Where the Heart Is (31 page)

After Ricky had gone Con had soon convinced himself that the American had been exaggerating, no doubt suffering from jealousy because he was being posted away from Liverpool and the gold mine he and Con had created together. Of course the Americans would still come. How could they not when he, Con, was going to the trouble of setting up a private members’ club for them, not to mention the amount of money it had already cost him? Money that he could only recoup from future gambling wins.

Only they hadn’t come, and now, several weeks down the line, Con was being pressed for money: first of all by the landlord of the run-down property just off Hope Street that Con had been having fitted out as a club when Ricky had given him his news; next, by the spivs he’d been dealing with. The one who’d supplied him with the Jaguar he’d been paying for in instalments had repossessed it, and another, whom he’d asked to source him the fabric for another new suit, had come over quite ugly when Con had told him that he hadn’t got the money. Even worse, Con had got Ed Mulligan, who’d been as friendly as anything with him the
last time Con had seen him, claiming that Con was in arrears with his protection money.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough he’d even got Eva insisting that he’d promised to marry her, and throwing jealous tantrums every time he so much as looked at any of the girls, fingering that knife of hers, and telling him how she was going to stab him with it if she ever found him with another woman again. Looking at pretty girls had always been Con’s major source of solace when times were bad, and now, thanks to Eva’s jealousy–and his fear of her father’s knife–he was even being deprived of that. God knows what Eva would do if she ever found out that he was already married.

He had to get his hands on some money, and fast, but how?

Abruptly Con stopped pacing. The answer to his problems had been staring him in the face! Emily. His wife. She had money and plenty of it. It was all wrong the way she’d taken herself off with that ruddy kid she’d taken in, leaving him, her husband, to fend for himself. Conveniently Con forgot how much having an absent wife had suited him.

Knowing Emily had the money he needed was one thing. Getting it out of her was another. He’d have to go and see her. Where was it she’d gone? Some place in Cheshire; he’d got the address she’d given him somewhere.

It wasn’t in Con’s nature to worry about anything for very long. Except perhaps now Eva’s temper and her constant threats that she would use her father’s knife against him.

They’d all known when Monty had arrived, and then Churchill, that something was brewing. Then the word had gone round that there was no way British soldiers were going to surrender or cross the Suez Canal. Then had come the preparation for a big offensive, using dummy models of tanks and trucks to deceive the enemy and move the men. Last night their battalion, like all the others, had received its full briefing and told what positions it had to take. As experienced desert fighters they had been given command of a strategic position–and the danger that went with it.

Now they’d got a ruddy full moon to deal with on top of ruddy Rommel and his tanks, Luke thought grimly as he went round speaking to his men, checking as he did so that they were well dug in to their positions, ready for what was to come. El Alamein it was called, this train stop in the desert that they’d been pushed back to and somehow hung on to, and from which they were now to mount a huge all-out assault on Rommel’s forces.

The Royal Engineers had cleared the mines the
Germans had laid to allow the units to pass through and now all they had to do was wait.

Once he’d checked up on his men Luke crawled back to his own position, next to Andy.

‘Gawd, I’d give anything for a fag,’ Andy said.

‘A fag, did you say, and or a shag?’ one of the other men demanded with the bawdy licence of men at war.

‘Doesn’t matter much either way,’ someone else chimed in, ‘'cos he won’t be getting either.’

No sooner had he finished speaking than a huge barrage began lighting up the night sky with the flames from the specially placed burning petrol dumps littering the desert.

A lone Stuka dropped its bombs, clearly visible in the moonlit sky. And then it began: the work they had trained for. A skirl of bagpipes from the 51st Highland Division announced the commencement of the infantry’s advance.

‘Come on, men,’ Luke ordered, and soon they too were moving forward at a steady seventy-five strides a minute, bayonets fixed, their task to clear the way for the waiting armoured divisions.

‘The ruddy pipe’s stopped playing,’ Andy yelled in Luke’s ear above the cacophony of war.

‘Keep going,’ Luke told him. He too had registered the burst of machine-gun fire that had silenced the piper’s ‘The Road to the Isles', but it didn’t do to think of such things.

