Daughters of Liverpool (27 page)

But it was too late because that was exactly what he was doing.

Charlie was well pleased with himself. His parents were certainly well pleased with him, even if his sister, Bella, hadn’t stopped pulling a sour face from the moment he and Daphne had arrived on Good Friday to spend Easter with Charlie’s parents.

Everyone knew that it wasn’t just because it was Easter that he and Daphne were here. The ring he’d borrowed the money off his father to buy, a single diamond – a single very expensive diamond, in fact – was now shining brightly on Daphne’s finger. He and Daphne had chosen it together, or rather Daphne had chosen it and he’d whistled silently under his breath and hoped that his father was feeling generous. He certainly ought to be, with a hero for a son and a double-barrelled with a father a ‘name’ at Lloyd’s as his daughter-in-law-to-be.

Lord, but it had made Charlie grin to himself to see Bella’s expression when she had realised that he was now the perfect son and she was the one who got the parental frowns. After all, he’d had enough years of it being the other way round. Poor old Bella, she wasn’t even going to get a look in at the wedding either. Daphne had as good as said that she wasn’t going to ask Bella to be one of her attendants.

‘It doesn’t seem right somehow, with her being widowed, and as Mummy has already said, with me having two cousins of my own and there being
a war on … Oh, Charles, I’m so happy,’ Daphne had told him. ‘And so are Mummy and Daddy. Knowing how close you were to dearest Eustace makes you and me so very special.’

Charlie had agreed, of course he had, but in reality he was getting a bit fed up of the constant references to Eustace, and Daphne’s eyes filling with tears every time she mentioned him, which seemed to be hundreds of times a day. Eustace was dead now, after all. Charlie had tried jollying Daphne along, and hinting to her that he preferred girls who were fun, although of course he hadn’t told her that he preferred them so much that he’d already been tempted by one very jolly girl indeed who lived in the village close to the base. Luckily she was married, so no danger there of any problems, should Charlie find himself in the kind of situation a chap would be a fool to deny himself.

For now, though, he was on his best behaviour, the perfect newly engaged young man, a hero, whose father-in-law-to-be had shaken his hand with tears in his eyes when he had given him permission to propose to his daughter.

‘Bella’s been able to get tickets for you and Daphne for the Tennis Club dance, Charles, haven’t you, Bella?’

Bella gave her brother a thin smile. ‘Yes.’

Just as Laura had predicted, the committee had been almost ready to fall over themselves to provide tickets for a hero of the Battle of Britain – a full table of six of them. Bella had spent a lot of time thinking about Jan since Laura had commented on how good-looking he was. She was looking
forward to showing up at the Tennis Club dance on the arm of a Battle of Britain hero, all the more so because she knew how much Laura wanted him to partner her.

Not that Bella had any personal interest in Jan. How could she have? He was, after all, a refugee with no country and no money. It was unfortunate that Laura had included Bettina in her invitation to Jan to go with them to the dance. Bella was well aware that Jan’s sister despised her. Well, Bella didn’t care.

She didn’t care much either for the manner in which Laura had now taken to ordering her about, like she had done earlier this week when the crèche had been officially opened, but Bella had been forced to remain in the background whilst Laura greeted the dignitaries and smiled for the local press photographer.

They had now been inundated with enquiries about places at the crèche, and it had been Bella who had had the dull and time-consuming job of taking all the names and addresses of the mothers applying on behalf of their infants and then preparing a typed list in alphabetical order to include the names and dates of birth of all the children.

Bella had been seething when Laura had complained that Bella hadn’t put the children, when there was more than one to a family, in date-of-birth order.

‘You never said that you wanted me to do that,’ she had defended herself.

Laura had simply said firmly, ‘I thought you
would have known to do it without me having to say, Bella. You are my assistant, after all, and it is what I would have done.’

As Bella was quickly discovering, there were two sides to Laura.

There was the Laura who treated Bella as an equal and who linked her arm with Bella’s and wanted to be her friend, especially when it came to talking about Jan, and then there was the Laura who was very quick to let not just Bella herself, but also the world at large, know that she was the one in authority and Bella the one who had to obey that authority.

