isn’t a matter of what I do or don’t like.’
‘Well, it should be,’ Dulcie told him stoutly. ‘Are you really going to get engaged to Miss Iron Knickers?’
‘It’s what my parents and hers expect.’
Dulcie gave him a look. ‘So you’re almost an engaged man but you’ve given me this.’
‘To make up for the unpleasantness this afternoon.’ He paused and then told her, ‘I’m sorry – about not being able to go dancing with you.’
‘Don’t be. I’ve got lads queuing up to dance with me,’ Dulcie told him truthfully, thinking gleefully to herself that being given the vanity case was far better than winning her bet with Lizzie. She just couldn’t wait to see the other girl’s expression when she told her about the case.
‘Where are you going now then?’ she asked him.
‘Like I told you, I’ve got to read some briefs. The senior partner wants my notes on them in chambers first thing on Monday morning.’
‘Chambers?’
‘That’s what they call the . . . the offices that barristers work from. Mine are at Gray’s Inn. ‘Look, I’m sorry but I’ve got to go.’
Before anyone saw them he meant, Dulcie recognised as she saw the quick look he gave over his shoulder. Well, she certainly wasn’t going to ask him to stay.
‘Suit yourself,’ she responded. Then giving him a dismissive shrug, Dulcie turned on her heel and walked away from him without a backward look.
Who’d have thought that he’d buy her the vanity case, she thought gleefully. She certainly hadn’t. Oh, she’d known from the look he’d given her this afternoon that he had a bit of an eye for her, but then she’d known that the first time she’d seen him. But buying her the vanity case . . . That would be one in the eye for Miss Stuck-Up Lydia Whittingham.
She wasn’t going to take her vanity case out with her when she went dancing tomorrow night, though, Dulcie decided, immediately protective of her new acquisition. All sorts went to the Hammersmith Palais and she didn’t want some other girl nicking it when she wasn’t looking. She would take it with her to church on Sunday, though. She couldn’t wait to see Edith’s face when she saw it, Dulcie thought happily, unconcerned both about the fact that a vanity case was hardly the kind of thing one would take to church and the fact that she wasn’t going to win her bet about dancing with David James-Thompson.
For much longer after he had left her than was wise or sensible David was still thinking about Dulcie and the way that talking to her had made him realise how little he wanted the future his parents had planned for him, and how constraining it felt, like wearing someone else’s clothes. But he had no choice; he had to wear them, just as he had to marry Lydia, or risk being labelled a complete cad – something his determined and icily proud mother would never tolerate or accept. Marriage was marriage, and if his was going to be a duty rather than a pleasure, well then, he’d just have to find his pleasure elsewhere. His parents moved in the same social circles as the Whittinghams. They were neighbours, living on the outskirts of the same small market town. He had known Lydia for ever, and his mother had made it plain that she wanted Lydia as her daughter-in-law. Or rather, that she wanted the money Lydia’s mother would inherit to come into their own family. His parents were comfortably off but not as well off as his mother would have liked. Her own grandmother had had country connections to the aristocracy, and she was an out-and-out snob, who never lost an opportunity to make it plain that she felt she had married down in marrying David’s father.
Until now David hadn’t really given much thought about whether or not he actually wanted to marry Lydia. Marriage was marriage, and marrying the right sort of girl was something a chap just did. When it came to having fun, that fun was something one found discreetly outside one’s marriage and away from one’s home. David was someone who liked living on the surface of life, skimming it like a pebble skimming across a flat calm pool. The emotional turmoil and danger of the depths that lay below that surface held no interest or appeal for him. He was obliging and easy-going, preferring to pay lip service to what he was supposed to do, rather than challenge the status quo. He preferred amusing flirtations to passionate affairs, risqué conversation to risqué relationships, going with the flow rather than swimming against it. Dulcie tempted him but she was a temptation he could easily resist because she was the sort who would cause him trouble. Meeting her this evening had merely been an impulse decision, his gift to her something that amused him, just as she did. As they went their separate ways David reflected cheerfully, that he would probably not even be able to recall her name in a month’s time.
It was gone midnight according to the illuminated face of Tilly’s alarm clock, and she and Agnes should have been asleep, but instead they were lying in their separate beds in the darkness facing one another as they whispered excitedly about their promised shopping trip. Olive, having given in to maternal love, had agreed that they could make the longer journey to the Portobello Road Market.
The Portobello Market. Tilly hugged her excitement and delight to herself, enjoying the grown-up feeling it gave her that her mother had accepted her argument that travelling to it could be cost effective in the end, given that they were bound to have a wider choice of fabrics, and possibly at better prices.
Typically, Nancy next door had nearly brought an end to Tilly’s hopes, when the proposed shopping trip had been mentioned to her and she had sniffed in that disparaging way she had and said that you wouldn’t get her travelling all that way just to get a length of fabric, adding for good measure that she’d heard that half the stalls in Portobello Road sold things that had been acquired illegally. Tilly had held her breath whilst Nancy had been sounding off over the garden fence to her mother but, to her delight, Olive had merely nodded her head and then told her and Agnes, once Nancy had disappeared, that they might as well take a look along the Portobello Market, even if in the end they ended up buying something from Leather Lane.
Tilly knew exactly what kind of new dress she wanted: one that was properly grown up. The kind of dress that someone like Dulcie’s brother, Rick, would see a girl wearing and immediately want to ask her out. Quite what shape and colour that dress would be Tilly hadn’t made up her mind yet, she just knew that it had to be a magical, special kind of dress that would transform her from a girl into a young woman.
Not that she’d said anything about that to her mother. Instinctively Tilly knew that Olive might not agree with Tilly’s own plans for her new dress, and that a certain amount of coaxing and pleading might be required in order for her to get what she wanted. One thing Tilly did know, though, and that was that it would be far more exciting and much more fun looking for fabric for her dress at the Portobello Market than it would be in dull familiar Leather Lane. Thanks to Dulcie the Portobello Market had taken on an allure of glamour and excitement, the sort of place, in Tilly’s vivid imagination at least, where all sorts of enticingly new things might happen. Like finding the perfect fabric for THE dress. The one that she would come downstairs in and that Rick, who would just happen to be visiting number 13 to see his sister, would see her in. He would look up at her with the kind of bedazzled expression she had seen on the faces of heroes at the cinema. She would smile graciously at him whilst she finished descending the stairs, and then . . . Tilly’s heart gave a thump of mingled excitement and apprehension at the romantic possibilities of such a scenario (her mother would, of course, be at a WVS meeting and thus not there to witness the scene and possibly banish Tilly back to her room), which was so intense that she had to cover her heart with her hand to calm it down.
Agnes’s ecstatic whispered, ‘Oh, Tilly, I’m so happy I could burst,’ echoed Tilly’s own feelings so exactly that she reached across the narrow space between
