Where the Heart Is (34 page)

Back in uniform, but not back here in Liverpool, where Jean could see him and hold him, and assure herself that he was as whole and well as he said.

Christmas Eve, and Rainbow Corner was frantically busy. So busy, in fact, that Katie had been asked if she could possibly work over Christmas and New Year. She’d agreed with an enthusiasm she
would never have expected herself to feel on that first dank November evening when she’d walked uncertainly into the building, accompanied by her supervisor, to be interviewed by a somewhat intimidating American Red Cross official who had made her feel as though she would never quite be good enough to mix with their GI customers.

Once she had started her voluntary work, though, Katie had discovered that Carla Wannafeld’s bark was much worse than her bite and, rather shamefully, that the American had good reason to suspect the motives of some of the British girls who were so ready to welcome the American military.

‘Homely’ pursuits were not exactly what members of the so-called Piccadilly Commandos, those women who hung around Piccadilly eager to entice GIs to part with their money in return for ‘sexual favours', had in mind when they approached American men on leave, and Katie could quite understand why the American Red Cross ladies, on behalf of the mothers, wives and girlfriends ‘back home’ would want to vet any young woman coming into contact with their men.

For some girls the embargo on those who worked at Rainbow Corner ‘dating’ its customers might prove onerous, but for Katie it was a bonus.

One of Katie’s main jobs was to be on hand to answer the GIs’ many questions, which ranged from advice as to what shows to see, to enquiries about the denominations of English money, and covered everything in between. Katie had got used now to the arrows in the lobby–one pointing to
Leicester Square, one to Berlin, and a third to New York, just as she had got used to American accents, the smell of donuts and hot coffee, hamburgers, hash browns, waffles and sodas, and the juke box pumping out favourite American songs.

The Rainbow was designed to be a real home from home for Americans, where they could get a haircut, a shoe shine, a bed to sleep off a heavy night, and where they could play pool, watch a boxing match or teach willing British partners how to jitterbug at the Rainbow’s five-nights-a-week dances. As Katie loved to dance, partnering young Americans in the kind of energetic dancing they favoured was fun, but far and away her favourite job was sitting downstairs close to the coffee bar, helping Irene Whittaker in her self-imposed task of providing an instant sewing and darning service.

As Irene had warned Katie the first time she had sat down to help her, as much as anything else, the young men who came to their table to have tears mended, socks darned or stripes and insignia stitched on, wanted someone they could talk to just as they might have talked to their mothers and their sisters at home whilst they were engaged in the same homely task. That was the part of her voluntary work that Katie most enjoyed: listening to the young men who sat beside her whilst she worked on the sewing task they had handed her, telling her about their home lives and those they had left behind, unburdening themselves to her in the safe privacy of the calm environment Katie created around herself, whilst she put in the occasional encouraging word where required.

It was amazing the number of young men who came back to her to tell her how much they had appreciated her ‘advice', when all she had actually done was listen to them. Without her planning for it to happen, Rainbow Corner was, Katie recognised, becoming the antidote to her own pain. She had lost count of the number of requests she had had to ‘save a dance for me won’t you, honey’ for the New Year’s Eve dance, or how many gifts of sweets, cigarettes and stockings she had been offered and firmly turned away.

The New Year would soon be with them, and Katie was going to step into it with a determination to make a fresh start.

‘Got a minute, Campion?’

The sound of Verity Maitland’s voice had Lou straightening up from the engine on which she had been working and climbing out of the cockpit of the Lancaster. She stepped out of the hangar and into the afternoon daylight, shielding her eyes from the sun as she did so.

She’d seen Verity Maitland on several occasions since her first visit, although normally the ATA pilot only had time for a passing nod of recognition on her way to either deliver or pick up new aircraft.

Verity tugged the strap of her helmet free and sighed with relief as she let it drop to the floor along with her leather gauntlets.

‘Beastly things, and so damned ugly.’

She was wearing the same RAF-issue leather flying jacket that the RAF pilots wore, and looked
enviably dashing, Lou thought, glancing down at her own oil-stained, slightly oversized overalls.

