Where the Heart Is (21 page)

When she had finished reading it, Bella pressed the letter to her trembling lips and wept. It should have comforted her that Jan had understood why she had sent him away–one day maybe it would–but right now she would have sacrificed every bit of comfort she had derived from his letter for Jan himself to be alive, even if that had meant that he no longer loved her.

It was so cruel that he should have died. He had so much to give to other people, such gifts and strengths. When this war was finally over the country would need men like Jan. Why must it be that the brave and the good should die whilst men like her father and her brother were allowed to live?

‘Are you planning to go to Hampstead to see your parents this weekend, Katie, only if you aren’t I thought the two of us might do something together, seeing as the weather is so nice–perhaps go to Richmond on a pleasure boat, and then maybe the cinema in the evening?’

‘What a lovely idea. And, no, I’m not going to Hampstead,’ Katie told Gina.

‘Good. I’ll make some enquiries about what pleasure boats are running.’

The two girls exchanged warm smiles.

‘I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have as a pal than you, Katie,’ Gina told her. ‘I bumped into one of the girls I was at school with the other day. She’s married now and living in the country, not really doing any kind of war work at all, and talking to her made me realise how little we now have in common. Not like you and I.’

‘It’s the war,’ Katie agreed knowledgeably. ‘It’s changed things so much. If it hadn’t happened and we’d met I’d have heard you speaking and decided you were too posh to want to know me, without even thinking about what you might be like as a person. Before the war, we all knew our place and we stuck to it, but now the war has put so many of us into a different place and with different people that we have to get on with. We all have to pull together, and out of that friendships are being made that never would have before. It’s divided us all in a different kind of way–those of us who get stuck in and get on with things, and those who try to cling to the old ways.’

‘Well said, Katie, and we’re all the better for that,’ Gina applauded Katie’s speech. ‘I’m glad to see that you’re putting the hurt that chap of yours caused you behind you as well. Good for you. You’ve got such a kind heart, Katie, and I’m not surprised that the powers that be have promoted you. Now the other girls can turn to you for advice on whether or not they need to refer letters
they have concerns about to their table leaders. You have a natural ability to draw people to you that makes them feel comfortable confiding in you.’

Katie blushed a little. ‘I am pleased with my promotion. I just hope that I do a good job.’

‘You will,’ Gina assured her confidently.

They had the discussion about the coming weekend in the canteen over lunch. When they got back to their desks, to find their head of table waiting for them, they exchanged silent looks.

‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ she told them both promptly. ‘It’s just that you’ve had a pair of visitors, male, and in uniform and with official permission to call and see you. If you go to reception you’ll find them waiting there for you.’

‘Who?’

‘Who?’

When they both spoke at once, they exchanged another look.

‘I can’t tell you any more, because I don’t have that information. All I do know is that they have official authority to speak to you, so if I were you I’d look lively and go and see them.’

‘Who on earth can it be, do you suppose?’ Gina asked Katie as they hurried to obey their superior.

‘And why do they want to see us?’ Katie’s question was more anxious and less curious than Gina’s, but then Katie had not forgotten the disquiet and discomfort she had felt over the whole issue of her Liverpool colleague and friend’s insistence on getting too pally with the young Irishmen they had met at the Grafton Dance Hall. Katie wasn’t aware now of having done anything ‘wrong’ that might
be damaging to national security, but she still felt worried.

However, when they reached the reception area and she saw exactly who was waiting for them, looking so very smart in their naval uniforms and attracting admiring glances from the women toing and froing through the reception area, her anxiety vanished.

‘It’s those naval men from Bath,’ she whispered unnecessarily to Gina. ‘Captain Towers and Lieutenant Spencer.’

Although he had the more junior ranking, it was the lieutenant who stepped forward to greet them and to explain the purpose of their visit.

‘The Royal Navy is so grateful to you for saving my life, my services to them being, of course, ir-replaceable,’ he paused with a mischievous look in his eyes, ‘that they have sent us here to pass on their thanks in person via a dinner date at—’

The captain, who had so far stood back, now shook his head and told him drily, ‘Somehow I don’t think they’re going to fall for that line, Eddie–they’re far too intelligent.’

