My Sweet Valentine (35 page)

Tilly had barely touched her lunch, her gaze fixed anxiously on Drew as though she was afraid that he might somehow disappear. Drew had insisted that they do the washing up, and Olive had let them, but now she felt that some fresh air and the sight of little Alice playing
joyfully in the garden would do more to lift her daughter’s spirits than washing up.

As she opened the door into the kitchen she could hear Tilly saying emotionally to Drew, ‘Mum’s right about me not being mature enough to be married. Last night, when I was so worried about you and all I could think about was you, I felt that if we had been married and we’d had a child, I’d have resented having to look after it when I wanted to be thinking about you. I’m such a coward, Drew.’

‘Darling, please, you mustn’t say that because it isn’t true,’ Drew protested.

‘It is true,’ Tilly insisted. ‘Mum’s right, I’m not fit to be married. I’d only drag you down with my worry and my cowardice. I’m not afraid for myself but I’m so afraid for you, so afraid of being without you. Last night …’

Drew put down the tea towel with which he had been drying the dinner plates and reached for Tilly’s hand.

‘It’s the same for me, you know,’ he told her gently. ‘So if you worrying about me and not wanting to lose me makes you a coward, then me worrying about you and not wanting to lose you makes me one as well. But it isn’t cowardice, my darling girl, it’s love.’

‘I can’t bear the thought of losing you.’

‘You could never lose me, Tilly. Never. My heart is yours for ever. My love will always be with you, and as for you being a coward, on the contrary, you have the courage of a lion, giving your love as you have done to a stranger from another land, trusting him, believing in him. That isn’t cowardice. Only a very brave person can do that.’

‘Oh, Drew, why is it that you always know just what to say to make me feel better?’

Standing on the threshold of the kitchen, Olive surveyed them both, her eyes damp with tears. Drew’s words had caught at Olive’s own emotions. There was no mistaking his sincerity.

Perhaps she had been too hard on the young couple, too fearful on Tilly’s behalf. She wasn’t going to change her mind about them getting married – she still felt that Tilly was too young for that – but there was some lenience and trust she could show that would help to restore her daughter to her old self and give her some respite from the horror of the Blitz.

Olive took a deep breath and then, before she could allow herself to change her mind, she stepped into the kitchen and announced calmly, ‘I’ve been thinking about how much this dreadful Blitz is getting us all down, and I think it would be a good idea if you had a holiday, Tilly. You haven’t had a proper holiday since you started work at the hospital, and now with summer coming …’

‘A holiday?’

Tilly felt confused, and wary. Automatically she moved closer to Drew. If her mother was going to suggest parting them and sending her away from London and from Drew …

‘Yes,’ Olive agreed, looking steadfastly at her. ‘I really do think that it would do you the world of good. I can’t get away myself, unfortunately, so I was thinking that perhaps if Drew could go with you …’

Olive could hear Tilly’s indrawn gasp of excitement and see the joy lighting up her eyes.

‘Oh, Mum.’ Releasing Drew’s hand, Tilly almost flew
into Olive’s arms, her voice breathless with delight and emotion as she told her shakily, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you really mean it. It would be wonderful. To be able to go away, and with Drew …’

‘You can be sure that I’ll take the very best care of her, Mrs Robbins,’ Drew assured Olive.

‘I know that, Drew. I wouldn’t have suggested you go with Tilly if I didn’t think that, and if I didn’t feel completely able to trust you to do everything that is right.’

Quietly they looked at one another, and Olive could see from the seriousness of Drew’s expression that he understood the promise she wanted from him and that he was willing to give it. He was everything any mother could want for her daughter, Olive knew.

To see Tilly’s spirits restored so speedily and almost miraculously was wonderful, Olive had to admit later in the afternoon, as they all sat on the grass, Tilly’s voice rising and falling excitedly as she chattered happily about the holiday.

‘I’ll have a word with some of the guys on the paper,’ said Drew, ‘find out where they recommend.’

‘Well, if it was me I’d go to somewhere like Brighton where there’s a bit of life,’ Dulcie informed them.

‘No, I want to go somewhere quiet and peaceful, a pretty little village with houses with thatched roofs, and a dear river with fishing boats,’ Tilly said dreamily.