‘Thought I should let you know that if you’re still interested in flying, ATA is recruiting for pilots,’ Verity told Lou once she had offered Lou a cigarette, which she refused, and then took herself one. As always, Verity’s nails were painted a glamorous shade of red. Lou felt like hiding her own hands, which were stained with engine oil.

‘With Bomber Command and all the fighter units at full stretch, we’re having to transport more and more planes, and further afield,’ Verity continued, before drawing on her cigarette and then exhaling.

Lou’s heart, which had soared with excitement, dropped back against her ribs with sickening disappointment as she remembered a few realities.

‘ATA only take girls with flying experience and I haven’t got any.’

‘That was the case,’ Verity agreed, ‘but now there’s been a rethink from on high. We’re training girls up from scratch, and the WAAF is one of the places where we looking for them. But of course the girls most likely to get onto the training courses are those who are recommended because they show promise or already have some of the skills that are needed.’ Verity stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette and announced, ‘If you were to be interested then I’m prepared to recommend you.’

If she was interested? Lou felt as though she’d just been handed the very best Christmas present in the whole world.

‘It would be a dream come true for me,’
she admitted, not sure if she was shivering slightly because she was excited or because of the cold sharp wind whistling round the corner of the hangar.

‘Well, though I’d stop off here on my way home for Christmas and see if you wanted the chance to apply. After all, if it wasn’t for you, my bro certainly wouldn’t be sitting down to Christmas dinner with the family tomorrow. I can’t promise anything, mind, but it never hurts to put a few words in the right ears, and as a family we certainly owe you that.’

Verity was already pulling her leather helmet back on over her curls and picking up her gauntlets, obviously getting ready to leave.

Lou was torn between feeling proud and listening to her conscience, and in the end her conscience won.

‘I wouldn’t want to be put forward for something I’m not up to,’ she felt obliged to say.

‘There’s no question of that,’ Verity assured her. ‘We always need good flight engineers, so if for some reason we can’t get you on board as a trainee pilot then we could think about getting you drafted over to us as an engineer. If we could get you based at White Waltham, for instance, then we could start you off with a few unofficial flying lessons and then get you transferred onto a proper training course. You’d be better off based there, or at Barton-le-Clay near Luton, for that matter, because that’s where they do the training courses. I dare you’ll have picked up a few tips from working here?’

Lou could only agree. It was true, after all. She had learned a lot from watching the flying instructors in training being put through their paces, ready to train up the RAF’s new pilots.

‘So what do you say?’ Verity asked. ‘Do you want me to put your name forward?’

‘Oh, yes please.’

‘Good-oh. I’ll drop a word in the right ears and get things started. Should warn you, though, that you’ll probably come up against a good deal of flak from some of the RAF flight crews. Most of them are decent sorts, but you do get some that don’t think women should fly planes.’

Long after Verity’s plane had disappeared, and she was back in the hangar working on the Lancaster, Lou was still lost in bemused disbelief. She was going to get the chance to become a pilot. If Sasha had been here then the very best way Lou could have shown how she was feeling would have been for the two or them to burst into one of their favourite energetic jitterbug dance routines to celebrate. But Sasha wasn’t here, and even if she had been Sasha wouldn’t have understood how Lou felt, and nor probably would her family, Lou reminded herself, especially her mother, who would worry and imagine all sorts of terrible fates overcoming her.

It was sometimes difficult to deal with what war did to relationships, Lou acknowledged. She longed to share her exciting news with those closest to her–her family–but she knew already that she wouldn’t in order to protect them.

* * *

The last thing on Emily’s mind as she opened her back door was Con, her estranged husband, and the marriage that had brought her so much heartache and humiliation. But Con was the first person she saw as she stepped into her kitchen. There he was, as large as life, taking all the heat from the Aga as he stood in front of it whilst Wilhelm and Tommy stood together to one side of him, Wilhelm’s hand resting protectively on Tommy’s shoulder.

The blood came and went in Emily’s face, registering her shock at Con’s unexpected and most definitely unwanted presence.

