London Belles (24 page)

Olive didn’t miss the challenging tilt of Dulcie’s chin as they exchanged looks. There was nothing she could say, though, not without risking spoiling Tilly’s night, and of course she didn’t want to do that.

Instead she hugged her daughter and then Agnes, telling them truthfully, ‘You all look lovely.’

Within minutes the girls all had their coats on and were going out of the front door, leaving the house feeling very empty and quiet without them.

An hour later Tilly was gazing round the interior of the Palais, still half unable to believe that she was actually here. The packed ballroom had been decorated for Christmas and everyone was in high spirits.

There was a large Christmas tree illuminated with multicoloured fairy lights in the entrance foyer, but well back from the doors so as not to break the blackout laws. Red and green paper garlands decorated the ceiling, coming from the walls to the huge glittering mirror ball suspended over the dance floor, whilst the male bar staff were wearing red waistcoats, and a cheery-looking Father Christmas, escorted by a bevy of pretty girls wearing short red dresses trimmed with white swansdown, went from table to table selling raffle tickets. The whole atmosphere was so exciting and filled with Christmas goodwill and fun that at first Tilly and Agnes could only stand and stare as they tried to take it all in.

‘I never thought it would be like this,’ Tilly gasped in delight. ‘I mean, I knew it would be wonderful . . .’

When she stopped, lost for words, Dulcie informed her knowledgably, ‘Well, it is the best dancehall in London,’ before leading them all speedily to ‘her’ table, a move that Sally recognised was a good one, half an hour later as she looked to where some people were standing watching the dancing and reflected that she herself wouldn’t have fancied standing up all evening. But then, aching feet were something she was familiar with, being a nurse.

Sally was used to the atmosphere of Liverpool’s Grafton Ballroom, but she still had to admit that the Palais was impressive. No one could be here on a night like this and not be infected by the atmosphere of fizzing excitement and energy.

For Tilly, the atmosphere in the ballroom was almost magical, and she gazed round at her surroundings in thrilled delight, half unable to believe that she was actually here. The church hall could never compare with something like this. Her eyes widened as she watched prettily dressed young women and their partners take to the floor. She felt so . . . so grown up and special just being here.

‘Oh, isn’t this wonderful?’ she mouthed to Agnes above the sound of the Joe Loss Orchestra.

‘I hadn’t realised it would be so big or that there’d be so many people here,’ Agnes mouthed back, her own feelings tending more towards apprehension than excitement. She didn’t much like crowds.

A waiter stopped at their table, asking if they wanted drinks.

‘Lemonade for us,’ Sally said firmly, indicating Tilly, Agnes and herself.

‘Yes, and for me as well,’ Dulcie surprised her by agreeing.

The reality was that whilst Dulcie would have a shandy if one was pressed on her, she had seen enough of what too much alcohol could do in her own neighbourhood to want to end up the worse for drink herself. There was Ma Bowker, who lived round the corner from her own parents, the whole family crammed into three rooms they rented in a tenanted house. Ma Bowker liked nothing more than rolling up her sleeves and laying into both her kids and her husband, giving them a real battering when she was in drink. Then there were the husbands who regularly knocked their wives about, and then ‘up’ after too much to drink; men who drank so much of their wages that there wasn’t enough left to feed their families. Dulcie wanted no part of that. Her own father thankfully wasn’t a big drinker. He liked his pint on a Friday and a Saturday, just as he liked his bet at the dogs, but that was all.

There were plenty of women dancing together, Tilly noticed, but when she suggested to Dulcie that they did the same, Dulcie shook her head firmly.

‘It looks like you can’t get a proper partner if you do that, and besides, we won’t be sitting here long. The best-looking girls always get asked to dance.’

As though to prove her point, just as she finished saying this four young men approached their table. However, before they could so much as open their mouths, Dulcie was saying firmly, ‘No, thanks, we aren’t dancing right now. We’re just waiting for our drinks.’

Dulcie’s manner was rather different from what she had expected, Sally had to admit, ruefully.

‘We can do better than that,’ Dulcie explained. ‘Much better. You’ve got to make sure that lads know how lucky they are when you agree to have a dance with them,’ she informed Tilly and Agnes firmly.