‘I’ve never been to the seaside,’ Agnes put in. ‘We were going to go once with the orphanage, but I had to stay behind because I got some spots and they thought I was coming down with something.’

‘I dare say the south coast itself will be out of bounds
because of the war,’ Olive warned them, ‘but Devon is supposed to be very pretty.’

‘We could hire bicycles and explore the countryside,’ said Tilly enthusiastically. The truth was that really she didn’t care where they went as long as she and Drew were there together.

Dulcie pulled a face. ‘That’s not my idea of having a good time. I’d want to go dancing and be taken out for a posh meal.’

Seated at Drew’s side, Tilly reached for his hand. She felt so happy, elated and buoyed up with a heady mixture of relief in his safety and joy at the unexpected gift her mother had given her that fizzed up inside her. Suddenly, despite the war, her world had turned from the darkness of fear into a place in which she could look forward to a special time for her and Drew to share together.

‘We could go next month, in June,’ she told Drew.

June, the wedding month. She and Drew might not be getting married, but that did not mean that she couldn’t make their precious shared time away together something very special, and just for the two of them. A couple didn’t have to be married for that. As
that
thought formed inside her head, Tilly deliberately avoided looking at her mother, knowing that what she had in mind right now as part of their special time together was not something of which her mother would approve at all.

‘I’m going to go in and make us some tea,’ Olive announced. ‘You girls can keep an eye on Alice. Don’t let her go too far, mind.’

‘I’ll come with you, Mum,’ Tilly said, her conscience urging her to make the offer as though to make up both for the gulf that had existed between them in recent
weeks, and the secret thoughts she had just had about how she would most like to spend her precious time with Drew.

The feeling of her daughter’s arm through her own as they walked back towards the house together, the May breeze catching at the hems of the skirts of their floral dresses, filled Olive with relief. With just a few words she had brought Tilly back from that dark, frightening place she had gone to, and where Olive had really begun to fear she might lose her, and now she was her old optimistic sunny self again. She had made a mistake in judging her daughter’s emotional makeup to be similar to her own, Olive acknowledged. Tilly loved fiercely and with everything in her, throwing herself into her emotions with unguarded intensity. Because of that she was vulnerable to her love in a way that Olive knew she herself was not. She might never have known the highs that love obviously brought Tilly, but she had never known the lows that were Tilly’s either. As a mother all she wanted for her daughter was her happiness, a good steady ongoing happiness that came from a world at peace and a reliable, loving, living husband. At least in Drew Tilly had found a young man who did truly love her, Olive comforted herself as they walked into the kitchen. Not that she intended to say anything of what she was thinking to Tilly.

Instead she told her prosaically, ‘You get the tea tray organised, Tilly, and I’ll put the kettle on.’

Tilly reached for the tray, which was propped up at the back of the smart kitchen cabinet of which Olive was so proud, and then stopped, going over to where Olive was standing by the kitchen sink.

‘Thanks, Mum,’ she told her, reaching for her and hugging her tightly. ‘This morning I thought that Drew was really gone and that I’d lost him, and now … I don’t think I’ve ever felt so happy.’

The feeling of her daughter’s young strong arms around her filled Olive’s heart with emotion.

She hugged her in return then told her, ‘You go back to Drew, Tilly, but remember, when you and he do go away—’

‘I know, Mum. You don’t have to tell me,’ Tilly stopped her.

As she headed back to Drew she recognised that she hadn’t crossed her fingers behind her back when she’d let her mother think she was giving her an assurance of ‘good behaviour’, but then crossing your fingers was a childhood thing and she wasn’t a child any more. She was a woman on the verge of claiming that womanhood, and so very eager to do so, to give and share the reality of love with the man she loved.

June couldn’t come soon enough.

Olive was just pouring the boiling water onto the tea leaves when Sally walked into the kitchen.

‘You could have had a couple more hours in bed,’ Olive told her. ‘If we have another night like last night you’ll be kept busy at the hospital.’

‘I couldn’t sleep. We had so many patients in last night that we just couldn’t do anything for. Too many. You just lose count in the end, but to their families every one of them is someone loved who has been lost. You feel so guilty because you can’t be more sympathetic, but there just isn’t time.’

