Where the Heart Is (40 page)

Half an hour later, having brought the plane safely, if somewhat bumpily, down, Lou climbed out of the cockpit, dragging her parachute and its harness with her, feeling both apprehensive and euphoric. Euphoric because she had actually flown, and apprehensive because she was expecting her instructor to tear her performance to pieces.

Pushing back her goggles, Lou stood anxiously in her overalls and helmet, waiting for his appraisal, not sure whether to feel relieved or disappointed when he merely nodded his head and dismissed her.

‘Well, that’s that then, I suppose. I always told him that he’d come to a bad end, the way he carried on.’

Emily listened quietly to Con’s sister, Alice, with the morning sun pouring into the quiet hospital waiting room, understanding that her apparent lack of concern for Con’s death came not from
not caring but from her shock at the unexpectedness of it.

Poor Alice. She had lost her husband before the war and now she had lost her brother as well.

Emily thought she’d have been shocked too if she’d been summoned from her bed to be told that Con was in hospital and not expected to survive the night.

It was strange in a way that the two of them should be here like this, supporting one another, just as they had both supported Con through his last hours, sitting either side of his bed, waiting for what they knew to be inevitable, since they had never really got on as sisters-in-law.

Alice Mallory, Con’s sister, had never wanted him to marry her. She’d said so right from the start, and of course Emily had been hurt by that.

‘He never should have married you. I always said that,’ Alice announced now, as though she had somehow followed the direction of Emily’s own thoughts. She was a raw-boned woman, darkhaired like Con, but without his good looks, the mother of five children, with her eldest son in the RAF. A strong woman; if Con had got the good looks then Alice had got the strength.

‘I knew straight off what he was after, and that it would all end in tears. Not that I haven’t admired you for the way you’ve put up with him. He might be my brother but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know his faults. Always was too fond of women, was Con, and too full of himself. Still, I never thought it would end like this. Him being stabbed through the heart by one of them.’

‘It was an accident,’ Emily told her, repeating what she had already said to the police the previous evening when they had come to the hospital to interview her. ‘She was just play-acting really, wanting to get Con’s attention and make a bit of a fuss. She never meant it to happen.’

‘Well, it has, and it was just as well that you were there to do what had to be done, else he’d have probably died in that ruddy theatre.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she told Emily abruptly. ‘Well, wondering really how you’d feel about him being buried with our mam and dad. There’s a space there, you see, unless you wanted him with your parents so that you—’

‘No. I think that’s a good idea,’ Emily assured her hastily.

‘What about the church and that? Do you want me to sort it all out, seeing as you’re living in Whitchurch now?’

‘Why don’t we do it together?’ Emily suggested. ‘I’d like to give him the kind of send-off he’d have wanted, you know, a …’

‘A proper wake, you mean? Well, it will be that all right, if all them girls of his turn up,’ Alice told her with dark humour.

They looked at one another in mutual understanding.

‘You’ve been a proper brick and no mistake,’ Alice sniffed, reaching for her handkerchief. ‘I reckon Con was a fool not to have realised how lucky he was to have you, but then that was Con all over, wasn’t it?’

* * *

Poor Con, Emily reflected later when she was finally on board the train what would take her back to Whitchurch. Everything had happened so fast that it was still hard to believe that he was actually gone.

Oh, she’d known from the look on the faces of the nurses that he was going to die, but somehow, what with sitting with him, holding his hand, and then later when Alice had arrived trying to help her over the shock, the reality of what was happening had mercifully been pushed to the back of her mind.

The woman whose knife had killed him, Eva, had been in a dreadful state and had needed a doctor herself.

As Emily had said to the police, from what she had seen, Eva hadn’t intended to hurt Con. It had all just been a terrible accident.

Last night, sitting with him whilst he slipped away, Emily had remembered how it had been when she had first met him, how handsome and wonderful she had thought him, and how disappointed she had been when she had realised that all there was to him was just his good looks and his vanity. Poor Con indeed.

‘What’s wrong?’ Francine asked Marcus.

