urgently, ‘Have you changed your mind about me? About us? Please tell me that it isn’t true and that you haven’t.’
Somehow or other he had taken possession of her hand and was clasping it between his own.
He was enjoying this, Dulcie could see. ‘You’re overdoing it,’ she told him. A quick look round the cosmetics floor showed her that the other girls were goggling at them from behind their counters, and that Arlene was looking astounded – astounded and envious!
Oddly, though, Dulcie felt less triumphant than she should have. That was because she liked being in control. She did not like someone else grasping the upper hand and directing the things she had planned to direct herself. It made her feel . . . Dulcie didn’t want to think about how it made her feel or about being taken over by someone else, controlled by someone else. Didn’t he realise that he was going too far? All she’d wanted was for him to come in and give the impression that he was keen on her, not act like they were already an item. Now she’d end up having to come up with a reason for them breaking up.
‘The shop will be closing in couple of minutes,’ she told him, wanting to get rid of him so that she could manage the impression he was giving when the other girls asked her the questions she knew they would ask.
His warm, ‘I’ll be waiting for you outside,’ wasn’t the response she’d wanted, but she couldn’t say anything, not with Lizzie standing within hearing distance.
Now he was giving her an openly languishing look, before turning on his heel and heading for the exit, just as the warning bell to customers to leave the store started to ring.
‘Well!’ Lizzie announced as soon as the bell had stopped. ‘Who is he and why haven’t you said anything about him?’
But before Dulcie could answer her, half a dozen of the girls were clustering round her, demanding, ‘Where did you meet him, Dulcie?’ ‘Has he got any brothers?’ ‘Cousins?’
Then Arlene came and joined in, her nose in the air, malice in the look she gave her, before she said, with what Dulcie knew was mock concern, ‘I don’t want to spoil things for you, Dulcie, but your young man looks awfully foreign.’
‘He’s Italian,’ Dulcie responded with a small shrug of her shoulders, as though she herself had never for a moment shared the thoughts she suspected were going through their heads. ‘So what?’
‘An Italian!’ Arlene pretended to marvel, before adding mockingly, ‘I suppose you met him when he sold you an ice cream.’
One of the other girls began to laugh.
‘And the way he speaks . . .’ Arlene rolled her eyes.
‘He’s from Liverpool,’ Dulcie defended Raphael.
‘An Italian from Liverpool.’ Arlene dissolved into fits of laughter. ‘Poor Dulcie, but then I suppose you won’t mind. Sometimes I do wish that my own standards weren’t quite so high.’
‘Don’t pay any attention to Arlene, Dulcie,’ Lizzie said stoutly after she and the others had gone. ‘I thought your young man looked lovely.’
‘He isn’t my young man. He’s just someone I know,’ Dulcie told her crossly. Her plan seemed to have backfired on her, and that was his fault, not hers. If she did find him waiting for her outside then she’d give him a piece of her mind.
Only when she did find him waiting for her outside the staff entrance to the building, Dulcie discovered to her own surprise that her curiosity about why he had turned up in the first place was stronger than her desire to blame him for Arlene’s mockery of her.
However, when he told her in response to her question, ‘I was at a bit of a loose end, so I thought I might as well do you a favour,’ Dulcie was more incensed than grateful.
‘You overdid things,’ she said, ‘and now I’ve had to put up with the Miss Snotty Nose looking down on me even more because of you being Italian.’
They had been walking away from the building as she delivered this attack but now he had stopped walking so that Dulcie was forced to do the same, and the look in his eyes was far from warm as he demanded, ‘Why should the fact that I’m Italian make her look down on you?’
‘Because you aren’t British,’ Dulcie replied irritably. Surely it was obvious to him that him being Italian and foreign, an immigrant, meant that he could never be considered as good as someone who was really British. After all, everyone knew that was how things were.
‘Actually I am British,’ he informed her. ‘I was born in this country, to parents who were also born here, and who, whilst being part of Liverpool’s Italian community, have taken British nationality.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Dulcie said dismissively. ‘You look Italian, and you were with Italians when I saw you.’
‘So I can’t look Italian but be British is that what you are saying?’
Dulcie gave an exasperated sigh. ‘This is boring and I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘It isn’t boring to me,’ he told her grimly. ‘This is my country, a country I have enlisted to fight for and to die for, if necessary, but according to you because of my Italian ancestry I am not good enough for Britain – or for you? My grandfather would enjoy listening to you. It would validate and vindicate everything he believes.’
They had to stop walking for a minute to allow the crowd of people coming the other way to surge past them, giving Dulcie the chance to demand, ‘Your grandfather?’
‘Yes. It is to see him that I am here in London, to see if I can mend a family feud. You see, he abhors the thought of me being British just as much as you abhor the thought of me being Italian.’
‘I don’t abhor it,’ Dulcie defended herself. She’d never heard the word ‘abhor’ before, but she could guess what it meant and she certainly wasn’t going to let him know that it was new to her, she decided. She had to hurry to catch up with him as he strode off. ‘But everyone knows that a girl who isn’t Italian would be plain daft to get involved with an Italian chap when they always marry their own kind. Why doesn’t your grandfather want you to be British?’
A shaft of sunlight beaming down as they crossed a road, highlighted the warm olive tint of Raphael’s skin, catching Dulcie’s attention. Here in the city, its buildings shutting out the sunlight, its dust filling her nose and its war-ready grimness all around her to be seen, that sudden glimpse of healthy vitally alive male flesh brought her an emotion she didn’t understand. And because she didn’t understand it, Dulcie refused to countenance it.
‘Because he believes, as so many of his generation do, that our presence here in Britain is temporary,’ Raphael told her. ‘When he came here it was to work and send money home, to save up so that one day he too could return home. That was his belief and his dream. He and his contempararies do not consider Britain to be their home and their country because in their hearts Italy is that. They are fiercely proud of being Italian and they cling together in their communities because they are afraid if they do not, that they might forget and lose their traditions and their way of life. To Italians, family is all important, and family means not just husband and wife and children, but their whole community, to which they owe their loyalty along with their loyalty to Italy itself.’
He
