it, waving Ted into a chair as she did so.
He looked a decent enough sort, and Sergeant Dawson had spoken well of him. Olive liked the fact that he was concerned about Agnes.
‘I found out what Tilly was planning and I refused to let them go. I’m sorry if you are disappointed at not being able to see Agnes there,’ Olive told Ted as she made the tea.
‘No. I mean, I only went there ’cos I was a bit worried about her. I told her it was a daft idea and that they were bound to get found out,’ Ted announced with male scorn for an ill-thought-out female plan. ‘Told her too she should say summat to you about it and get it knocked on the head, but she said she couldn’t on account of her and your Tilly being friends. Ta,’ he added gratefully when Olive poured him a mug of tea and handed it to him.
Wrapping his cold hands round the mug, he told Olive, ‘Once I’d seen that they weren’t at the Palais I remembered how Agnes had said that she was feared that you might send her packing, her being only a lodger here, so I thought I’d come round just to make sure that you knew what was what.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that Agnes isn’t the sort of girl to break the rules, Ted,’ Olive assured him, touched by his obviously genuine concern for her lodger. ‘I’ve made my feelings about what she’s done very plain to Tilly and there’s no doubt in my mind about where the blame lies.’
‘Well, I dare say it’s natural that she wants to go, it being the best place in London for dancing and everyone going there. I was a bit iffy about it meself until I got inside, Hammersmith being what it is, but the management there know what’s what and there wasn’t any trouble going on inside, that I could see.’
‘That’s very reassuring to know, Ted,’ Olive thanked him gravely, hiding a small smile. Sergeant Dawson had said that Ted helped to look after his younger siblings and she could see that sense of responsibility in him when he talked about the Palais.
Ted drained the last of his tea and stood up.
‘I’ll be on my way then now that I know that Agnes is all right. Thanks for the tea.’
Dulcie tapped her foot irritably on the floor as she watched the three other girls dance off yet again with their partners. Not that she’d have wanted to dance with any of them, not for one minute. She could have been up there on the floor dancing. She’d been asked but she certainly wasn’t going to waste her blue silk frock or herself on any of the no-hopers who’d come up asking her for a dance.
It wasn’t in Dulcie’s nature to question her own actions, never mind find fault with them. It was other people’s fault that she wasn’t dancing, not her own – because there was no one there good enough for her to dance with.
She felt a tap on her shoulder and braced herself, turning round impatiently, the words of sarcastic rejection dying on her lips, her eyes rounding as she looked up into a familiar face, her heart thudding so hard it took her several seconds to vocalise her recognition in an uncharacteristically stunned voice. She stared at the handsome man wearing an RAF uniform, and said in disbelief, ‘You!’
It was David James-Thompson. For a minute she was as shocked as a naïve girl who knew nothing might have been. But, of course, she wasn’t a naïve girl and she had always known that Lydia’s beau was the sort to break the rules, just as she had always known that eventually he would seek her out, she assured herself.
Suddenly the evening was full of promise and excitement, the glitter from the mirror ball twirling over the dance floor and the spotlights reflected in the sparkle of her eyes.
All she allowed herself to say was, ‘You’re in uniform.’
‘You noticed then,’ he teased her. ‘I signed up for the RAF a week ago. Decided I couldn’t bear to stand on the sidelines any longer. Pilot training begins next week.’
The RAF. Far more exciting than if he had joined the army, Dulcie thought approvingly.
‘Thought I’d come on the off chance that you’d be here so we could celebrate together.’
Dulcie was over her shock now, and that fast beating heart had been firmly restored to its normal beat. There was no way she was going to allow him to know how thrilled she’d been to see him.
‘Shouldn’t that be something you’re doing with your fiancée?’ she taunted him instead.
‘Possibly,’ he agreed, unabashed, as he came to sit down beside her, taking the seat that had been Rita’s and turning it round so that he was sitting facing her, his knees brushing against her thigh. ‘Although at the moment she isn’t very pleased with me for joining up. She and my parents think I should have arranged things so that I claimed exemption from military duty. Awfully boring doing that, though, especially when so many other chaps seem to be having so much fun. We like having fun, don’t we, Dulcie?’ he asked her with a knowing smile, reaching for her hand as he did so and then sliding his fingers through hers so that their hands were laced together with an expertise that told her that this wasn’t the first time he had done something so intimate. The very fact that he knew what he was doing made David all the more of a prize and all the more exciting.
‘We’re two of a kind, you and I,’ he told her, his eyes brimming with amusement and appreciation as though he knew what she was thinking.
David watched the battle going on inside Dulcie’s thoughts and reflected in her gaze as caution fought with triumph. He hadn’t intended to come here, after the row with Lydia about him joining up. He’d planned to have dinner with a couple of other chaps who’d enlisted at the same time, and then go on to a nightclub with them, but then suddenly he’d thought of Dulcie and before he’d really known what he was doing he was on his way over here.
She was a looker all right, and classy too, nothing cheap or common about the way she looked. David toyed with the idea of persuading her to leave the dancehall with him. He could take her to one of the quieter and more discreetly managed clubs he knew, somewhere where they could sit in the darkness together, but before he could say anything Dulcie was standing up and tugging impatiently on his hand as she demanded, ‘Well, now that you’re here we’d better dance, hadn’t we?’
At the other end of the dance floor, on the elevated stage with its red curtains, the Joe Loss Orchestra swung into a waltz, and the lights were dipped.
The floor was packed with dancers, giving them no option but to hold each other close. He was a good dancer, leading her confidently, but then he would be, him being posh, Dulcie thought. Really, the two of them looked so good together that they could have had their photographs in one of those gossip columns in the newspapers, which showed you photographs of lords and ladies and the like. She looked far better with him than Lydia would, with her sallow skin and her bad-tempered face with its thin mouth. She wasn’t surprised that David wanted to escape from his fiancée to be with her.
His fiancée. Dancing with another girl’s fiancé was one thing, especially when she disliked that girl as much as she disliked Lydia, but once David was married to Lydia then things would be different. Girls who went out with married men were putting themselves on the wrong side of the respectability line and Dulcie had no intention of ever doing that.
Tilly couldn’t sleep. She knew her mother had come up to bed. She’d heard her familiar footsteps on the stairs and then the opening and closing of her door, followed by the further equally familiar sounds of her mother going to the bathroom and then returning to her room. She’d also heard Sally coming in, humming some tune