He turned to the girls. ‘We do want to thank you. As I mentioned in Bath, Eddie here is my cousin, and I’d have had to face a real telling-off from our shared grandmother if anything had happened to him.’

‘I’m her favourite,’ the lieutenant announced smugly.

Katie couldn’t help but laugh. The lieutenant, although quite obviously an accomplished flirt and used to getting away with the most outrageous behaviour, was nevertheless good fun.

‘Eddie here has just been pronounced fit to return to active service, and as we are both on leave at the moment, we would appreciate it very much if you would allow us to take you both out to dinner as a thank you for what you did for him.’

Gina looked at Katie. ‘What do you think? On the one hand we would probably get a decent dinner, but on the other we’d have to put up with the company of these two to get it.’

Gina was so clever knowing just the right note to strike, Katie thought admiringly as she guessed from her friend’s manner that she was happy to accept the invitation as long as she herself felt the same.

‘A decent dinner sounds very tempting,’ Katie answered, echoing Gina’s own tone.

Gina’s small nod of the head told Katie that she had given the right answer, and Gina was smiling when she turned to the captain and told him, ‘Dinner it is.’

‘Excellent.’ The lieutenant looked buoyant. ‘How does the Savoy sound? We can pick you up and—’

‘The Savoy would be very acceptable, but we will meet you there,’ Gina told him firmly.

Within ten minutes it was all arranged. Katie and Gina would meet the captain and the lieutenant at seven o’clock on Saturday evening at the Savoy, to be their guests for the hotel’s Saturday evening dinner dance.

‘I hope they realise that they may not be able to get tickets,’ Katie told Gina, as they made their way back to their desks.

‘Something tells me that they will get them by hook or by crook,’ was Gina’s answer.

Katie wasn’t the least bit romantically interested in either of the naval men but it had been fun to banter with the lieutenant. A little bit guiltily she recognised that the few minutes of fun they had shared with the men had lifted her spirits and that she was looking forward to Saturday evening. Even so …

‘You don’t think we’ve given them the wrong impression, do you?’ she asked Gina, her hand on the door to their workroom.

‘Not for a minute,’ Gina reassured her, adding wryly, ‘Mind you, if you want my opinion I reckon that the lieutenant’s the sort who doesn’t need any kind of encouragement–not that either of us gave him any, but my guess is that the captain is cut from a different sort of cloth, even though they are cousins, and that he will make sure that the lieutenant toes the line and behaves as he ought. Of course, if you’re having second thoughts …’

‘No,’ Katie admitted a bit self-consciously. ‘To be honest, I’m rather looking forward to it, although …’ She looked uncertainly at Gina. Katie knew that whilst she liked the idea of having fun, she certainly didn’t want that ‘fun’ to include anything ‘romantic’ or, even worse, having to deal with a man who behaved like an octopus, with his hands everywhere and one purpose on his mind, but she wasn’t sure how to say as much to Gina, and felt able only to add rather weakly, ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to go out with one of them on my own, but seeing as we’re both going it should be fun.’

‘I think we pretty much share the same opinion,’ Gina smiled. ‘One hint of any funny business and we’re leaving, right?’

‘Right!’ Katie agreed with real relief and gratitude that Gina had been confident enough to speak so frankly.

‘Bella?’

Bella tensed as the door to her office opened and Lena peered round it.

‘It’s such a lovely sunny day I was wondering if you and your mum would like to come round and have tea with us today. It would save you cooking.’

With every word Lena said Bella could feel her tension growing.

‘I can’t,’ she told her abruptly. ‘I’m far too busy.’ Bella bent her head over the papers on her desk, hoping that Lena would take the hint and go away.

Instead Lena protested, ‘But, Bella, you worked all weekend, and …’

Bella had had enough. Her teeth were gritted, the knuckles showing white where she had gripped her hands into tight fists in an attempt to control her emotions. Her nails bit into her palms, but she didn’t care. She deserved that pain; she wanted it and welcomed it even though it could nowhere near mirror the depth of pain that Jan must have known in his last precious minutes of life, his plane shot down, burning as it screamed towards the sea, Jan himself probably on fire as well. A shudder of anguish shook her whole body.