Katie spotted Jean the minute she walked into the elegant room where the Savoy served its afternoon teas. Her ex-landlady was sitting at a table on her
own on the velvet-covered banquette facing the doorway. She was wearing what Katie knew to be her ‘best’ coat and she was sitting bolt upright, her ‘good’ leather handbag clasped tightly on her lap. She had obviously had her hair newly done for the trip to London and, standing observing Jean, a wave of love for her filled Katie, drowning out the discomfort she had been feeling on her way here.

Far more familiar with the Savoy than Jean could ever be, Katie felt no self-consciousness about being here. She had, after all, virtually grown up in the hotel, she had accompanied her father there so often. The refined upper-class voices of some of the women taking tea, the obviously expensive if somewhat war-worn clothes many of them were wearing, the preponderance of uniforms bristling with gold braid, high-status-officer pips and the like, couldn’t daunt her or make her feel out of place. To Katie the Savoy was familiar territory, somewhere that she felt completely at home.

Unlike Jean, who Katie could see was looking uncomfortable and ill at ease. Another surge of emotion swept through her: tenderness, this time, for this woman who had welcomed her into her home and been so kind to her. Smiling, Katie hurried over to the table, her smile widening when she saw Jean’s look of relief when she spotted her.

The two women hugged one another, and then Jean held Katie at arm’s length as she looked at her for a moment before she released her so that they could both sit down.

‘Grace and Seb have taken the others to Madame Tussauds. Lou and Bobby both wanted to go,
although Sasha wasn’t so keen. I said that I wanted to have a bit of a rest. We’ve done that much sightseeing since we got here last night that I feel as though I’ve been walked off me feet. It’s ever such a big place this, Katie. A boarding house would have suited us fine just as long as it was clean, but Francine said that she wanted to give us a bit of a treat. She’s lost Brandon … not that it wasn’t expected,’ Jean added after Katie had immediately offered her sympathy.

‘I’m ever so glad to see you, Katie. I think about you a lot.’

‘I think about you too,’ Katie told her truthfully.

They looked at one another.

‘Have you ordered tea?’ Katie asked her.

‘No. There’s that many people here, and the waiters seem that busy.’

Katie signalled to a passing waiter, who immediately came over to them.

‘We’ll have afternoon tea for two,’ Katie told him, waiting until he had gone to tell Jean, ‘And it’s my treat.’

‘Oh, Katie, I couldn’t possibly let you pay, not at the prices they charge here.’

‘Yes you can,’ Katie told her firmly. ‘Now tell me about Lou and her medal. I’m dying to hear all about it.’

Jean looked at her. ‘Well, of course, I will tell you, but first there’s something I want to say to you, Katie, and that’s how sorry I am about you and our Luke. I couldn’t imagine a girl better suited to him than you. There’s certainly no girl I’d sooner welcome as my daughter-in-law.’

‘Nor any family I’d more want to be a part of,’ Katie admitted to her, ‘but maybe that was part of what went wrong. Maybe I should have thought more about me and Luke getting on together and being a good match, and less about how much I wanted to be part of his family.’

Katie’s admission had been hard for her to make. It had been only recently that she had started to question her motives in wanting to marry Luke, after Gina had been talking to her about her own relationship with Captain Towers, and saying how comfortable she felt with his family, and now important that was, but how easy it was to fall into the trap of loving a man because one loved his family.

Gina’s comments had made Katie think more deeply about her feelings for Luke and his family, and to question whether she would have loved Luke so easily if she had not loved his family so much. And yet there were other times when she missed and ached for Luke himself so much that she could have sworn that she would have loved him for himself, no matter what his family were like.

‘I dare say you’ve met plenty of good-looking young men here in London,’ Jean probed.

Katie wasn’t offended by Jean’s question. She knew that it sprang from love–love for Luke her son, and love for Katie herself.

‘Not really.’

‘So you’ve not been seeing anyone then?’

‘Well, there is someone,’ Katie admitted, ‘but he’s just a pal really. My friend Gina is going out
with his cousin so we double date when the men are on leave, from the navy.

‘You must have been anxious about Luke, with him being out in the desert. I hope he’s all right.’

‘As far as we know. Although with all that you read in the papers about Rommel we can’t help worrying. He hasn’t written to you or anything then, since … well, since … ?’

‘No, there hasn’t been any reason for him to. Not really. I’ve wanted to write to you to ask how he is, but I didn’t want anyone thinking … well, I didn’t want Luke thinking, that I was making a nuisance of myself or anything.’

