My Sweet Valentine (31 page)

Sally’s mouth tightened.

‘You and I are all Alice has got now. She’s your half-sister and my niece. She’s our responsibility. I was there when they dug her out of what was left of the house. I’d gone straight there as soon as I could when my ship docked in Liverpool. The damage to the city is appalling, but even so, I hadn’t expected …’

The grief Sally could hear in his voice caused her heart to thump painfully.

‘Half the road had gone, even the cherry trees.’

There was a huge hard lump in Sally’s throat. Her mother had loved the pink blossom that had filled the branches of the cherry trees in the spring. Whenever
she thought of her home it was those trees she visualised.

‘All of it flattened,’ Callum was continuing grimly, ‘but somehow Alice was saved. Someone had heard her crying beneath the rubble. They’d been digging for over two hours when I got there. I never thought … To find that she was unharmed … I’ve spoken with the authorities in Liverpool. They’re overwhelmed with people to look after following the bombing, especially orphaned children. They were relieved when I told them that Alice had two close blood relatives, especially when I told them that one of them is a nurse.’

The baby was Sally’s half-sister, and the handsome naval officer’s sister had obviously been married to Sally’s father, and not with Sally’s approval, Dulcie reckoned.

Sally might be trembling inside with the pain that Callum’s brief description of the scene of destruction caused her but she wasn’t going to let him see that.

‘The child is nothing to me,’ she told him. ‘I told my father when he married your sister that I no longer considered myself to be his daughter. The child is nothing to me. I want you both to leave.’

‘You can’t mean that. Alice has no one else. I’ve got to rejoin my ship tonight. They’ve only given me extra leave so that I could bring Alice to you. She’s still a baby, Sally, unable to speak for herself. I can’t believe that you mean to turn your back on her. Your mother would never have wanted you to do that.’

‘You dare to mention my mother to me?’

Dulcie had never seen Sally so fired up.

‘Your sister stole my father from my mother whilst
she was dying and this … this child is the result of that betrayal. Take her away, Callum. There’s bound to be an orphanage that will take her.’

‘I don’t believe you mean that. You’re in shock at the moment, and I’m sorry to have been the bearer of such bad news. I know how much your father meant to you.’

‘Once, before he betrayed my mother, but not since then.’

As though Sally hadn’t spoken Callum continued, ‘I have to go.’ He stood up and carried the baby over to Sally, almost forcing her into Sally’s unwilling arms, and then bending his head briefly to kiss Alice, his voice soft as he told her, ‘I’ll be back, little one,’ before straightening up to step back as though somehow he knew that, despite her anger and aversion, it would be impossible for Sally physically to reject someone so vulnerable, no matter what was in her heart.

By the time Sally’s brain had taken on board that the soft warm weight she was holding was the child she desperately wanted to repudiate, Callum had reached the front door.

Hurrying after him, hampered by the fact that she was holding the baby, Sally could only watch as he opened the door and then walked out. She wanted to run after him and thrust the child at him as he had done her. She wanted to tell him to take it away and that he had no right to have done what he had done, but there was a huge, aching, raw place in her heart, like the bomb crater that she suspected must now be her childhood home, caused by the news that her father was dead.

The baby started to cry, her face growing red as huge
tears rolled down her cheeks and the sound of her wails grew in intensity.

Coming out of the kitchen, Dulcie closed the front door. ‘Well, that’s a turn-up for the book, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You having a baby sister, and not ever saying a word about it.’

Dulcie had to raise her voice over the frantic pitch of the baby’s cries.

‘Poor little mite’s probably missing her mum and dad. Here, give her to me,’ she ordered. ‘No wonder she’s yelling, you holding her like that. She’s probably hungry as well. Let’s hope that that Callum had the sense to put a bottle and some formula in that case he’s left. Go and have a look, will you, Sally, whilst I try and settle her down a bit?’

‘She’s not staying,’ Sally told Dulcie. ‘She’s nothing to do with me and I don’t want her to be.’ And yet she was still doing as Dulcie had suggested and opening the case, which was packed with baby clothes and nappies, all of them thick with brick dust. Inside her head Sally had an unwanted image of them being collected from the detritus of the destroyed house. She’d seen it so often, after all, here in London: people picking through the rubble looking for their belongings.