Con was equally surprised by Emily, although for a different reason. The wife he had despised and mocked so much had been transformed in the time they had been apart into a slender not half bad-looking woman, he realised. Con, who had been passing the time whilst he waited for Emily to return imagining how easy it was going to be to sweet-talk her into doing what he wanted, was taken aback to see the way that she looked at the German POW. Con knew exactly what that kind of soft-eyed tender look from a woman to a man meant. He’d been on the receiving end of enough of them from a wide variety of women over the years, after all.

He was taken aback and not at all pleased. So that was the way the wind was blowing, was it? Well, if some ruddy POW thought he was going to step in and get what was rightfully Con’s he was going to learn his mistake and so was Emily. Con judged all men by his own standards, and he
knew there was only one thing that he’d have been going round to a woman’s house for: cosying up to her. It was obvious to him that the ruddy German POW had been sniffing around Emily, and Emily, of course, was daft enough to be taken in by him. Well, she could have her POW if she wanted, and her kid, but she was going to have to pay for having them, Con decided grimly. And the five hundred pounds he intended to get off her now would only be the start of it; enough to get Ed Mulligan and the rest off his back, and give him a bit of breathing space. Con reckoned that the best thing he could do would be to have a fresh start–in London, perhaps–but fresh starts took planning, and money.

‘Well, here’s a fine thing. I come all this way to visit my wife and I find she’s got a ruddy German POW making himself at home,’ Con accused Emily grimly, ignoring the fact that she was still holding her shopping, so that it was Tommy who came to help her, relieving her of the heavy bags.

Emily felt too mortified to look at Wilhelm, far more concerned about his reaction to Con than she was about Con’s to him.

Normally Wilhelm would have taken the shopping from her, but with Con being here he’d naturally hold back, expecting her husband to help her. Some hope of that, Emily thought bitterly.

She couldn’t imagine what Wilhelm must be thinking. Well, she could, but she didn’t want to. It was her own fault. She should have told him about Con properly and let him know just what the situation was. Not that she’d meant to deceive
anyone, of course; the thought horrified her. The truth was, she realised, feeling both miserable and guilty, that she’d been so happy, both to be away from Con and in her own life, that it had been easier for her to simply ‘forget’ that Con even existed. She’d never spoken about him, not because she had wanted people to think she was free, but because she had never really thought about him. Now, though, she could see that she should have said something.

It wasn’t just Con’s presence that was worrying her. It was why he had come. She knew Con well. Only one thing could have brought him here and Emily knew exactly what it was. He wanted something, and in Emily’s experience that something could only be money.

‘I’d like to know what the authorities have to say about a ruddy German POW acting like’s got a right to be here.’

Con’s voice was as ugly as the words he had spoken. Con might be good-looking but inside he was ugly, Emily knew. Ugly and mean and selfish.

Tommy, bless him, had moved closer to her whilst Con had been speaking, obviously wanting to protect her. He’d grown taller and stronger since they’d left Liverpool but he was still only a boy and no match for Con. Emily instinctively stepped forward to half-screen him from Con’s vengeful gaze.

‘Wilhelm has been looking after the vegetable garden for us,’ she spoke up determinedly. Con could have as high an opinion of himself as he liked, but she certainly didn’t share it, and she
certainly wasn’t going to allow Con to insult Wilhelm, who had done nothing wrong.

‘Oh, he has, has he?’ Con sneered, obviously not in the least bit calmed by her words. ‘Well, I reckon that the vegetable garden isn’t all he’s bin taking care of.’

Before Emily could even react to his accusation, he continued, ‘You and me need to have a talk, ‘cos I’ve got a few things I want to say to you, in private. So you can hop it, mate,’ he told Wilhelm.

‘I do not go anywhere until Emily tells me to go,’ Wilhelm responded staunchly.

Emily’s heart swelled with pride at Wilhelm’s response. She looked at him with gratitude. He had every right to turn his back on her and walk away from her in disgust, and the fact that he wanted to stay–for her sake–despite the way that Con had insulted him only confirmed what Emily already knew: that Wilhelm was a true gentleman and knight in shining armour.