As Time Goes By (28 page)

Eat with them, and have her on edge all the time because of what she was feeling? Sally certainly didn’t want that.

‘I should be doing twice what I am for what
you pay me,’ she told him. She could feel him looking at her but she refused to meet that look.

Their brief shared moment of equality and intimacy was over, and so it should be, she told herself firmly.

‘Huh, well, look who it isn’t. We were just talking about you.’

Sam’s heart sank as she and Hazel walked into the dormitory to find Lynsey sitting on her bed, along with a couple of the other girls. Lynsey had been on leave and Sam had known that she was due back today. Sam was not really surprised to be told that she had been the subject of Lynsey’s conversation. She had known that sooner or later Lynsey was bound to tackle her about Johnny because Lynsey was that kind of girl.

At least now she was feeling a lot happier about her and Johnny than she had felt first thing this morning, Sam acknowledged, as she braced herself for the scene she suspected was to come. She and Johnny had managed to sneak a few precious minutes alone together at the barracks earlier in the day, whilst she had been waiting for the major, and Johnny had been so tender and loving towards her that she had wondered what on earth she had been worrying about. What did it matter if he
didn’t want her to meet his sister? He loved her. He had told her so when he held her in his arms and not just once either, but over and over again in between his kisses. Those kisses! A dreamy smile of blissful happiness curled her mouth.

‘Still seeing Johnny Everton, are you?’ Lynsey challenged her.

Sam had known that it wouldn’t be long before Lynsey got to hear about her and Johnny. Personally she would far rather they had had this conversation in private, but it was Lynsey who had chosen to challenge her in public and she wasn’t going to back down.

‘Yes. Yes, I am,’ Sam confirmed. ‘Look, Lynsey—’ Even though Lynsey had been running after Johnny without him giving her any encouragement, Sam didn’t like to think of her being hurt, especially now that she knew what it was like to love someone, but before she could say so, Lynsey cut her off, turning to look knowingly at the two girls still sitting on her bed.

‘Well, more fool you. Pity you didn’t think to say anything before you went and got yourself involved with him,’ cos if you had I could have given you a few words to the wise about him. I just hope you haven’t gone and done something you shouldn’t have done, Sam – besides making a bit of a fool of yourself, I mean. It’s like I was saying to Cal – that’s my new chap, by the way, he’s a GI – you learn to get to know the signs that tell you when a chap’s trying to lead you up the garden path. Still I suppose it’s too late to warn
you now. It’s like I was just saying to Babs and Lizzie here, I feel ever so sorry for you, Sam. I really do,’ cos it sounds like you’ve really been taken in. Of course I’d guessed that something wasn’t right even before
I’d
been told all about him. That’s why I dropped him.’

Sam was too taken aback to say anything. She’d been expecting Lynsey to be furiously angry and resentful, and yet here she was, all smiles and full of triumph, and talking as though she pitied Sam and knew something about Johnny that Sam did not.

Sam looked helplessly at Hazel, not knowing what to say. She could see from Hazel’s expression that she had taken Lynsey’s comments seriously because she was frowning.

‘If you know something about Johnny that Sam ought to know, Lynsey, then you should tell her,’ Hazel announced firmly.

‘Well, since you put it that way, I suppose that I should,’ Lynsey agreed, ‘especially seeing as I heard it from his own sister.’

Sam’s heart gave an unpleasant jump and thudded into her chest wall. The discovery that Lynsey knew Johnny’s sister caused her stomach to churn and make her feel slightly sick with a mixture of shock and anxiety.

‘You
know
his sister?’ Hazel demanded, asking the question that Sam somehow could not.

‘Yes,’ Lynsey smirked. ‘It just so happens that I do. Got introduced to her through a friend of a friend of her hubby’s. Jennifer, her name is.’

Sam’s heart was thudding even more painfully now.

‘She filled me in about him. I don’t know what he’s told you, Sam, but if he’s tried to fool you that he’s fallen in love with you, he’s lying. I know for a fact that he doesn’t love you and he never will, and I’ll tell you why he doesn’t love you. It’s because he’s in love with someone else.’

‘No, that’s not true,’ Sam protested, finding her voice.