Lena rushed to her side to a protective arm around her shoulders, as she whispered, ‘Bella …’

Bella tensed her body against Lena’s sympathy. It wasn’t what she wanted. Lena wasn’t who she wanted.

‘I’ve got work to do, Lena,’ she repeated fiercely, ‘and so have you.’

This time Lena took the hint, closing the door quietly behind her as she left Bella’s office.

It was June. Outside the sun was shining. From the nursery she could hear the children’s voices mingling with those of her nursing staff. A bee was droning dizzily, no doubt heavy with pollen, as it worked the yellow flowers of the laburnum tree outside her office window. Despite the war, people were trying to make the best of things and look forward to the summer. Government notices urging people to ‘Holiday at Home’ seemed to be posted everywhere, alongside posters from local councils advertising the events they were planning to entertain people, the business of everyday life humming as busily around her as the bee was humming around the laburnum racemes, but Bella felt completely removed from it all, as though it was happening in a different world, a world she no longer wanted to inhabit. Her world was different: a wasteland of might-have-beens, of wasted opportunities and dead dreams; a world of coldness so icy that it burned her heart, a world in which she was frozen for perpetuity.

She had lost Jan, and not just lost him but failed him and their love. He might have written to her that he understood, he might have tried to spare
her with his gentle and loving words, telling her that he believed she had done the right thing, but she knew better, she knew the truth. She had betrayed him and their love.

How different things would have been, how differently she could have felt if only she had had the strength to put their love first; if only she had gone to him, with him, given herself wholly and completely to him, and shared with him that most precious gift of love and intimacy. But instead she had behaved like a coward, putting the views of others–of society, of her employers–putting herself and her status, her respectability within that society before Jan’s need of her, and now she was having to pay the price for that selfishness. That was why she couldn’t accept the sympathy Lena was trying to offer her, why she couldn’t allow herself the relief of tears; because she did not deserve either of those things.

Instead she must suffer. She deserved to suffer because of what she had made Jan suffer, because of what she had denied him and let him die without. How could she claim to love him and yet not have known that his need must come first? Wherever he was now he must be looking at her in sorrow and reproach, perhaps even in contempt too, for her lack of courage and for the way in which she had failed him and their love. And because of what? Because she had wanted to be seen as moral and respectable, because her pride could not bear for her to be dragged back down to what she had seen as her old unworthy self, her old selfish, selfobsessed self. How blinded she had been by that
pride. How cruel and thoughtless, and yes, how selfish she had been in not putting Jan first. Instead she had cloaked that selfishness in ‘moral right', and in doing so she had lost the opportunity to give him the gift of her love, to cherish him and perhaps, in doing so, to keep him safe.

Pain gripped her, shuddering through her body. That was the hardest guilt of all to bear, torturing herself with the belief that, had she put her hand in his, had they gone to bed together, then he would not have died, because his sense of duty to her, and to the child they might have created together might have made him more cautious.

His letter to her, so loving and forgiving, held in its words the true essence of the man he had been, compassionate, strong, heroic, a man of the type this country would need so desperately once the war was over, a man who now, thanks to her, was lost to them all.

She could never forgive herself. She must never forgive herself.

Katie and Gina had had a lovely afternoon in Hyde Park, having decided, in view of the fact that they had agreed to go out with the captain and the lieutenant, to put off their river boat trip until another weekend, just in case they couldn’t get back in time.

Now, at five o’clock, having enjoyed a cup of tea, they were walking arm in arm down Sloane Street, towards Katie’s billet, Gina having disclosed that she lived not very far away from Cadogan Place herself, ‘in a small flat that actually belongs to an aunt of my father’s, but which she’s allowing me to use. It was her
pied-à-terre
for when she visited London. She’s widowed now, and she finds the damage the German bombs have done to the city too upsetting to want to visit very often. Her husband was an architect, and she’s rather passionate about buildings.’