‘Hurry up with that bottle, will you, Sally?’ Dulcie urged her. ‘There it is, look, and the formula with it.’

Numbly Sally put them on the worktop next to the sink, and then watched distantly as Dulcie deftly washed the bottle and the teat with hot water from the kettle, and then prepared a bottle of warm formula with one hand whilst holding the baby with the other. She expertly settled Alice in the crook of her one arm whilst testing
the heat of the formula on the bare skin of the crook of her elbow where she’d pushed up her cardigan sleeve.

Seeing Sally watching her, Dulcie scoffed, ‘There’s no need to look so surprised. You might be a nurse, but you can’t grow up in the East End and not know how to look after a baby, which is more than you seem to know.’

Immediately she was given the bottle the baby started to suck hungrily. Settling herself in a chair, Dulcie took advantage of the situation to ask casually, ‘Make us a fresh cup of tea, will you, Sally? I’m fair parched.’ Adding, ‘I’ll tell you what, that Callum of yours is a good-looker. Mind you, I always think that a naval uniform makes a man look handsome.’

‘He is not my Callum. He’s nothing to do with me,’ Sally denied.

‘His sister was married to your dad, wasn’t she, so that makes him related to you, doesn’t it?’ Dulcie challenged her, shifting Alice’s weight to a more comfortable position and smiling back at her when the baby smiled up.

And that was how Olive, who had met Agnes walking up the street, found them when she walked into the kitchen after her WVS meeting.

‘Don’t look at me,’ Dulcie told her. ‘She’s got nothing to do with me. I’m only giving her a bottle on account of Sally not knowing what to do. Oh, and I hope you can find a half-decent nappy in that case, Sally, ’cos she’s going to need changing pretty soon and I’m not doing that.’

‘Callum brought her,’ Sally told Olive.

Olive knew all about her family history. Sally had confided in her when Callum had turned up on the doorstep on another occasion, hoping to persuade Sally to make her peace with her father.

‘Her … my father and her mother are gone. The house was bombed.’

‘Poor little mite almost bought it herself,’ Dulcie told Olive. ‘Only got saved because her dad’s body was protecting her. Sally here and that Callum are all she’s got left now.’

‘She’s nothing to do with me,’ Sally insisted. ‘I’m sorry about this, Olive. I’ll find somewhere suitable for her as quickly as I can. Matron might know of a suitable orphanage.’

‘An orphanage? Oh, Sally, no, please don’t.’

They could all hear the shock in Agnes’s voice, and Olive’s tender heart ached for her, and for Sally. And if she was honest it ached for the small defenceless baby that was now drifting contently off to sleep in Dulcie’s arms as well.

Olive looked from Agnes’s anxious face, her eyes filled with tears, to Sally’s, which was so set and yet, at the same time, so shocked, guessing just what both girls would be going through, and why, and decided that for now it was best that she took control.

‘I think that the thing to do right now would be for the baby to stay here.’

‘No!’

‘Oh, yes.’

Sally and Agnes spoke together and then looked at one another.

‘Alice isn’t Olive’s responsibility, Agnes,’ said Sally
determinedly, ‘and she isn’t going to be mine either. If Callum wants to keep her then it’s up to him to sort something out, not bring her here to me. How can I take care of her, even if I wanted to, which I don’t? I’m a nurse. I’m working. There’s nowhere for her to sleep. She’s barely got any clothes or nappies. No, no, she—’

‘As to that, Sally,’ Olive stopped her, ‘I’m sure between us all we can manage to find the time to look after her. For now she can sleep in my room, as I agree that it’s not possible for you to look after her with the shifts you work. I’ll turn out a drawer and we’ll make her a bed in that. I’ll have a word with Mrs Windle about sorting out some clothes for her. I dare say that Callum will come back for her as soon as he can. He obviously cares about her. No, Sally,’ Olive insisted firmly when Sally looked as though she was about to protest again, ‘I do know how you feel about … about what happened, and your father, but right now you’re in no fit state to make any kind of proper decision. Not after the news you’ve just had,’ Olive told her gently.