‘Yes it is,’ Lynsey corrected her. ‘His sister told me all about it. It seems that there was a girl he was crazy about. Engaged and everything, they were, him and this Molly, and then she goes and drops him for someone else. His sister told me that it broke his heart. Then when this chap she dropped him for got killed when his ship was torpedoed, and he thinks that the two of them can get back together, she tells him that she’s going to marry her dead sister’s husband so that she could look after her sister’s kiddie. Johnny’s sister reckons he’d be back with her like a shot if she gave him half a chance. Oh, and you’ll never guess who this Molly’s husband is,’ Lynsey continued gleefully. ‘It’s only that Sergeant Brookes you were working with down at the barracks. Talk about it being a small world. Mad about this Molly, Johnny was, and still is, according to his sister. She reckons he always will be. Of course, him being a man he still has his needs, if you know what I mean, and if some girl is daft enough to let him have what she shouldn’t off the back of him making out that
he loves her when he doesn’t, well then, of course he’s not going to tell her the truth, is he? Stands to reason that he won’t.’

Sam could feel a painful burning sensation in the region of her heart. Tears were threatening to blur her view of Lynsey. She tried hard to swallow against the lump of misery in her throat and found that she couldn’t.

It was left to Hazel to ask Lynsey sternly, ‘Are you sure about all of this, Lynsey, because if you aren’t—’

‘Of course I’m sure. After all, I heard it from his own sister. Not that she had any idea that he’d been trying it on with me before I got wise to him, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her after what I’d just learned. You look ever so pale and sickly, Sam,’ she added with a too-sweet smile of concern. ‘Still, it’s best that you know the truth about him, isn’t it? I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t tell you and then you went and did something you shouldn’t.

‘Oh, is that the time?’ Lynsey exclaimed, looking pointedly at her watch. ‘My Cal will be round here thinking he’s been stood up if I don’t get a move on. He’s taking me out to the pictures and then a bit of supper.’

‘Come and sit down for a few minutes, Sam.’

Hazel’s hand was on her arm, holding her gently as she guided her over to her bed. Sam was distantly aware that Lynsey had disappeared and the other girls were all tactfully pretending to be very busy.

‘It can’t be true,’ she told Hazel shakily. She
could feel the hard frame of the side of the bed behind her knees as Hazel pushed her down to sit on it.

‘I don’t think that Lynsey could make up something like that, Sam, not when she’s said she heard it all from Johnny’s sister.’

‘So you think it is true then?’

‘You said yourself that he didn’t want you to meet his sister.’

‘Perhaps he just didn’t want me to … to feel hurt because … because he’d been engaged to someone else before he met me.’

Sam knew that she was clutching at straws but she just couldn’t bear to accept that Johnny did not love her.

‘Oh, Sam.’ Hazel sat down on the bed next to her and took hold of her hands in her own. ‘I am so very sorry that you are being hurt like this, but you must be brave and strong. You must insist that he tells you the truth. Any decent man who genuinely loved a girl would want to be honest with her about his past. You do see, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Sam admitted miserably.

Johnny,
her
Johnny, loved Sergeant Brookes’s wife. Sam remembered how determined Johnny had been to make sure that she knew that Sergeant Brookes was married. To protect the woman he loved? For the second time that day Sam felt as though her heart was breaking.

Johnny
. Why couldn’t he have told her about being engaged to Molly Brookes? Why couldn’t he have said that he had loved someone before
her, but that she and that love were in the past now and she was the one who mattered; the one who had his love? If he had, then everything would have been all right. But he hadn’t.

‘I won’t come down for supper tonight, Hazel. I’ve … I’ve got a bit of a headache.’ She couldn’t bring herself to look at Hazel, knowing that they both knew that she was fibbing, and to her relief Hazel didn’t try to press her to change her mind, simply nodding and standing up.

Sam had to wait until all the other girls had gone down for supper and the dorm was empty before she could give in to her tears, crying until her pillow was wet with them and her throat raw from the effort of trying to suppress her brokenhearted sobs.

‘Well, if it isn’t the doctor’s new receptionist.’

Sally could see the looks the other women in the queue outside the grocer’s were giving her when they heard Daisy’s sneering greeting and the way she had emphasised the word ‘receptionist’.

‘Got your feet well and truly under the table there, haven’t you? But there’s no point you thinking you can get away with giving yourself fancy airs and graces round here where there’s folk wot knows you.’