Their drinks arrived, delivered by a smiling redwaistcoated waiter, and Sally paid for them using the money Olive had given her for that purpose when she’d asked Sally to keep an eye on what Tilly and Agnes had to drink.

Dulcie had told herself not to expect to see David. She’d achieved her goal and that was that. David might have said that they were two of a kind but Dulcie disagreed. He was posh – a toff – and he’d marry Lydia. To him she was just a bit of fun, a way of breaking the rules before he knuckled down to the right kind of marriage. Dulcie knew that, but she also knew where her own boundaries lay and she wasn’t going to let David cross them. Besides, it made her feel good to realise that he’d rather be with her than Lydia. Lydia might look down her nose at her, but Dulcie could feel she had one up on her because Lydia’s fiancé secretly fancied her. There was no way, though, that she was going to end up as David’s bit on the side. That wasn’t how Dulcie envisaged her future at all. Ultimately she would marry, and the kind of respectable man she wanted as her husband – a man with a good job, perhaps even in an office, who could afford to buy them a house like those in Article Row, or perhaps even in one of those new suburbs she’d seen advertised – would not want a wife who’d been carrying on with other men. Dulcie viewed her planned future without sentiment. All women had to marry – how else could they manage financially? But she was determined that her marriage would give her a better life than her mother and their neighbours had. Dulcie had no illusions about herself. Men would always be attracted to her because of her looks, more the wrong kind of men than the right kind. It was up to her to make sure that when she let the wrong kind, like David, treat her to the good things in life, they did so on the understanding that she was merely trading with them the right to enjoy having a pretty girl on their arm, but not the right to expect sexual favours.

Living in Article Row, like working in Selfridges, was for Dulcie a step in the direction she wanted her life to go. Both conferred on her a certain status that, for all her mother’s boasting about Edith’s singing, allowed Dulcie to feel that she had moved ‘up’ socially from her background. She might milk these benefits for all that she could but there was no way she was going to risk losing them by going too far.

She looked at Tilly, flushed and excited. She had almost pushed Olive too far with that business of Tilly lying to her, Dulcie knew, which was why tonight she intended any report that Sally made back to Olive to be one that showed her in a good light and not a bad one.

To Tilly, filled with the excitement of the evening, simply being at the Palais was initially enough to fill her with happiness, but then eventually, tapping her foot in time to the music became a longing to be up on the floor and dancing.

Then Ted arrived, coming over to their table, to be welcomed by a shyly delighted Agnes, who introduced them.

Dulcie cast one look over Ted’s plain honest face and shiny clean appearance, and immediately dismissed him as unimportant, whilst Sally duly registered Ted’s discreetly protective manner towards Agnes and politeness to everyone else, and mentally agreed with Olive’s judgement that Ted seemed a decent sort.

Ted, for his part, was glad to draw up a seat next to Agnes, and take charge of ordering the girls second drinks, rather than having to suggest that he and Agnes had a dance. He wasn’t much of a dancer. He preferred to sit and watch, and it seemed to him that Agnes was of much the same mind.

The sensation of someone tapping on her shoulder, just as the band struck up for a new dance, had Dulcie stiffening, fighting against the betraying race of her heart, and trying to deny the name that immediately sprang to her lips.

Only the voice in her ear saying, ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ belonged not to David but to her brother, Rick.

‘Rick, you’re home!’ Genuinely pleased, Dulcie turned round to find, not only her brother, but a whole group of other young men in army uniform clustered behind her.

‘Got back this afternoon,’ Rick told her, adding cheerfully, ‘Is it OK if we join you?’ and then calling for his comrades to collect some chairs, without waiting for Dulcie’s reply.

There were five of them all together; Rick; a tow-headed young man with a northern accent, called Ned, who came from Manchester and who Rick said was their corporal; two boys from London, named Ian and Fred; and, a little to Dulcie’s surprise, John Dunham, whose father was the builder for whom her own father sometimes worked.

‘I thought you were going to join the navy,’ she commented when John sat down next to her.

‘I was, until Rick persuaded me to enlist in the army then as luck would have it we ended up in the same regiment – the Middlesex, 7th Battalion,’ he said proudly, ‘and the same company.’

