Where the Heart Is (12 page)

There was genuine misery in Sasha’s voice, which caught at Bobby’s heart.

‘You don’t want to go getting yourself all upset over her, Sasha. I know she’s your twin but she’s not like you.’

‘No, she isn’t,’ Sasha agreed sadly. ‘I could never have done what she’s done, Bobby–you know, joined the WAAF. Lou’s always been the brave one. I do miss her, but just lately whenever we’re together we seem to end up falling out about… about something.’

‘About me, you mean,’ Bobby corrected her.
He was a fair-minded young man, and he loved his Sasha more than enough to want her happiness above everything else. ‘I dare say me coming along put Lou’s nose out of joint a bit,’ he continued when Sasha didn’t say anything, ‘and I dare say too that I’d have felt the same in her shoes.’

‘But you and me being like we are didn’t have to mean that me and Lou had to fall out. I don’t want it to be with me and her like it is with Mum and Auntie Vi, Bobby. Lou’s put out with me because after … well, you know, after that dancing business that I told you about she wanted us both to promise that we wouldn’t let any boy come between us, but that was before I knew how it was going to be with you and me.’

‘She’ll come round,’ Bobby tried to comfort her. ‘You’ll see.’

Sasha realised that Bobby wanted to reassure her, but she knew Lou better than he did, and she knew how stubborn her twin could be when something or someone got her back up. They weren’t children any more, though, and unlike in their schooldays she wasn’t going to give in and do as Lou wanted for the sake of peace and quiet.

‘Ah, Connor, you are a very good man. You make my visit here to your theatre where I sing for the people of Liverpool a most wonderful experience.’

Con flashed his trademark wide smile in the direction of the large-bosomed woman who was currently the Royal Court’s leading female singer.

‘Only the best is good enough for the Royal Court’s artistes, Eva,’ he responded.

They were only halfway through the evening’s show, and Eva had caught him just as he had been about to sneak out to the pub to warn the landlord that he was going to need his upstairs room tomorrow night for a card game.

‘You are so kind,’ Eva breathed, placing her hand on his arm, the rings on her fingers catching the light. ‘Kind, but something here within me -’ Eva touched her magnificent chest in a theatrical gesture before looking deeply into Con’s eyes with burning intensity– ‘here in my heart, that power I have inherited from my forebears, tells me that you are a very lonely man, Connor. A man who yearns for the comfort and the pleasure that only a very special woman can give him.’

Or, in fact, several very special women, Con thought, especially when one of them was the luscious young dancer who had just joined the chorus line, blonde, with legs up to her armpits, baby-blue come-to-bed eyes, and a certain something about her that told Con that his planned conquest of her was going to be successful.

‘You are a little alarmed, I think, that I should have this power to see into your heart,’ Eva was telling him, ‘but you must not be. I am a woman of great passion, a woman who knows how to please a man who is worthy of her.’

Eva was moving closer to him as she spoke, pressing her body up against his on the narrow staircase.

Alarm bells began to ring inside Con’s head. Eva was making up to him, there was no doubt about that, and he couldn’t afford to offend her,
there was no doubt about that either, but as for what he suspected she was suggesting … She was closer to thirty-five than eighteen, and not his type at all.

‘I am right, aren’t I?’ Eva was demanding.

‘What? Oh, listen, there’s the interval bell ringing,’ Con warned her, determinedly stepping back from her so that she was forced to release him. ‘You don’t want to be late for your second half solo.’

‘I shall sing just for you,’ Eva assured him, ‘and then after the show we shall have dinner together, and open our hearts to one another.’

Over his dead body, Con thought as he smiled at her again, whilst inwardly cursing the fact that Harriet Smith, his now retired secretary, who had been with the Royal Court Theatre for years and who had known exactly how to protect him from women like Eva, had taken it into her head to leave Liverpool and go and live in Bournemouth with her brother.

Stu and Paul were waiting for him outside the stage door to the theatre, falling in behind him as Con headed for the pub tucked down a back alley behind St John’s Market, ignoring the shells of buildings, casting dark shadows in the moonlight, that had been bombed in the dreadful air raids that had nearly destroyed the city in the early part of May 1941.