‘Oh, Katie, you could never do that. I wanted to write to you but Sam didn’t think that I should.’

‘No … he’s right. It wouldn’t be fair to Luke. Tell me about Sasha. You haven’t mentioned her yet. Is she still at the telephone exchange?’

‘Yes, and Grace and Seb are still in Whitchurch.’

Jean picked up her cup and sipped at her tea, and then put it down again, her voice filled with emotion as she said, ‘Oh, Katie love, I do so wish things had worked out better than this, and you and Luke were still engaged.’

Katie couldn’t help it; her own eyes filled with tears as she shook her head and said quietly, ‘So do I, but it isn’t what Luke wishes or wants, and …’

‘Oh, there now, I’ve gone and upset you.’

Jean looked and sounded so upset herself that Katie felt obliged to forced a smile and insist that she was all right.

* * *

It wasn’t true, though. She wasn’t all right, Katie admitted to herself later, after she and Jean had said goodbye and Katie was on her way back to Cadogan Place. She would have to find a way to make herself be, though, otherwise she was going to end up filled with self-pity, and be pitied by others as well, as a girl who hadn’t got the backbone to get over a man who didn’t want her. That certainly wasn’t a picture of herself that Katie wanted to contemplate. Other girls went through the same kind of heartache, after all, and survived it. Some had to survive much worse, with the death of loved ones. Her heartache was nothing when compared with theirs.

What she ought to do was forget that Luke had ever existed or been a part of her life. And what was more, she should start doing it right from this minute. And she should start making a new life for herself as the Katie she now was, not the Katie who had been the fiancée of Luke Campion. She had both dreaded and wanted to see Jean, but now that she had done Katie realised that seeing herself through Jean’s eyes, as someone to feel sorry for–and that was how Jean felt about her, no matter how much she genuinely cared about her–had given her a much-needed jolt. She hadn’t liked knowing that Jean, and no doubt the rest of the Campion family, felt sorry for her; she hadn’t liked it one little bit. If she wanted others to stop feeling sorry for her then the first thing she had to do was stop feeling sorry for herself, Katie told herself firmly.

Lou felt dreadfully nervous. She was sure her hands were sweating, but she didn’t dare try even surreptitiously to wipe her palms on the side of her uniform skirt, not with so many steely official gazes fixed on the line-up of those King George was going to honour.

She was well forward in the queue, which was something of a relief. She would have hated to have been the first, but neither would she have wanted the long wait that would come with being at the tail end.

She had hardly slept, despite the wonderful comfort of the bed in the Savoy’s bedroom she had shared with Sasha, and it hadn’t really helped when both her mother and her sister Grace had told her over breakfast that they hadn’t slept either.

She was glad that her family were here to see her receive her medal from the King, of course, but at the same time she also felt worried in case she muffed something and let them down.

She had said as much to Sasha this morning when they had been alone together in their room,
but Sasha hadn’t seemed to understand. Instead she had shrugged and told Lou sharply, ‘Well, I don’t see why you’re worrying. After all, all you have to do is walk up to the King when you’re told to, and then walk away when he’s given you the medal.’

It wasn’t quite as simple as that, though. For one thing, she had to bob a curtsy and then salute, even though she wasn’t receiving an exclusively military medal, because she would still be in uniform.

It had been Grace who had understood and helped her the most, taking her back to her and Seb’s room after breakfast, so that Seb, a flight lieutenant now in the RAF, could run a military eye over her uniform and generally put her through her paces, whilst Grace’s calm presence had helped to steady her.

Even though she had been told what to expect, nothing had really prepared her for the way she had felt when they had arrived at Buckingham Palace. Whilst her family had been taken to join the other guests, Lou had been escorted to a vast room with a high ceiling, all ornately plastered, the room filled with officials and also people who were going to receive medals, most of them wearing the uniforms of the mainly non-military war service they were with. There were nurses and firemen, WVS, ARP officials, and even a young messenger, along with a handful of people, like her, from the armed forces. A smart-looking Wren of around her own age was standing on her own, but when Lou looked across at her she lifted her nose in the
air and turned away. Lou sighed. Everyone knew that the Wrens considered themselves to be a cut above everyone else. They certainly had the smartest uniform.