From the minute she had seen Rick, Tilly’s heart had been thumping with excitement and teenage self-consciousness. If anything he looked even more handsome than he had done before, bigger somehow, broader, and very manly and grown up in his uniform, with his dark hair cut close to his scalp. The other men looked shorn and rather forlorn with their short back and sides army-regulation haircuts, but in Rick’s case the short cut only served to emphasise his well-shaped head.

‘Mum won’t be very pleased when she hears you’ve come down here. Not with Edith singing with ENSA,’ Dulcie said somewhat sarcastically as she mimicked their mother’s voice for the last few words.

Typically, though, Rick merely grinned. ‘Yes, I heard all about that the minute I got through the door. Ta, yes, John, I’ll have a beer, thanks,’ he broke off as John was asking what everyone wanted to drink. ‘Ma says that Edith’s got an agent now.’

John was asking what Dulcie wanted to drink now but before she could show off her sophistication by announcing that she’d have a gin and it, Rick was telling his friend cheerfully, ‘She’ll have a shandy, John.’

‘I was going to have a gin and it, ’ Dulcie told him crossly. ‘And as for Edith’s agent, he’s a real spiv, and I told Mum that she was a fool for letting Edith take up with him, but of course she wouldn’t have it. You know what she’s like. She’s always thought that the sun shines out of Edith’s backside and now she thinks the same about this agent.’

‘Ma said that you’re having your Christmas dinner at your lodgings instead of coming home.’

‘Yes. My landlady asked me in particular to have my dinner with them,’ Dulcie fibbed, turning away so that none of the other girls could hear her.

Sally thanked the young corporal who was handing her her drink. She’d been a bit worried at first when Dulcie’s brother had proposed that he and his friends join them, but the respectful manner in which the young soldiers were behaving towards them had calmed her fears. Dulcie’s brother was a very good-looking young man, and it was no wonder that Tilly was looking at him with such admiration, Sally acknowledged ruefully. Once she had probably looked at Callum like that. The pain that thought brought her was swift and savage.

‘What are we doing sitting here when we could be dancing?’ Rick demanded jovially, giving Tilly an appreciative smile. She really was a looker, even if she was a bit on the young side. ‘John, you dance with Dulcie,’ he instructed, ‘but mind she doesn’t step on your toes; she’s got two left feet,’ he teased his sister, before holding out his hand to Tilly.

‘Do you want to take pity on a poor soldier who hasn’t seen a pretty girl in months and dance with him?’ he asked with a warm smile.

Did she? Tilly was speechless with delight.

The corporal asked Sally up, causing Ted to reach for Agnes’s hand and give it a little squeeze when she confided in him, ‘I’m glad it’s you that’s asked me to dance, Ted, because I’m not very good at it at all. Because I was one of the oldest at the orphanage, I always had to be the boy when we did any dancing.’

Two minutes later they were all on the floor, Dulcie proving that she was as light on her feet as a proverbial feather, her steps confidently in perfect time with the music.

When Agnes whispered to him happily, ‘Oh, Ted, you are ever such a good dancer,’ Ted’s chest swelled. Agnes felt so fragile and delicate, like something precious that he wanted to protect from harm. She looked a treat too in her new dress. He just hoped that one of those army lads didn’t step in and catch her eye.

Tilly was in heaven, dancing on clouds of delirious excitement and delight. Never had there been such a wonderful Christmas gift, she thought giddily as Rick swung her expertly through the dance. But all too soon it came to an end, the light dimming to signal the interval between the orchestra’s sessions. Then, just as the dancers were starting to disengage from their partners and drift off the floor, a young man wearing an RAF uniform jumped onto the stage and said something to the band leader, who nodded and then made an announcement.

‘As a special request we’re going to play the last waltz before the interval so that the flight lieutenant can share it with his new fiancée before he has to catch his train and get back on duty.’

Above the laughter and cheers of the crowd, the first strains of a waltz began. Rick had started to move back to their table, but since Tilly was still standing looking at the orchestra, he too stopped moving. The lights were still dimmed, couples swaying together, locked in their own personal worlds. Silently Tilly went into Rick’s arms, trembling slightly when they closed round her. This was beyond heaven, this was . . . there were no words to name it, no previous experiences in her life with which to compare it. This was special, wonderful, a time out of time that would remain with her for the rest of her life, Tilly promised herself fervently as she instinctively moved closer to Rick.