Striding ahead of his henchmen, Con ignored them. He prided himself on being a snappy dresser, even in these times of rationing and utility clothing. Like the wide boys and spivs who sold their illegal
goods on the black market, Con favoured pinstripe suits, although he liked to top his with a smart camel-hair top coat, with a nice bit of velvet on the collar, just like the big impressarios of the West End, whose photographs he’d seen in
Variety,
liked to wear.

Con liked to arrive at the pub before the Americans but tonight, thanks to Eva, he was running late and reached the pub to find they were waiting for him.

One of them was Chip, the young American who had had to be warned not to be a sore loser. Con shrugged inwardly. If Chip wanted to lose even more money then why should he care?

‘Good to see you, boys,’ he smiled as he directed them towards the side of the building where the door that the landlord had left unlocked for him led straight to the stairs to the private room.

‘We’ve brought Ricky with us tonight,’ another of the Americans told Con once they were all upstairs.

‘Once I’d heard they’d found a good poker game there was no way they were going to stop me joining in,’ Ricky told Con as Con reached out to shake his hand.

Con prided himself on the firmness of his own handshake but the American, for all that he wasn’t particularly tall or even thickset, had a grip that left white pressure marks on Con’s flesh.

‘Chip says you play a mean game of cards,’ Ricky told Con as they all sat down at the table, Ricky deftly beating Stu to the chair next to Con’s.

Con shrugged, assuming the affability of a man with a clear conscience. ‘I’ve just been lucky.’

‘Well, I’ll just to have to hope that some of your good luck rubs off on me,’ Ricky responded, smiling at Con as he reached into his pocket and removed a pack of cigarettes, offering Con one, which Con refused, going instead into his own pocket to get one of his favourite brand of cigars, along with two packs of playing cards. The cigar was black market, of course, but Con could afford them, thanks to the Americans.

Con knew another chancer when he met one, and the American had that confidence.

With the cigar clamped between his teeth, Con shuffled the cards several times, and was just about to start dealing them when Ricky leaned towards him, producing two brand-new packs of cards from his own pocket.

‘Would you mind if we use these,’ he asked Con. ‘I’ve got this thing, you see, about using only new packs. It’s kinda a bit of a superstition with me. Seems like I never win unless I’m using a new pack.’

As he spoke, Con caught the grin that Chip was giving him. So the sore loser had been suspicious about his loss, had he? Well, too bad, and as for the new packs of cards … Con shrugged his magnificently broad shoulders.

‘Of course I don’t mind, if you don’t mind if I shuffle them?’

Check them he meant, of course, and Ricky knew it. As Con well knew, a pack could be marked and put back in its box and the box made to look
as though it was sealed and untouched. Old Marvo had known all the tricks there were to making the cards fall in his favour.

‘Sure, you go ahead,’ the American agreed.

It wasn’t just big strong shoulders that Con had, he had big strong hands as well, surprisingly swift and deft big strong hands, certainly skilled enough to palm the aces as he shuffled the pack and then handed it back to Ricky, telling him, ‘You deal.’

Ricky began to deal.

All he had to do now, was to exchange the cards he had been dealt for the aces, and then replace the extra cards in the pack during the course of the game every time he picked up a new card. Easy. He drew on his cigar and sat back, ready to enjoy the evening.

‘Gimme those cards.’

Con had just produced his four aces and had been about to scoop the pot–over two hundred pounds tonight, thanks to Chip’s increasingly wild betting, until he, like the other three soldiers, Stu and Paul, had been knocked out of the game, leaving only Con and Ricky to battle it out between them. But Chip had suddenly got to his feet, lurching towards the table, grabbing the discarded cards as he did so.

‘Hey, kid, calm down,’ Ricky advised him as he too stood and reached across the table to place his hand on the angry young soldier’s arm.

‘He’s cheatin’ us, man. There ain’t no way anyone has that kind of luck. It’s like I told you.’

So he had been right, Con acknowledged. Ricky
had come with them to see if he could catch him out. Well, it would take far more than an undersized American soldier to catch him on the hop, Con thought triumphantly, as he shuffled the pile of fivepound notes and then folded them into his pocket.