To her disgust, Sally discovered that she badly wanted to cry. That was the trouble when people were kind and nice to you when you had to harden your heart against those emotions. They were too much for you to bear. Her father, dead. It shocked her that she should feel so much pain and such an acute sense of loss, when since she had discovered his relationship with Morag, she had cut herself off from him emotionally. She didn’t want to feel like this, just as she didn’t want to feel that raw ache inside her that Agnes’s emotional outburst had caused her. The baby – she refused to use her name – would be far better off in an orphanage and with people who could
look after her properly. She could write to Callum, care of the navy, telling him where the baby was and he could then make his own arrangements for her. He had had no right to barge into her life in the way he had and dump the child on her. George would agree with her about that.

George
. For the first time since she had seen Callum standing in the doorway holding Alice, Sally realised what problems the arrival of her half-sister were going to cause her. George, after all, knew nothing about Alice’s existence, never mind the events that had led to Sally’s alienation from her father.

‘Dulcie, can you keep hold of the baby – does she have a name?’

‘Alice.’

Sally looked at Dulcie as they both spoke the name together. She hadn’t intended to say it but somehow she had.

‘Oh, how pretty!’ Olive smiled. ‘If you can keep hold of Alice whilst I go upstairs and sort out somewhere for her to sleep that will be a help.’

‘All right,’ Dulcie agreed, ‘but I can’t sit here with her for long. I’ve got me toenails to varnish.’

Upstairs in her bedroom Olive removed a drawer from the mahogany chest and took the clothes from it. They smelled of lavender from the lavender seeds she had sewn into small scraps of cotton in the autumn after the flowers had finished flowering in the garden.

They could sew together some of the blanket squares the girls knitted in their spare time for the homeless to make a baby blanket, and a sheet folded over with a pillow underneath it would do for Alice’s bed until
they could sort out something else. Olive knew that she couldn’t force Sally to keep the baby if she didn’t want to, but she had to admit that, like Agnes, she didn’t like the thought of her being handed over to an orphanage. Not when there was a houseful of women who could quite easily accommodate the needs of one very-much-in-need baby. Poor little thing. She must be feeling so confused, wondering who they were and what had happened to her mummy and daddy. Olive thought of how she would have felt as a young mother at the thought of her Tilly being orphaned at Alice’s age, and handed over to strangers to bring up. The surge of protective maternal anxiety that filled her confirmed to her that, in insisting to Sally that Alice stayed, she was doing the right thing.

Of course, the situation had to be explained to Tilly and Drew when they came in, Tilly insisting on giving Alice her final feed of the night, once Drew had gone, under instruction from Dulcie. Agnes, well used to looking after the little ones from her time in the orphanage, volunteered to change her nappy, and did so expertly, whilst Olive kept a keen eye on what was going on.

‘I’m really sorry about this,’ Sally apologised to Olive when Olive went up to her bedroom with a cup of tea for her.

‘It isn’t your fault, Sally. How are you feeling?’ Olive asked gently. ‘It must have been a dreadful shock – to hear about your father.’

‘I … I didn’t think that I’d care, but I keep thinking about the way he was when I was growing up.’ Tears
filled her eyes. ‘I know you mean to be kind, Olive, but she can’t stay here. I don’t think I could bear it.’

‘It won’t be for ever, Sally. Callum is bound to come back for her.’

‘That could be months.’

Olive patted her gently on the arm. ‘I do understand how you feel.’

‘How I feel? That’s the whole problem. I don’t want to feel anything. I keep seeing him – my father – inside my head, teaching me to ride my first bicycle. I was so happy then …’

‘You were lucky to have such loving parents, Sally,’ Olive told her, opening the bedroom door to leave.

Olive didn’t say any more, but Sally knew what she had been hinting at. She had had a happy childhood, but Alice wouldn’t, especially if Sally insisted on sending her to an orphanage. But what else could she practically do? And what was she going to say to George?

But then why did she need to say anything? After all he didn’t even know that Alice existed, and since she was going to send her to an orphanage there was no need for him to know, was there? It made good sense all round. She couldn’t keep Alice, even if she wanted to do so. She worked shifts, and she lived in one room, which she rented. Olive was a kind and a generous landlady but even if she, Sally, wanted to keep her half-sister, she couldn’t imagine that Olive or the other girls were going to be happy about having a baby around all the time, never mind be obliged to get involved in her care.