Women on the Home Front: Family Saga 4-Book Collection. Annie Groves
the room dim and depressing. The small leather settee under the window had shiny patches on its arms where the fabric had worn thin, and the cupboards either side of the fireplace were painted dark brown, like the skirtings and doors. A table covered in a chenille cloth was pushed up against the wall adjoining the two rooms, three chairs tucked into it so that there was just enough room for the old-fashioned winged armchair with a leather footstool in front of it drawn up close to the fire: Mr Long’s chair, Olive guessed.
‘I’d offer you a cup of tea, but I’m expecting the doctor any minute,’ Mrs Long told her. ‘It’s kind of you to offer to help but Christopher, our son, is very good and he calls and gets the shopping for me on his way home from work.’ An expression of sadness shadowed her face as she spoke.
Poor woman, she was no doubt as anxious about her son as she was about her husband, albeit in a different way, Olive thought compassionately. Christopher’s views on the war were bound to make life difficult for him, and what mother wouldn’t wish for a happy easy path through life for her child? Olive felt so sorry for Mrs Long. Thin and careworn, with an anxious expression and grey hair pulled back into a bun, she was looking into the hallway through the door she’d left open the whole time she was talking to Olive, her voice barely raised above a whisper. Olive, who had once been in her position herself, knew exactly what she was going through but was reluctant to say anything about her own experience. Mr Long was, after all, still alive, and Olive knew how desperately one clung to that and how desperately one hoped for a recovery. Telling her that she had lost her own husband might not be a tactful thing to do.
‘Yes, this is the very latest colour,’ Dulcie assured the customer who had spent the last half an hour hesitating over which lipstick to choose.
‘And you can assure me that this lipstick was made here in England and not America? Only my husband wouldn’t approve at all if I’d bought a lipstick that had taken up space in one of our convoys that could have been used for something much more essential to the war effort. He has a cousin in the navy, you see, and he’s very conscious of the dangers to our brave sailors in crossing the Atlantic.’
‘Our buyer would never countenance buying stock that risked sailors’ lives,’ Dulcie assured her customer without having a clue as to whether or not what she was saying was true, and privately thinking that her husband must be mean if he hadn’t ever bought a bit of something to carry in his pocket and bring home for his wife.
Her reassurance seemed to convince her customer, who told her, ‘Very well then, I’ll take the lipstick.’
Last night’s attack on the Manellis’ shop had left Dulcie with several bruises and the angry cut on her face, which she’d done her best to disguise with some powder. Of course, the other girls had been curious about it, so she’d lied and said that she’d been scratched by a cat.
What had happened to the Italians was all over the papers, and at dinner time there’d been some snide comments from Arlene about the likelihood of ‘Dulcie’s Italian’ being picked up by the police and imprisoned as an enemy alien.
For her own part, Dulcie had pretended not to notice, whilst talking to Lizzie in a very firm voice about how Raphael was in the Royal Engineers and how he was only at home because he’d been at Dunkirk. Not that she had done that for Raphael’s sake, of course; she had done it for her own. She certainly wasn’t going to have Arlene making out that she was romantically connected to an enemy alien.
The staff entrance to Selfridges was a dark shadowy place that seemed always to smell of oil and exhaust fumes, from the delivery vans and cigarette smoke from the workmen who hung around the entrance, snatching quick fags, and the late afternoon heat of the city emphasised those odours.
London’s air as a whole smelled and tasted dry and dusty to Raphael. For him it lacked the bracing salt tang of Liverpool’s air, blown in over the Liverpool bar on winds from the Atlantic.
He’d arrived here well before six, determined not to miss Dulcie, knowing this was his last chance to see her and that he had a train to catch this evening to Liverpool, where his parents were waiting for news of his grandfather. Now he was leaning against a wall in the shadows opposite the store, waiting for her. He had managed to telephone his parents to discuss the dawn raids and they in turn had told him what had been happening in Liverpool. Not to them – Raphael’s father was a British citizen, after all. He worked as warehouse manager down on the docks, a good job and one he had wanted Raphael to follow him into until he had realised how determined Raphael was to train as an engineer. That was how he had come to be in the Royal Engineers instead of the regular army.
Raphael saw Dulcie emerging from the building. He pushed himself off the wall, straightening up as he strode purposefully towards her.
Dulcie saw him and stopped walking, a surge of triumph and vindication reinforcing what she told herself she had already known: that although he had pretended not to find her attractive, he had been drawn to her all along. Irresistible, that was what she was, Dulcie decided smugly. Well, if he thought that all he had to do was turn up here to persuade her to grant him the favour of a date, he was quickly going to learn that it wasn’t.
She waited for him to approach her, smiling a triumphant smile when he reached her, but instead of pleading with her to go out with him, he told her instead, ‘I haven’t got much time. I’m leaving for Liverpool this evening, but before I go I just wanted to thank you for what you did for Mrs Manelli. She’s my father’s second cousin, and since she doesn’t have anyone of her own to thank you I’m doing it on her behalf.’
Raphael looked down at his feet in their polished army boots. Coming here like this was a duty he would rather not have had. Dulcie wasn’t the type of girl he admired, and yet last night she had done something he admired very much indeed. He could see his own face in the gloss he worked into his boots.
He exhaled and raised his head, telling Dulcie, ‘I’m not going to pretend that you weren’t one of the last people I’d thought would do something like that, and I’m not going to apologise for thinking it either, but I am grateful to you.’
He hadn’t come here to ask her out, and far from finding her irresistible he was practically insulting her. Dulcie glared at him.
‘Grateful is it?’ she challenged him. ‘Well, you don’t sound very grateful, and as for not apologising for thinking I was one of the last people you’d thought would do what I did, that just goes to show that you shouldn’t go judging people and thinking things about them that aren’t true. Just because I don’t go round acting all holy and soft, that doesn’t mean I don’t know right from wrong. Those lads had no call to go acting like they did. Always kind to us when we were kids, Mr Manelli was, even if he was an Eyetie.’
Raphael inclined his head in acknowledgement of her comment and then pushed back the cuff of his tunic to look at his watch.
Dulcie watched him. He was impatient to leave and she certainly didn’t want to prevent him from leaving, so why, as he started to turn away from her, did she have to stop him by asking, ‘Did you get to see your granddad?’
His, ‘No,’ was terse, and a signal that he didn’t want to waste any more time talking to her, Dulcie suspected.
Well, that was all right by her; she didn’t want to waste her time talking to him. She hadn’t asked him to come here. He’d chosen to do that himself. She turned away in angry indignation.
‘He refused to see me, and then yesterday morning he was rounded up with the others. They’re keeping them at Brompton Oratory School for now.’ Raphael paused and then said bitterly, ‘He’s eighty-one and for all his fiery Fascist talk, he’s about as much danger to this country as a day-old child. They took them all before it was light; most of them were bundled off so fast they weren’t even allowed to get dressed. I took some clothes down to the police station where they were holding my grandfather but they refused to let me see him.’
‘What will happen to them?’ She wasn’t really interested, Dulcie assured herself. She wasn’t so soft that she cared what happened to them, and yet deep down she knew that she did feel something