Well, tonight Laura was going to learn that when it came to attracting men it wasn’t having the most authority that counted, but having the prettiest face. And she, Bella thought smugly, was beyond any doubt the prettier of the two of them.

Bella was jerked out of this pleasant mental confirmation of her own unassailable status by her mother, who was still going on about June being the perfect month for a wedding, and the importance of not wasting any time in getting things organised.

‘You’ll want to get married in your own parish church, of course,’ Vi smiled, her mind busy with plans. In one sense it was a pity that Daphne’s home was so far away because that meant that Vi herself could not be as involved in the wedding preparations as she would have liked. After all, she already had the experience of having organised Bella’s wedding, which everyone had said had been the wedding of its year, and Bella quite definitely
Wallasey’s bride of the year. Daphne was a lovely girl and sweetly pretty, but her looks in no way rivalled Bella’s, and with the war on it would be next to impossible for her to find a wedding gown that could rival Bella’s.

‘It’s such a shame that you are so much taller than Bella,’ Vi gushed, ‘otherwise you could have worn her wedding dress.’

‘Oh, that’s very kind of you but I think that Mummy is planning to have her own gown altered for me. Mummy’s going to ask her cousin if we can borrow Great-grandmother’s lace veil and tiara.’

Any sense of dissatisfaction Vi might have felt at not being able to have a say in Daphne’s wedding dress was swiftly forgotten when Daphne uttered the word ‘tiara’. Vi felt positively light-headed with the joy and pride that filled her. Just wait until she told her WVS group that her son’s bride would be wearing the ‘family’ tiara. She would only mention it casually, of course, just dropping the information in so as not to sound boastful or awaken any resentment.

‘Well, of course, naturally your mother will want you to wear it,’ she managed to agree.

It was just as well really that the South of England was too far away for her twin sister, Jean, and her family to be able to travel to the wedding, Vi decided. Such refinements as a double-barrelled surname, Lloyd’s and a tiara would all be wasted on Jean and her down-to-earth husband, Sam. Sometimes Vi actually felt that Sam, instead of being in awe of her Edwin, was actually slightly
contemptuous of him, but that, of course, was impossible.

‘I must write to your mother, Daphne, and offer my help. After all, I have organised a wedding myself and I may be able to give her some little tips, and June isn’t that far away.’

‘Mummy and Daddy think that we should wait for a while,’ Daphne told Vi. ‘They were engaged for a year before they got married and, as Daddy says, with Charles feeling so strongly that he wants to continue in uniform even though he’s been told that medically he’s not really fit enough to do so, we should perhaps wait.’

Vi looked at Edwin, who immediately looked grimly and meaningfully at Charlie. It had cost Edwin an arm and a leg to find a doctor who was prepared to state that Charlie’s ‘bad back’ meant that he should be dismissed from the army on the grounds that he was medically unfit, and now here was ruddy Charlie over-egging the bread as usual, by the sound of it, and damn-near getting himself stuck in uniform.

‘Well, of course, I hate the thought of not staying in uniform,’ Charlie informed them all, correctly interpreting his father’s grim look, ‘especially when I’d been looking forward to fighting for Eustace as well as for myself.’

Bella rolled her eyes when she saw the way in which Charlie’s claim had Daphne reaching for his hand, a look of blind adoration in her eyes. Daphne really must be stupid to be taken in so easily by Charlie, Bella thought unkindly.

‘But since the doc has as good as told me that
my back could give out altogether if I’m not careful, I don’t think I’ve got any choice but to accept that from now on my contribution to the war effort will have to be whatever I can do whilst working for you, Dad.’

‘Well said, son,’ Edwin approved over-heartily.

‘Daddy’s worried about us being able to find somewhere to live,’ Daphne continued, still clinging on to Charlie’s hand.

‘Well, that’s no problem,’ said Vi immediately. ‘Bella has that lovely house right here in Wallasey that her father bought when she got married. It’s far too big for her now, and to be honest I’ve been thinking for a while that it would make much more sense for Bella to come back home. If you and Daphne were to move into it, Charles, we’d probably even be able to get rid of those wretched refugees. After all, Daphne’s parents are bound to want to come up and visit her.’