‘Now look here,’ Con began, drawing himself up to his full impressive height. Con stood six foot in his socks, taller than anyone else in the room. ‘If you’re trying to accuse me of cheating—’

‘It’s OK, Con, the kid’s just a bit upset at losing so much money. Come on, Chip, Con won fair and square. I watched him deal the cards, and they were both new packs, you know that,’ Ricky assured the younger man, going round to him and putting his hand on his arm.

‘Ain’t no way a man can come up with four aces two games in a row and be playin’ fair and square,’ Chip protested, shaking off Ricky’s hand, and scowling.

‘Well I’m not a man to hold a grudge,’ Con assured them. ‘You’re all welcome to come back to the theatre with me to catch the finale of the show.’

‘What, and get fleeced a second time by those hookers he’s got working there?’ Chip said bitterly–a comment that Con affected not to hear, as he reached for his coat from the back of his chair.

Bella had a splitting headache. It hadn’t been a good morning. They’d had a young mother in a desperate state, her three-year-old in the nursery, and the news just arrived that her husband had been killed in
action. She’d been beside herself, saying there was no point in her going on living, and Bella had had to calm her down and remind her that she had a little boy who needed her and that her dead husband would have expected her to be brave and look after his son.

She’d started to unwrap her sandwiches from their greaseproof paper, but somehow she didn’t have the appetite for them. Her mother had been very difficult over the weekend, insisting that Bella didn’t understand how she felt about her husband leaving her, and practically blaming Bella for what had happened.

Bella had tried to occupy her thoughts with other things over the weekend. Since Gavin had been working she had gone round and spent both Saturday and Sunday afternoons with Lena. Janette was almost four months old now, sitting up and showing off the two new teeth she had cut. The minute she had seen Bella she had held out her arms to her to be picked up. The feel of her soft weight and the smell of her baby skin had almost been too much for her, Bella admitted now, bringing back as it had done memories of the baby she had lost and underlining the fact that she would never now hold a child of her own–Jan’s child. The pang of grief that ripped through her was so intense that it made her cry out, a low groan of mortal pain as though her body was crying out in protest.

She mustn’t be like this. It wasn’t right.

She looked towards the window of her small office, removing her handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan as she did so. She must not cry here
at work, sitting behind her desk with the door open. What would everyone think? What—

‘Bella.’

The sound of Jan’s voice gave her such a shock that she almost knocked over her cup of tea as she turned to look at him.

‘I had to come.’

‘No.’ She shook her head fiercely in denial. ‘No.’

‘Yes,’ Jan told her, reaching out to stop her as she pushed back her chair.

Please don’t let this be happening when she felt so weak, so pitifully weak and so much in need of him. She could feel her gaze being drawn to him, famished, desperate, greedily drawing in the familiar sight of him. He had lost weight. His face was thinner, his cheekbones sharper, emphasising his masculinity, giving his features a chiselled maleness that had her heart turning over.

She had retreated as deep into her chair as she could to avoid the hell of self-betrayal that would come with his touch.

‘Yes.’ His voice was as stark with pain as the look in his eyes as he kicked the door shut, isolating them in the dangerous privacy of her office. No one would come to her rescue, to save her from herself. The rule was that no one knocked or came in when the door was closed.

‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘I had to see you. I can’t stay long. I’ve driven my mother and Bettina back from … back, but I’m due at my base tonight. We’re flying almost nightly missions over the Channel, providing air cover for Bomber Command.’

‘You shouldn’t be telling me that.’ The words were automatic. After all, anything was better, safer, than talking about … that other … his wife … her death … her own pain.

‘Magda’s father was very touched by your letter. My mother showed it to him.’

‘Stop it.’ Her voice was frantic with panic and fear.

‘The doctor was very good. He stated that it was an accident, although she’d threatened to do it–to kill herself–because of me … because …’

‘Because she’d guessed? Because she thought you didn’t love her?’

‘No! My love was the last thing she wanted. She told me that. She told me that she hated men, even her own father, because he hadn’t saved the others. She said that there were voices in her head telling her that she should kill us both, that she should kill all men. I should never have married her. Without marriage she might have had a chance of avoiding sinking into the dreadful confusion that was responsible—’