, but she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t grieved for those boys who came into the theatre and then left it with their lives saved but far too often without a limb. It would have been hard to talk as openly with anyone else as she could with George about her professional pride in being part of a team that saved lives, but her distress at this being at the cost of an arm or a leg.
‘It’s their acceptance of what they’ve been through that does it for me,’ George told Sally as she poured them each a cup of tea. ‘Some of the tales they have to tell . . .’ He paused and shook his head. But Sally knew what he meant.
‘I had to remove half a dozen pieces of shrapnel from a sergeant tonight who swore that all he’d got was a bit of a cut. He never made a sound, but afterwards he cried like a baby when he was telling me about having to leave a dog he’d befriended behind on the beach.’
‘I had a young lad in, leg badly damaged, and I reckon we’ve been able to save it. He reckons he’d have bled to death but for the medic on the naval vessel that picked him up after the boat he’d been in had been shot to pieces.’
Sally nodded, and then picked up her cup so that she could avoid looking directly at him whilst her heart was still thudding so fast. She was a fool to react like that simply because he’d mentioned a naval vessel. Callum could be anywhere, and anyway, what did it matter to her where he was?
‘Some date this is,’ George was saying ruefully as he reached for her hand.
Sally let him take it, but her thoughts weren’t really with him. His mention of the navy had been as effective at holing her defences as Germany’s torpedoes were at holing British ships. Now the unwanted thoughts she had thought successfully blocked were pouring in. And not just thoughts about Callum. She was acutely aware that the baby Callum had told her about would have been born by now. Her father’s child. Her half-brother or -sister. The child of betrayal and adultery.
No one in Olive’s household was more aware of the number of lives that had been lost than Sally. The newspaper lists of shipping losses were something she made herself avoid. After all, why should she worry about Callum when he didn’t mean anything to her any more? She had been out on several dates with George now, and she enjoyed his company. They shared similar tastes in music, both great admirers of Dame Myra Hess and her lunchtime piano recitals at the National Gallery, preferring to attend a concert rather than go out dancing, just as they preferred the theatre to the cinema. George had a good sense of humour, and a manner that made Sally believe that he had the makings of a first-class consultant, although she knew that ultimately his plans were to return to New Zealand and follow in his father’s footsteps as a GP. George hadn’t said anything to her about them putting their friendship on a ‘going steady’ basis, but Sally suspected that he would. And if he did, what would she say to him, Sally asked herself as she entered the hospital, ready to start night duty.
Sally exhaled painfully. The truth was that she liked George, but she didn’t think that right now, with a war on, was the time to get involved in a serious relationship. She had seen the strain and anxiety on the faces of those girls who had serious boyfriends, fiancés and husbands. She’d miss his friendship if she turned him down and he left her life, she knew, but was she really ready to start going steady?
Chapter Eighteen
‘Come on, Agnes, we’d better hurry otherwise we’ll be late,’ Tilly exhorted.
It was one of their St John Ambulance evenings and, having spent an hour in the garden removing weeds from Sally’s vegetable plot, they were now later than they had planned setting out for the brigade’s meeting in the church hall.
With the return of the BEF from France, the WVS, the St John Ambulance and various other voluntary organisations were all working at full stretch, with volunteers being asked to put in as many hours as they could. This meant that Tilly and Agnes were returning home from work to quickly eat the meal Olive had cooked for them, before all three changed into their uniforms and dashed out of the house to join their respective voluntary groups. Olive was in particular demand because of her driving abilities and had even been called upon to drive a temporary ambulance to and from St Pancras to St Thomas’s Hospital one evening when the normal driver hadn’t turned up. Tilly and Agnes had gone from practising first aid to actually doing it, and as Tilly said to Agnes as they hurried to meet up with other members of their group, after the first few real wounds they’d had to check and dress, they’d been so busy that she’d forgotten to be nervous.
Christopher had reached the church hall before them and was checking through their main first-aid box.
Tilly nudged Agnes, telling her, ‘Let’s go and give Christopher a hand rolling those bandages.’ He was standing with his back to them, dressed in stone-coloured cavalry twill trousers and a checked shirt with a Fair Isle-patterned sleeveless pullover on top. Tilly had noticed how some of the other members of their group avoided Christopher, turning their backs and refusing to speak to him, and their attitude made her feel sorry for him and protective towards him. He might be a conscientious objector and not prepared to fight but at least he was doing something towards the war effort.
‘I didn’t have time to change into my St John Ambulance uniform