Women on the Home Front Page 18

  ‘Knowing me, I’d probably end up sticking my finger in my eye.’

  Her eyebrows and lashes done to her satisfaction Tilly reached for the Tangee lipstick that her mother had only allowed her to wear once she had started work. The lipstick looked orange but once on Tilly’s lips it gave them a satisfyingly rosy-pink lustre that Tilly was convinced made her look much more grown up.

  ‘Here, you have some,’ she invited Agnes.

  Hesitantly, Agnes took the lipstick. Living at the orphanage, she had been denied the opportunity to experiment with growing up in the way that other girls did and the movement of her hand as she applied the lipstick to her own mouth was shaky and uncertain.

  ‘We’d better get a move on,’ Tilly warned, turning to their shared wardrobe and opening its doors. ‘Here’s your bag and your dress.’ She thrust both at her so that Agnes had no alternative other than to take them from her whilst Tilly removed her own dress from its hanger and quickly folded it up to put it into her own bag.

  ‘Your mother is bound to ask what we’ve got in these,’ Agnes warned Tilly as she eyed the over-filled bags.

  ‘Not if we take them down into the hall and leave them there whilst we say goodbye. She’ll be listening to the radio so she won’t get up to see us off. She said how tired she was at teatime after Sergeant Dawson had her driving through the afternoon traffic. Come on,’ Tilly urged. ‘We’ve got to get changed yet into our skirts and jumpers as though we were going to the cinema.’

  Upstairs in her own room on the top floor, Dulcie was also getting ready for the evening ahead, surveying her appearance in the full-length mirror. The dress she was wearing – pale blue silk, its V neck trimmed with a slightly darker shade of velvet ribbon, the same ribbon trimming its puffed sleeves – was cut on the bias, skimming her curves but not clinging to them. Dulcie knew where to draw the line and which side of that line she intended to stay. Other girls might make the mistake of dying their hair a too brassy blonde and wearing clothes that were too tight, but Dulcie never would. They could make themselves look cheap but she was certainly not going to. That sort of girl more often than not ended up having to get married quickly with a baby on the way and a life of hardship ahead of her.

  Piling her curls up on top of her head and securing them there with some Kirbigrips that she’d been holding between her teeth, Dulcie paused to admire her own reflection. Classy, that’s how she looked, she decided triumphantly. Her smile widened as she reflected on her other triumph of the evening – Tilly and Agnes’s illicit attendance at the Palais. Olive might think that her precious daughter wouldn’t listen to anyone but her, but Dulcie was going to prove her wrong.

  ‘That’s Dulcie going downstairs now,’ Tilly told Agnes as she heard the tap of Dulcie’s heels crossing the landing outside their room. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I can’t go yet. I need the lav,’ Agnes protested.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Olive too heard the tap of Dulcie’s heels on the stairs and then the sound of the front door opening and closing, and frowned to herself. Tilly and Agnes were cutting it fine if they weren’t going to miss the beginning of their film. She’d better go upstairs and hurry them along, Olive decided. Tilly could be such a daydreamer at times.

  In her room, Sally hummed one of the tunes from the review to herself. She’d really enjoyed her outing with her fellow nurses, right from the moment at the hospital in the room where they’d all changed with Sister’s permission, when Rachel had complimented her with a teasing, ‘Well, don’t you scrub up well?’ as she admired Sally’s appearance in her pretty hyacinth-blue dress, with its neatly fitted bodice closed by tiny pearl buttons and its softly gored full skirt.

  ‘If I do I’m not the only one,’ Sally had laughed in response.

  It had been true. Eight of them had gone to see the show, and seeing her fellow nurses out of their uniforms, with their hair down, anticipation of a happy afternoon out adding a soft glow to their skin and eyes, and wearing pretty clothes, made Sally think how attractive everyone looked.

  ‘It should be a good show,’ Rachel told Sally, linking up with her after they had all pulled on their coats and were heading for the door. ‘Of course, some of the jokes will probably be a bit warm . . .’ She paused and Sally laughed.

  ‘Yes, I expect they will,’ she agreed.

  ‘Thank heavens you aren’t the stuffy sort,’ Rachel told her with evident relief, adding, ‘Since the tickets haven’t cost us anything I reckon we can splurge a bit and go by taxi. You go and hail a couple, Brenda,’ she commanded one of the other girls. ‘That blonde hair of yours is bound to have them stopping. A London cabbie never misses a blonde.’ Rachel had been proved right a couple of minutes later when two cabs pulled up a few yards from them.

  ‘What’s this then?’ one of the cabbies asked cheerfully. ‘Nurses’ day out? Matron know you’re escaping, does she?’ he joked as they split into two groups of four and piled into the cabs.