‘I’m sure that people would much rather you were in the operating theatre helping people, Sally, than offering them cups of tea and sympathy. You’re a trained nurse. Anyone can make a cup of tea.’

‘That’s exactly what my mum would have said,’ Sally admitted, bending to pick up the tea tray. Olive had a way of saying things that were unexpectedly sympathetic and understanding. She couldn’t have had a better landlady, Sally thought, and in her more fanciful moments she liked to think that her mother was looking down on her and thought the same thing.

Out in the garden Agnes was brushing her uniform hat free of the dust it had collected during the week’s bombings, whilst Dulcie filed her nails. Tilly was showing Drew how to make a daisy chain, ostensibly for Alice, but since it gave her an opportunity to sit close to Drew and hold his hands whilst she showed him what to do, Olive suspected that the chain would be a long time in the making.

Alice herself, busy playing on the lawn spotted them, toddled towards them, stopped and then sat down and looked straight at Sally, holding out her arms to her.

For a moment there was silence. Olive held her breath. For Sally’s sake as much as Alice’s she really hoped that the two half-sisters could form a bond, and that Sally would find it in her heart to love her little sister, who needed her so much.

Sally, though, after the smallest hesitation, turned from the baby and walked away.

As she put down the tray Sally could feel her heart thumping so heavily that it was making her feel light-headed. She felt sick and shaky, angry inside, and yet
guilty, in the same kind of way she had done as a child when she’d done something she’d known was ‘wrong’.

When Sally turned from Alice, leaving the little girl to wail in rejected misery, the sound of her despair tore at Agnes’s heart. Normally the last person to cause a confrontation of any kind, little Alice’s plight touched such a raw place in Agnes that before she knew what she was doing she was on her feet and following Sally to the furthest end of the garden, telling her fiercely, ‘I think it’s a terrible cruel thing wot you’re planning to do with little Alice, giving her away like she was just …’ her gaze fell on the vegetable patch, ‘… just like she wasn’t a baby and your own flesh and blood at all but a … a bag of veggies. I never thought you were the sort to do something like that, Sally.’

To be verbally attacked by Agnes, of all people, really caught Sally off guard, but she suspected that she should have expected it. After all, Agnes herself had been abandoned as a baby.

‘I’m not planning to leave Alice on the steps of an orphanage, Agnes,’ she informed her as calmly as she could. ‘Far from it. She will be properly adopted and placed with a family who will love and care for her.’

‘She has a family. She has you and her uncle.’

‘Callum is in the Royal Navy, and I am a nurse. There is a war on, and both of us have duties to fulfil for which we have been trained. Alice will be much better off with a family.’

‘No she won’t. She’ll spend the rest of her life wondering who her real family are, and why they gave her up. She’ll worry that she wasn’t good enough for
them, and that they didn’t love her enough. She’ll grow up feeling that … that part of her is missing.’

Never in the whole time she had known Agnes had Sally heard such an impassioned speech from her. Agnes was normally so timid and quiet. Because she felt that, as an abandoned child, she didn’t have the right to speak out or have an opinion? Was that what being rejected by one’s family did to a child?

‘I’m doing this for Alice’s own benefit. Like I just said, I’m not going to abandon her, Agnes.’

‘No you aren’t. Doing it for Alice’s sake, I mean. You’re doing it for you’re own because it hurts you too much to have her here because of what she means. You’re punishing her for what you think her parents did, and that’s wrong. I’d adopt her myself if I could, so I would.’

Without another word she turned round and ran back up the garden picking up her hat and then disappearing in the direction of the house.

‘I’m sorry about the child being here, and about upsetting Agnes,’ Sally apologised to Olive later when they were drinking their tea. ‘It’s not right that you should have to help out with her like this. She’s nothing to you, after all. Callum should never have brought her here. She’d have been far better off in an orphanage in Liverpool.’

‘I understand how you feel, Sally,’ Olive told her gently, ‘but I wouldn’t be being fair to you if I didn’t advise you not to rush into anything that you might one day regret, and as for Agnes, well, I think we both understand why she’s so upset.’