Outraged, Bella protested, ‘But that’s my house!’

‘No, it isn’t, dear,’ Vi pointed out in a far more steely tone of voice than she normally adopted with her daughter. ‘It was Daddy who bought it, remember?’

‘But—’

‘To be honest, Bella, Daddy and I have both been concerned about you living on your own, now that you’re widowed. You’ve still got your lovely bedroom here at home, after all.’

‘You mean the one that Daphne’s sleeping in?’ Bella pointed out sourly.

Vi tittered. ‘Well, of course she’s sleeping in it for now, darling, but once she and Charles are
married she won’t be, will she? No, Daphne dear, you can assure your parents that they needn’t worry about you and Charles not having a house. Mr Firth and I were saying only the other night how perfectly things are working out.’

Her mother might consider that things were working out perfectly but she certainly didn’t, Bella fumed, as she made her way home from her parents’. And as for her giving up her lovely house to Charlie and Daphne – well, her parents could think again if they thought she was going to do that!

Laura had been hinting for several days that she wasn’t keen on her billet and saying how much nicer Bella’s house was. She had even been buttering up Bettina and her mother, asking them to show her some Polish recipes, and making comments about how much easier it was to make decent meals when there was an extra ration book to add to the rations. Not that Bella was taken in for one minute by her behaviour. The only reason Laura was making such a fuss of Bettina and her mother was because she thought it would make her more appealing to Jan.

‘They are ever such a close family, aren’t they?’ she had commented to Bella after she had first met them. ‘I reckon that Jan would do anything to make his mother happy.’

Her own mother might think they could get rid of the refugees, but it would be a different matter trying to get rid of the supervisor of the local crèche, Bella decided grimly, and since she certainly
wasn’t prepared to give up her home and her independence to return to live with her parents, she would just have to bite on the bullet and invite Laura to move in with her. But there was one thing that Bella did intend to make clear, and that was that when they were at home it was what she said that went, since it was her house.

When she passed the site where the baby girl had been found alive in the rubble of her bombed home, Bella slowed down slightly. There’d been a big mass burial of some of those who had been killed in the March bombings. Bella had attended the service with her mother, and she had also – very reluctantly – done a stint down at the community kitchen on St Paul’s Road, where those who had been blitzed out could go and get a hot meal.

Right now, though, she had far more important things on her mind than her grievances against her parents. The dance tonight would be her big opportunity to dazzle Jan and ensure that he was totally smitten with her and no one else. Bella had everything planned, right down to the new red nail polish with which she intended to paint her finger-and toenails. And since her mother had not been able to persuade her father to increase her allowance, Bella had not been able to buy herself a new dress, which was why she had been obliged to do something she had never imagined she would ever lower herself to do, and that was to buy a second-hand dress.

A smirk of female triumph curved Bella’s mouth. She had come across the dress by accident when she had been given the job of sorting through boxes
of clothes donated to the WVS for the homeless. Full-skirted, with a strapless fitted bodice, it was made of an iridescent silk that looked black but that shone peacock blue and dark green when the light was on it. There was a matching bolero jacket and a crumpled pink rose attached to the waist.

Bella had recognised what treasure-trove it was the instant she had seen it, quickly bundling it up and wrapping it inside her own coat before anyone else could spot it. There was no reason why she shouldn’t have it – it wasn’t suitable for someone who was homeless, after all – and she
had
put two shillings into the WVS charity box for it.

Later on in the week, when she had heard about the poor little dressmaker who had come to the hall in tears to ask if anyone had seen the couture silk gown that had been brought to her to alter, Bella said nothing. It was just a black dress, that was all. It fitted her perfectly too.

Laura had been going on all week about the yellow and white piqué cotton frock trimmed with white and yellow rickrack braid that she was planning to wear, as though it was something really special. Well, not when she put on her black silk, it wouldn’t be, Bella thought happily.