  The show had turned out to be excellent, the comedian so funny that Sally had laughed until her insides ached. Best of all, though, had been the music and the dance routines, and Sally had itched to be twirling on a dance floor herself when the music had got her feet tapping.

  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 to me.’ Olive had to bite her lip to stop it from trembling.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Sally offered, going over to the stove without waiting for Olive’s agreement, and then saying calmly, once she had checked that it was full of water and had lit the gas beneath it, ‘I remember having words with my parents about wanting to do things they didn’t think I was old enough to do.’

  Olive gave her lodger a weak but grateful smile when she poured the boiling water on the tea leaves and then brought the pot over to the table, before returning to the cupboard to remove two mugs, cream ones with blue spots on them, and blue handles, which reminded Sally of some her own mother had bought one year at Preston’s annual Pot Fair.

  Automatically Olive got up and went to the larder to get the milk jug, but it was Sally who poured their tea and who passed her mug to her.

  ‘Tilly said it was my fault and that she’d had to lie because of me.’ The words, so painful to say, felt like sharp pieces of flint tearing at Olive’s throat and her heart.

  ‘I dare say she was so shocked at being discovered that she didn’t really know what she was saying,’ Sally offered comfortingly.

  ‘Perhaps I have been too protective. But it was only for her own sake. She’s so young. She doesn’t know how hard life can be. I want her to have her youth whilst she can. I don’t want to stop her from having fun, I just want her to be safe and to take her time growing up.’

  ‘Would it help if I went to the Hammersmith Palais with them? Not immediately, of course, but if you wanted to let Tilly know that you do trust her to be properly grown up?’ Sally offered.

  Despite the angry words that had been exchanged upstairs, the kitchen still had the lovely comforting and comfortable atmosphere that Olive had created throughout her home, but especially here at its heart, its cosiness reaching out to warm the heart.

  ‘I’d certainly far rather she and Agnes went with you than with Dulcie,’ Olive admitted, absently tracing one of the lines that made up the checks on the kitchen tablecloth with the tip of her fore-finger. Was Sally trying to say tactfully that she had treated Tilly like a child instead of recognising that she needed to know that she, her mother, trusted her? ‘You get all sorts going to the Palais, from what I’ve heard, and Hammersmith itself has a bad reputation,’ she defended her decision.

  ‘I know nurses who’ve been to the Palais and they say it’s just about the best dancehall in London. I think they’d say if they thought it wasn’t the kind of place one would want to go,’ Sally offered tactfully, pausing to take a sip of her hot tea before wrapping her hands round her mug and then continuing carefully, ‘Tilly is young, but she’s not the sort of girl to have her head turned by the wrong kind of young man, or the sort of girl who would behave in the wrong way.’

  Silently Olive digested what Sally had said, moving slightly in her chair and pushing it back a little from the table, its legs making a small scraping sound on the linoleum as she got up and began pacing the floor. Sally had offered her a face-saving way out of what was
a miserable situation and she’d be silly not to take it, Olive acknowledged, stopping her pacing to turn to Sally.

  ‘You’re right. She isn’t. And that’s just as well with this war, and young people being what they are. Perhaps I have been too hard on her, but the last thing I want for Tilly’s own sake is for her to meet some lad in uniform and then fancy herself in love with him and want to get married when he will have to go off to war and might not come back.’ Olive sighed. ‘I shouldn’t be talking to you like this, Sally. You’re only a girl yourself, and a very kind girl as well.’ She sighed again. ‘If you’re sure you don’t mind going with Tilly and Agnes, that would ease my mind an awful lot.’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind. I wouldn’t have offered if I did,’ Sally returned promptly. ‘In fact, it will probably do me good. It’s ages since I last went dancing and, by all accounts, the Hammersmith Palais is the place to go.’

  ‘So Tilly keeps telling me,’ Olive acknowledged ruefully.

  From her favourite seat at her favourite table next to the dance floor, Dulcie was able to keep a close eye on everyone coming into the ballroom, and when an hour after her own arrival there was still no sign of Tilly and Agnes she gave a dismissive mental shrug and told herself that if Tilly was too soft to take her advice then that was her lookout, and more fool her.

  Three girls she knew from school had taken the other seats at the table, the four of them exchanging nods of recognition, Dulcie well aware that the other three were covertly examining her appearance. Well, let them. It wasn’t her fault if she looked better than they did.

  ‘That good-looking brother of yours still in France with the army, is he?’ one of the girls – Ida Walton – asked Dulcie.

  ‘As far as I know he is,’ Dulcie replied. ‘Last time he wrote home he said how he’d been on leave in Paris.’

  ‘Huh, Paris.’ Rita Stevens, who was sitting next to Ida, joined the conversation. ‘My brother Harry was there before he got sent home on compassionate leave when his wife died having a baby, and he reckoned that the women in Paris are all tarts and that any British soldier who goes with one of them is a fool.’