you know best, Dulcie,’ David said with a hint of resignation, as he didn’t like to see her so upset like this.
‘And you’ll never guess what she did last week. She only sent Wilder a free ticket for her new show. Just the one ticket, mind, and Wilder is so trusting he probably thought she’d forgotten to send me one. I said to him, when I saw it fall out of his pocket, that she was trying to get her claws into him and he wanted to beware of her tricks to get him alone.’
‘Good for you,’ said David, realising how naïve Dulcie really was, now he’d been privileged enough to see beneath her brittle exterior. ‘What did you do after that?’ Just listening to Dulcie somehow eased the nagging, ever-present pain in his phantom lower legs. Other people might accuse her of being self-obsessed and even sometimes uncaring but David welcomed the fact that she didn’t make any emotional allowances for him, or treat him as though a part of his brain had been damaged along with his legs.
‘I ripped the ticket into a hundred pieces, that’s what I did.’ Her expression was one of relish, he noted, and then suddenly it changed to a frown when she looked up into the pale blue sky and announced, ‘That sun’s going to be in my eyes any minute now, here, let me turn you round so I can see you properly.’ Dulcie got up from the wooden bench and flipped David’s brake with her foot so she could get a better view of him.
‘Has that mother of yours been in to see you recently?’
David gave a little half-laugh. Nobody else would ask something as directly as Dulcie did, nor with such candour. ‘No, I told her not to come. What’s the point? We can’t agree on anything. She can’t forgive me for not giving her a grandson and heir when it was still within my power to do so.’
‘She can’t hold it against you now, David.’ Dulcie was horrified.
‘You don’t know my mother,’ he said grimly. ‘Furthermore, I cannot forgive her for caring more about the title than she does about her own flesh and blood.’
‘Your mother sounds every bit as stuck-up as your wife Lydia was, if you don’t mind me saying. Serves them both right that neither of them got what they wanted in the end.’
David knew that Dulcie didn’t mean to sound unkind. She was just upset on his behalf, and as she turned his wheelchair around he could hear the regret in her voice. At least she was honest in her emotions, he thought, unlike his mother and his late wife.
As the summer sun rose in the sky and cast its scorching rays at the hottest time of the day, Dulcie asked David if he would prefer to go inside and he agreed. He didn’t want to add sunstroke to his list of ailments, he laughed. It didn’t take Dulcie long to settle him into the chair at the side of his bed; she prided herself at getting quite good at the exercise and was pleased that David had every faith in her ability to move him from his wheelchair to the chair or bed. Nobody had ever trusted her that much before.
Once he was settled she poured him a glass of water and unconsciously examined her perfect oval talons for any sign of breakage, her eyes widening when she said suddenly, continuing their earlier conversation as if she’d never had an interruption, ‘I told her straight, I said, “Edith, you lay one paw on my Wilder and there will be trouble,” and she got the gist.’
‘And will she?’ David looked thoroughly amused. ‘Lay her paws on him, I mean.’
‘She wouldn’t dare, I’d scratch her eyes out.’ Dulcie let his obvious cynicism sail over her perfectly curled blonde head.
‘I think you would, too.’ David could hold in his mirth no longer and laughed aloud. ‘Only someone as beautiful as you could say a thing like that and make it sound inevitable, Dulcie. You are such a tonic.’
‘Why thank you, kind sir, I do agree.’ She, too, laughed now. ‘Oh, you are such a good friend, David,’ she said eventually, ‘but you’ve delighted me long enough and I must be off.’ She gathered her bag and gloves from the bed. ‘I’ll see you soon, don’t go home without letting me know what day, I don’t want to waste my time coming all the way down here to see just anybody.’
‘Heaven forfend, Dulcie.’ David’s remark was laced with a tinge of irony but it was lost on her as she bent and gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek.
‘What would I do without you to pour my heart out to, David? Now, have you got Olive’s address?’
‘You gave it to me earlier,’ David smiled, nodding to the piece of paper as Dulcie fussed around the bed, uncharacteristically straightening the cover where she had been sitting – he knew she wouldn’t want people to think she was a slut and couldn’t tidy up after herself.
David nodded, but before he could say anything Dulcie, with swaying hips and the clip-clip heels of her ankle-band peep-toed shoes, moved towards the door at the end of the nightingale ward. When she reached it she turned and blew him a kiss and waved.
‘Toodle-oo for now,’ she mouthed, not waiting to see David raise his one good arm and wave back.
THREE
In the woods beyond the hospital, one of Dulcie’s fellow lodgers, Sally, was walking with her fiancé, New Zealander George Laidlaw. Sally’s two-year-old half-sister, Alice, was between them as, securely, they each held one of her hands.
Sally and George had originally met when she had left Liverpool to work as a nurse at Bart’s hospital in London where George had been training as a registrar. George was now working in East Grinstead under Archibald McIndoe. When the war was finally over they planned to marry and live in New Zealand close to George’s parents.
‘Have you had no word yet from Callum about us adopting Alice when we get married?’ asked George over the child’s head.
‘Not yet,’ Sally answered. ‘I’m not sure where his ship is and it may be difficult to get post to him. But I don’t think he’ll object, he wants what’s best for her, that he brought her straight to me when her parents were killed goes to prove it.’ A small shadow crossed Sally’s face. She had been adamant she would have nothing to do with her orphaned half-sister when Callum brought her late that night. After all, it was Callum’s sister, Morag, who had been her best friend before betraying her in the worst possible way by marrying Sally’s father within months of his wife’s death and had then become pregnant with Alice.
It had come as a great shock and Sally, usually so caring, was determined that Alice should be handed over to the authorities and put into a children’s home. Olive, her wonderful landlady, had taken over in that gentle way she had and before she knew what had happened for sure, Sally discovered the little girl had found a place in her heart.
Now she couldn’t envisage a life without her any more than she could imagine one without her darling, steady and caring George, whom she loved so very much. It seemed laughable that she had once had a youthful crush on Callum, who’d been a school teacher before joining the Royal Navy, imagining herself in love with him.
‘Swing!’ Alice commanded firmly, bringing Sally out of her reverie and causing the two adults to exchange understanding looks before obliging the toddler and lifting her off her feet in a swinging motion that had her laughing with innocent delight before demanding, ‘More, Georgie, more …’
Georgie was her own special name for George and it never failed to touch Sally’s heart to see how much the little girl adored