They were having lunch at the Savoy and she’d known the moment he’d stood up from his seat at a table in the bar that something had happened.

‘White lady, please.’ Marcus ordered her favourite cocktail for her from the hovering waiter, before telling her, ‘We’ll talk in a minute, but first please let
me tell you how beautiful you look and how lucky I am.’

‘I’m sure that there can’t be many women here who aren’t looking at me and thinking how lucky I am in having such a good-looking and dashing major as my lunch companion,’ Francine responded with a smile.

Marcus was good-looking, with a pronounced air of masculinity and authority about him, and the right height and bearing to wear a military uniform as it should be worn, but more important than those things, at least to Francine, was the goodness that was inside him, as a person.

She loved him so very much, her love for him growing with every day they spent together. She could see in her own mirror the glow that loving him and being loved back by him was giving her, and yet at the same time Francine knew that, as happy as she was, she was hurting him because she had refused to marry him. Marcus, man of honour that he was, had not returned to the subject of them marrying once she had declared it closed, but Francine knew how he felt.

‘Only this morning in the hairdresser’s she had overheard two other women talking, one of them telling the other, ‘I had told him that there were to be no babies until this war is over, but now, with him about to be posted overseas, I can’t help thinking that I’m being selfish.’

‘Selfish, in not wanting to take the risk of being left alone to bring up a child should the worst happen? My dear, how can you say that?’ her companion had asked.

In response the first woman had answered her quietly, ‘It is selfish, because if Archie doesn’t come back then he and his family have lost the chance to create the next generation for ever, whereas if I lost him, my heart might be broken but I would still, if I wished, be able to remarry and have children. I will survive this war, but Archie may not. I feel I owe it to him to do whatever I can to show him my love and to make him as strong as he can be.’

The women had moved out of earshot then but their conversation had lingered in Francine’s thoughts and her conscience.

Marcus watched Francine. To him she was the most beautiful woman in the whole world. Everything about her was beautiful, from the way she smiled to the way she walked. He had seen the heads turn when she had walked into the bar in her sky-blue silk dress with its little white jacket, her matching sky-blue hat with a white trim perched just so on her dark blonde hair, her slender legs encased in silk stockings, which, like most of her current wardrobe, had been bought when she had been in Cairo.

‘I feel guilty having such pretty things when so many women haven’t,’ she had told Marcus.

But he had shaken his head and told her truthfully, ‘You have earned the right to wear them through your work with ENSA. Not many women would agree to travel so far and in such dangerous conditions to sing to troops in the desert.’

He loved her so much and he was so grateful to her for taking him back, and to Brandon for
making it possible for him to ask her to forgive him. There was nothing he wanted more than her happiness, nothing he wanted more than to give her that happiness and to protect it and her so that she would have it for all time, but he knew that that wasn’t going to be possible. His heart was filled with love for her, and heavy with what he knew he had to tell her.

‘Marcus.’ Francine reached out across the table towards him, pulling off her glove as she laid her hand on the table. Such a small delicate hand, so easily lost when he held it in his own, and yet such a strong hand, holding as it did the will to reach out to others, to help them as she had helped Brandon and as she would help so many more through the foundation Brandon had set up.

After this war had ended there would be much for her to do, and much for him to do also, but first he had another duty to perform.

He took a deep breath and told her, ‘I heard this morning that we’re likely to be posted soon.’

‘Italy?’ Francine guessed. Her gaze was fixed to his.

‘It looks like it.’

Italy, which had to be retaken from the Germans, in the same way that Canadian soldiers had attempted to take Dieppe less than a year ago, only to be repelled; massacred.

‘Can it be done?’

‘It has to be, if we are to win the war.’

‘When … when do you think you will go?’ Her mouth had gone dry, her heart thudding painfully inside her chest, her pain at the thought of losing
him even worse than it had been when she had stood on board the ship sailing from Alexandria, watching him stride away from her.

