to help me. I don’t know what I can do in return, except offer to dance with you. I’m Dulcie, by the way. What’s your name?’
No red-blooded man could possibly resist her. Dulcie waited confidently for his delighted response.
But instead he bent his head and told her calmly, ‘Raphael – Raphael Androtti, and I must say, Dulcie, that I’m surprised that an attractive girl like you needs to pull a trick like that in order to get a dancing partner. What was it? A bet with your girlfriends?’
Dulcie was stunned into momentary silence. No man had ever spoken to her like that before. By rights he ought to be falling over his own feet with gratitude, and what did he mean, describing her merely as attractive? She wasn’t attractive, she was beautiful.
‘No,’ she denied his allegation, telling him crisply – after all, she had nothing to lose now so there was no point in being sugary sweet with him – ‘I don’t need to make bets about getting someone to dance with me, especially not one of your sort.’
‘One of my sort? What’s that supposed to mean?’
His manner was now as hostile as hers was dismissive.
‘You’re Italian,’ she told him, not mincing her words. ‘Everyone knows that the only reason Italian men come down here is because they’re hoping to get from one of us what they know they’d never get from an Italian girl. That’s why no one wants to dance with them.’
‘Except you.’
‘I was just trying to be kind.’
‘How charitable of you, if that were true. But it isn’t, is it? I saw the way you looked at me when you were sitting down. You targeted me deliberately. Why?’
‘No, I did not,’ Dulcie denied furiously.
The Italian gave an exaggerated sigh that lifted and then lowered his impressively broad chest and then told her very slowly, ‘In Liverpool, where I come from, the only reason a girl drops her handbag in front of a man is because she wants him to notice her, and if you’re going to try to convince me that it isn’t the same here, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you that I don’t believe you.’
‘I don’t care what you believe,’ Dulcie snapped.
‘But you did want me to dance with you.’
‘No.’
‘So then why the dropped handbag trick?’
He wasn’t going to stop questioning her until he’d got the answer he wanted, Dulcie recognised, and the only way she was going to get rid of him was by telling him the truth. That way she could satisfy her own pride by making it clear to him that it wasn’t him she was interested in.
‘Someone I work with has recently got married. Her husband – before they were married – was showing a bit too much interest in me, and I thought she’d feel better if she thought I was involved with someone else,’ Dulcie lied smoothly.
‘By seeing you dancing with me?’
‘No,’ Dulcie corrected him. ‘By coming to Selfridges, which is where I work, on the makeup floor. If you’d danced with me and asked to see me again then I could have suggested that you come into the store.’
‘Funny how wrong you can be about a person,’ he told her. ‘Somehow you don’t strike me as the kind of girl who puts another girl’s feelings before her own.’
‘Well, that just shows what a poor judge of character you are,’ Dulcie informed him, before stepping past him and marching back to her chair, her back stiff with disdain.
No one had ever spoken to her as the Italian had done, and now Dulcie was angry with herself for telling him as much as she had done. Still, she’d rather have him knowing the truth, or at least a fictionalised version of it, than have him thinking that she had actually been interested in him as a man. The girls in Liverpool could do what they liked, but at least she’d made clear that in London things were different and that she wasn’t in the least bit interested in getting his attention.
At Barts Sally prepared to finish her shift. She had already worked two hours longer than she should have to help with the influx of wounded soldiers. Of the supposedly walking wounded, many had turned out to have far more serious injuries than they had wanted to admit to.
There’d been an awful lot of cleaning of hastily bandaged wounds to do, a lot of removing shrapnel from men who had borne the probing of tweezers with stoic silence, their tears only coming when they spoke in the darkness of the night about fallen comrades and those who had not made it.
Sally was supposed to have been going to the pictures with George Laidlaw after his own shift finished but when they finally met up in the main entrance to the hospital it was so late and they were both so exhausted that they agreed that a cup of tea at Joe Lyons was all they felt up to.
Their friendship had grown over the months. Sally enjoyed George’s company and, of course, they had a shared interest in talking ‘shop’ and a shared understanding of what it meant to be dealing with young men whose battle scars weren’t always only from their physical wounds.
Sally loved her job and the extra responsibility she had been given, but she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t grieved for those boys who came into the theatre and then left it with their lives saved but far too often without a limb. It would have been hard to talk as openly with anyone else as she could with George about her professional pride in being part of a team that saved lives, but her distress at this being at the cost of an arm or a leg.
‘It’s their acceptance of what they’ve been through that does it for me,’ George told Sally as she poured them each a cup of tea. ‘Some of the tales they have to tell . . .’ He paused and shook his head. But Sally knew what he meant.
‘I had to remove half a dozen pieces of shrapnel from a sergeant tonight who swore that all he’d got was a bit of a cut. He never made a sound, but afterwards he cried like a baby when he was telling me about having to leave a dog he’d befriended behind on the beach.’
‘I had a young lad in, leg badly damaged, and I reckon we’ve been able to save it. He reckons he’d have bled to death but for the medic on the naval vessel that picked him up after the boat he’d been in had been shot to pieces.’
Sally nodded, and then picked up her cup so that she could avoid looking directly at him whilst her heart was still thudding so fast. She was a fool to react like that simply because he’d mentioned a naval vessel. Callum could be anywhere, and anyway, what did it matter to her where he was?
‘Some date this is,’ George was saying ruefully as he reached for her hand.
Sally let him take it, but her thoughts weren’t really with him. His mention of the navy had been as effective at holing her defences as Germany’s torpedoes were at holing British ships. Now the unwanted thoughts she had thought successfully blocked were pouring in. And not just thoughts about Callum. She was acutely aware that the baby Callum had told her about would have been born by now. Her father’s child. Her half-brother or -sister. The child of betrayal and adultery.
No one in Olive’s household was more aware of the number of lives that had been lost than Sally. The newspaper lists of shipping losses were something she made herself avoid. After