‘I was as surprised as anyone else when Dr Ross offered me the job as his housekeeper and said that he’d want me answering the door to folk as well,’ Sally responded, deliberately playing down the ‘receptionist’ part of her duties. No matter how
much Daisy’s words annoyed her, there was no point lowering herself to Daisy’s level by arguing with her or getting Daisy’s back up even more than it already was. After all, she now had her position to think of.

‘Oh, surprised, was you? Come off it, jobs like that don’t grow on trees. I bet Doris Brookes had been angling for it for you for ages. Mind you, at least she’s done the rest of us a bit of a favour as well. Wi’ you gone from the Close we haven’t got that chap who used to come knocking on your door of a dark night hanging around no more.’

Sally’s face burned with angry pride. She could see a couple of women in the queue exchanging whispers, their hands close to their mouths. It infuriated her that she had to let Daisy get away with implying that she had been entertaining another man in her husband’s absence, but there was no way she was going to betray Ronnie’s indebtedness now that he was dead. It would be a rotten thing to do to him and to his memory, and he deserved better than that.

‘Mind you, if I was you I’d not have bin so keen to move in there, not after what I’ve heard the doctor had to say about your kiddies. Had it from one of the nurses, I did, wot knows my cousin Ruby. According to her he was that worried about you going out the way you was and leaving them for others to mind for you that he thought they should be teken into care for their own good. Said it was no wonder they’d ended up in hospital, so I heard.’

‘Well, you heard wrong,’ Sally told her sharply, her good intentions overturned by her fury. ‘The only reason they had to go into hospital was on account of the food poisoning they got from one of your sandwiches. Yes, and he wanted me to tell him where it had come from, an’ all, but I didn’t, having a bit more loyalty to others than some I could name.

‘Wot the doctor said was that he thought that maybe I should have let them be evacuated, that was all, but then he could have said that to plenty of other mothers here as well, as I’m sure we all know.’
There
, that should put Daisy in her place, Sally decided angrily.

‘I’m surprised you need to queue up to buy anything, Daisy, wot with your hubby being so good at finding them damaged tins. Mind you, I suppose you might as well use all them extra points you get for having him at home and not in uniform,’ she added for good measure.

She might seem calm outwardly but her heart was hammering away as though she had run a mile. She wasn’t going to let Daisy have everything her own way, not for one minute. That nurse had had no right to go saying anything about what the doctor had said to her about Tommy and Harry, and he had had no right to say that she wasn’t looking after them properly. What did he or Daisy know about the worries she had to bear?

As Sally turned to leave, Daisy caught hold of her sleeve and hissed angrily to her, ‘You want to keep an eye on that doctor, you do,’ cos what I reckon is that with him losing his own kiddies he’s
got it in his mind to take yours from you and adopt them. It was in the paper only the other week about someone doing that. Turned the poor mother’s brain, it did, when the judge said that they was better off with someone else. If you want my opinion that’s why he’s given you that job. The next thing you know he’ll be saying that you aren’t a fit mother and he’ll be keeping them two little lads.’

‘Don’t talk so daft,’ Sally told her scornfully, turning her back on her and walking away.

‘My, but you gave that Daisy Cartwright something to think about. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen her lost for words.’

Sally tried to smile at the woman who had come up to her as she left the shop, but in reality now that she had calmed down she felt slightly sick and a bit ashamed of the way she had ripped up at Daisy.

‘I perhaps said a bit more than I should.’

‘No more than she deserved. It won’t do her any harm. Was that right what she was saying about you working for the new doctor?’ she asked.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Thought I saw someone moving in the other week. Got two little kiddies, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, my sons.’

‘Only I live opposite from the doctor and a few doors down. Not that our side of the street is anything like as smart as where you are. A lovely house, that one of the doctor’s is. Your husband away fighting, is he?’

‘He was,’ Sally told her. ‘Only he got made a prisoner of war by the Japs and now he’s dead. I only heard a little while back.’

Immediately her companion’s expression changed, her curiosity giving way to sympathy. ‘Oh, love, I’m ever so sorry.’

‘It’s all right. You weren’t to know and, besides, I’m not on me own. Sometimes I think there’s more lost someone to this war than there are haven’t.’