‘Not for another month, so we shall have some time to—’

‘A month is four weeks. That’s three weeks in which to have our banns read and a week in which we can be married before you leave.’ Francine was speaking quickly, the words falling over one another as she said them hurriedly, not wanting to allow herself to think about them, following instead the agonised cry of her heart, listening only to it, thinking only of Marcus and their love, putting aside superstition and fear, wanting to give him all that she could so that when he left her there would be no regrets, and he would have no doubts about her commitment to him.

For a few seconds Marcus neither moved nor spoke, but then when he asked her, ‘Do you mean it?’ his voice choked with his feelings and his hand gripping hers tightly, Francine immediately felt heart-wrenchingly aware of just how much her words meant to him and achingly guilty for having previously withheld from him what he wanted so much.

When she answered, ‘Yes. It’s what I want more than anything else in the world, Marcus, to be truly yours in every single way,’ she was speaking with the passionate conviction of her own heart and not just out of her love for him, because suddenly and illuminatingly she knew that his happiness was hers; his trust in her, her own in him; his need, her need.

Their hands were still clasped, their fingers interlocking as perfectly and seamlessly as though they were made to be together.

The waiter had reached the table with their drinks. Without taking his gaze from her Marcus told him, ‘We’ve changed our minds. We’ll have champagne, please, instead.’

Bobby was so nervous as he paced the floor of the Campions’ front room. It was a hot day and he was all trussed up in his uniform, his boots so shiny that he could have seen his own reflection in them had he been able to bend that far forward against the collar and tie he was wearing under his battledress jacket. The heat of the late May sunshine wasn’t the cause of his discomfort, though. That was due to the fact that any minute now Sasha’s dad was going to walk in through the door and Bobby was going to have to persuade him to allow him and Sash to get engaged.

He’d been rehearsing what he wanted to say all week, good-naturedly listened to and then coached by his mates in the unit, of which he was the youngest.

The door opened and Bobby’s stomach churned. Sam Campion, Sasha’s father, was the kind of man that other men naturally looked up to and respected, but he was also a bit of a stickler, the kind of man who had strict values and high standards.

Bobby already knew from what Sasha had told him that even though she had won her mother round, Jean Campion had warned her not to get
her hopes up that her father would agree, and, even worse, Bobby’s request to ‘speak’ to him whilst he had leave had meant that Sam had had to give up his Saturday afternoon working on his allotment.

‘Well then, lad,’ Sam greeted Bobby. ‘Mrs Campion says that you’ve got something you want to ask me.’

‘Yes, sir. You see, the thing is that me and Sasha would like, that is, we were wondering if you would …’

‘Come on, lad, spit it out; I’ve got me toms to get watered.’

‘Me and Sasha would like your permission to get engaged.’

Sam Campion was frowning now and Bobby’s heart sank.

‘How old are you, lad?’ Sasha’s father asked him.

‘Twenty-two, sir, almost twenty-three. Plenty old enough to know that Sasha’s the one for me,’ Bobby spoke up determinedly.

‘Mebbe, but is our Sasha old enough to be sure that you’re the one for her? That’s what I have to consider. She’s a few years younger than you.’

‘Sasha told me that Mrs Campion was only seventeen when you and she got engaged,’ Bobby pointed out, remembering what Sasha had told him to say.

‘Told you to say that, did she, Sasha?’

Sam Campion’s astuteness had Bobby flushing up and longing to be able to unfasten the top button of his blouson jacket. He felt as though
the tie he was wearing beneath it was strangling him.

Sam felt a flicker of male sympathy for Bobby. The poor lad was doing his best, obviously coached by Sasha. Not that Sam had anything against him. Sam liked Bobby and got on well with him, and in different circumstances, if Sasha had been a bit older and there hadn’t been a war on, Sam would have given his permission for them to get engaged without any qualms. As it was, it was only thanks to Jean that the lad was here sweating uncomfortably in his uniform and preventing Sam from getting to his allotment at all. She was the one who’d told him that she thought they should relent and agree to Sasha and Bobby getting engaged.

‘She’s not herself at all, Sam,’ she had told him, ‘and I reckon not letting them get engaged will do more harm than good. Bobby’s a decent lad, after all.’