same,’ said Dulcie, eager to get on with the character-slaying. ‘She’s got no right carrying on the way she does with my boyfriend and her being my sister makes it even worse. Oh, I can’t stand her at times, she’s always been Mum’s favourite and doesn’t she know it.’ Dulcie gave an emphatic nod of her perfectly styled curls and carried on. ‘Edith’s been getting away with all sorts from the minute she was born, Mum can’t see any wrong in her – well, she should look at her through my eyes, that’s all I can say!’
Dulcie was forced to stop talking in order to breathe as they sat together in the beautiful sunshine, David in his wheelchair and she on the wooden seat next to him in the gardens of the hospital where he was staying whilst he recovered from his injuries and subsequent amputation of his lower legs which had been badly damaged when the aircraft he been piloting had been shot down.
He viewed her with grateful amusement. Dulcie, his little cockney sparrow – if sparrow could ever be used to describe a girl as stunningly beautiful as blonde-haired, brown-eyed Dulcie, with her luscious curves combined with a manner that told a man that he’d be very lucky indeed if he ever got close to actually touching those curves. She always cheered him up and took his mind off his own problems when she made him laugh. There were no such things as molehills in Dulcie’s life; all upsets were mountains.
They had known each other since the beginning of the war, when he had been a good-looking young barrister with the world at his feet and a wife-to-be with an eye on his future title. Dulcie had been a shop girl working on the perfume counter at Selfridges and very ready, he knew, to flirt with the fiancé of her upper-class colleague to whom, she later admitted, she had taken a distinct dislike.
Now his wife was, like his lower legs, feet, and most of one arm, destroyed by the cruelties of war. But they weren’t his only injuries; Dulcie was also privy to the information that the damage to his groin would, as far as anyone knew at this stage, prevent him from fathering a child. Such a shame, she thought, as David was one of the most devastatingly handsome men she had ever set eyes on.
Lydia, his wife, lay in her grave, having been caught up in the bombing raid on the Café de Paris where she had been dancing with her current lover, whilst he had lost his legs in the gun battle between his Spitfire and a German Messerschmitt.
Now he was a patient at the famous Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead under the care of the pioneering plastic surgeon Mr Archibald McIndoe, whilst Dulcie worked in a munitions factory and lodged at number 13, Article Row in Holborn, where she lived with the owner of the house, Mrs Olive Robbins, a widow, and her daughter, Tilly, who worked in the Lady Almoner’s office at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Two other girls also rented rooms: Sally, a Liverpudlian nurse who worked at Bart’s, and Agnes, a mouse of a girl who worked in the ticket office at Chancery Lane underground.
In the way that things were now happening during wartime David knew that those girls and the house on Article Row had become Dulcie’s mainstay and he also knew that communities, friendships and relationships destroyed by the war were reformed by its survivors. He also knew Article Row well, as it was very close to the Inns of Court where he had lived and worked before the war and where he intended to return once he left hospital.
‘And as for Wilder …’ Dulcie, aggrieved, was still talking and David realised he had to pay attention. ‘Well, I had a thing or two to say to him, I can tell you, especially after he asked Edith to come dancing with us next week.’
‘London is full of newly arrived Americans from what I’ve heard, Dulcie, why don’t you find yourself one who will treat you better than this Wilder chap?’ David suggested. He knew that she had been dating the American pilot, who had originally come over to England to join the Eagles unit of Americans attached to the RAF, for quite some time. He had never met him, of course, but from the way Dulcie talked about him and his wandering eye, David doubted he would like him very much if he did, and he certainly didn’t approve of the casual, not to say occasionally openly unkind, way in which he treated Dulcie.
‘What?’ Dulcie looked outraged. ‘Give him up and let Edith think she’s won and that Wilder prefers her to me? Never.’ Her response was determined. ‘Edith only wants him because she wants to get one up on me. I said as much to our brother, Rick, when he came home on leave from the desert and he insisted on taking me and Edith to see Mum and Dad.’
‘So your mother has been reunited with Edith, then?’ David said as the hot sun beat down on his face whilst Dulcie dabbed her cheeks with powder.
‘Oh yes,’ Dulcie said, pausing momentarily and looking over her gold compact. ‘Mum was all over her, carrying on as you’d expect. I was completely ignored for the whole afternoon; nobody would have known that it was thanks to me that they’d been reunited. I have the feeling that Edith would have been just as happy to leave her own family in the dark.’
‘What makes you say that?’ David asked, always interested in Dulcie’s chaotic lifestyle.
‘Well, it stands to reason, never once did Mum or Dad ask Edith why she hadn’t made a bit of an effort to find out where they lived after they left London at the beginning of the Blitz.’
‘Well, Edith knew where you lived, surely she could have contacted you?’
‘Exactly,’ said Dulcie with an emphatic nod of her head. ‘That’s precisely what I said, but no, it was all “how wonderful” to see her and Mum called it “a miracle” but did I get one word of gratitude? Not likely! And to think if I hadn’t seen her in the chorus line review they’d still be thinking she was a goner now.’
David’s heart went out to Dulcie knowing, first-hand, what her younger sister was like. He’d met her briefly when she came down to East Grinstead when Dulcie was on one of her regular visits. If he remembered correctly, Edith was a hard-faced, shallow little madam if ever there was one, he thought, concerned only with herself, and from what he could see nowhere near as pretty as Dulcie. He recalled that Edith had soon lost interest in him and the other men on the ward when she realised how badly injured they were.
‘As for letting another American serviceman take me out – and don’t think I haven’t been asked because I have. Many a time I’ve been invited out by some of those that have finally decided to join us in the war.’ Dulcie gave a small, proud toss of her head, seemingly satisfied that she had been stopped in the middle of the street by the new influx of Americans who had been arriving since last January and had become Briton’s active allies since the December bombing of Pearl Harbor.
‘If I was to see anybody else in uniform I think it would have to be one of them Poles, not another American.’ David watched her for a moment. Dulcie talked in a matter-of-fact way about everything, even her love life, which, he thought, was probably more exciting in her own mind than it ever was in real life – not that she didn’t have a wonderful time when she dressed to the nines and went out on the town dancing, but somehow there seemed a vulnerability in Dulcie that he was sure nobody else could see.
‘You’re too good for Wilder, Dulcie, let your sister have him and good riddance to the pair of them.’ David hadn’t intended speaking the words out loud but when he saw the surprised expression on Dulcie’s expertly made-up face he realised that he had done just that.
‘What! Let her have him? She’d crow till the cows came home and no mistake. She’d be on his arm before it had a chance to get cold, that one.’
‘Would that be so awful?’ David felt really sorry for her now. She didn’t deserve this treatment after all she had done for her sister, reuniting her with her family.
‘You bet your sweet potato it would,’ Dulcie said
