When the Lights Go on Again (18 page)

‘At least your mother isn’t likely to come back to say goodbye to me,’ Jan murmured as he bent his head to kiss her.

Bella’s mother had not approved of their marriage. Not that Bella cared about that.

‘We’re lucky that Muriel from next door came round and took Mummy to the church Christmas fair with her.’

It had been pure heaven to spend the final couple of hours of Jan’s precious leave up here in her bedroom, in bed. The room had last been decorated before the war, with pink and blue striped wallpaper overprinted with deeper pink roses, the curtains matching the wallpaper, and the pink carpet. It was a girl’s bedroom, the pink sateen eiderdown looking ridiculous against Jan’s tanned muscled body.

‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ Bella whispered to him as she kissed him. She wouldn’t tell him that she feared for him. He would know that. Nor would she tell him that she still sometimes had nightmares about him being shot down and becoming a prisoner of war again. Fighting men
needed their womenfolk to be strong for them, so instead of crying Bella smoothed Jan’s dark hair back off his forehead and told herself how very, very lucky she was.

It was only ten o’clock and the private club they’d got into, thanks to Lucky Fairweather, the well-connected and very vivacious strawberry-blonde American ATA pilot, who was holding court in one of the leather upholstered booths that filled the back wall, was seething with a mass of young men and women, all of whom seemed to have heard about the club ‘from a pal’.

As she sipped her drink – a shandy, having refused the offer of an American beer to drink from the bottle – Lou, who had somehow or other got separated from June, found herself part of a group that included several American ATA pilots all trying to out-do one another, ‘shooting a line’ about their hair-raising flying activities.

In ATA such boasting was looked down on, as well as being against their code of practice, and Lou found herself growing increasingly irritated as she listened to one particular American pilot, who was boasting about buzzing unsuspecting ground-based vehicles.

‘You should have seen the look on the face of
this farmer guy when I dropped down out of the sky heading for him. He ran for his life.’

Unable to stop herself, Lou commented coolly, ‘I dare say he did. Anyone who has lived in this country through the blitz would have done the same thing. It’s easy to laugh at people when you haven’t been through what they have, easy, and something you Americans seem to be very good at.’

For a moment there was silence and then the girl who had been boasting threw back her head and told Lou cockily, ‘Very good just about sums us up, as you Brits will find out when we win this war for you.’

‘A war you didn’t want to join until the Japanese pushed you into it,’ Lou pointed out.

The American’s face was flushed with anger. Did she think she was the only one who didn’t want to hear her country or her countrymen run down and made out to be cowards, Lou wondered grimly.

The other girl took a step towards Lou, her manner openly aggressive, as she raised her beer bottle to her lips.

‘Seems like you and me are going to have a little war of our own going on,’ she told Lou once she had finished drinking and wiped her hand over her mouth.

Lou didn’t like the direction the situation was taking but she wasn’t going to back down, not with the American saying what she had about them winning the war. The other girl was plainly spoiling for a verbal fight and Lou was inwardly relieved
when the girl next to her tugged on the sleeve of the low-necked dress she was wearing and told her, ‘Don’t look now, Patti, but that good-looking RAF flight lieutenant you were making eyes at last night has just come in, and he’s looking right over here.’

Automatically Lou looked towards the entrance to the club, her heart thudding into her ribs as she realised that the ‘good-looking RAF flight lieutenant was Kieran Mallory. Why did he have to keep turning up in her life when he was the last person she wanted to keep bumping in to?

The American raised her hand and called out, ‘Hey, Kieran, honey, over here.’

Now was her chance to escape, Lou decided, but as she turned to move away the American turned back towards her, grabbing hold of Lou’s arm and telling her, ‘You and me have got unfinished business that I won’t be forgetting.’

Lou tried to pull away but the other girl wouldn’t let go of her, and then Kieran and a couple of other RAF pilots had joined the group, Kieran’s frown in Lou’s direction making it plain to her exactly what he thought about her being there.

His curt and demanding, ‘Lou, what are you doing here?’ caused the American girl to give Lou a narrow-eyed look of increased dislike.

Lou cursed under her breath and responded firmly, ‘What do you think I’m doing here? I’m on leave and I’m having a good time, just like everyone else.’

‘You two know each other?’ The American’s voice was cold and sharp.

‘We’re both from Liverpool,’ Kieran answered her without taking his gaze off Lou.

Quite what would have happened if June hadn’t suddenly appeared at her side, Lou didn’t want to think. The American girl’s hostility towards her had grown with every second that Kieran’s attention was on Lou.

‘There you are!’ June exclaimed, plainly oblivious to the tension. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Those two Spitfire boys we met up with earlier are waiting for their dance.’

Lou was only too glad to escape, even if it did mean dancing with a young pilot who had two left feet, both of which he kept putting down on top of her own.

‘Have you seen how much some of the girls are drinking?’ June asked Lou, round-eyed when they had finally returned to the table they were sharing with several other girls from their hotel, some American and some British. ‘Tonight’s been a real eye-opener, I can tell you. I mean, I like a good time, but some of the things that are going on here…I heard a couple of girls openly talking about going back to their rooms with a couple of men they’d only just met. Who was that girl you were standing with when I came over, only she’s just danced past us and she was really giving you the evil eye?’

‘She’s an American pilot who can’t resist shooting a line about her flying skills,’ Lou answered June, pulling a face and adding, ‘You know the type.’

Several of the other girls, who had been dancing, returned to their table, one of them, Nadine,
announcing, ‘We’re all being treated to a free drink.’

‘Who from?’ June asked

‘An old friend of mine.’

When the drinks arrived, beer in bottles, Lou was tempted to refuse, but when Nadine told her firmly, ‘This is yours, Lou: ginger beer, a special order, since you’re not much of a drinker,’ she felt obliged to pick up the bottle instead and thank her.

Kieran watched Lou from the other side of the room. He hadn’t planned on coming to the club tonight, having discovered on previous visits to London that it tended to attract a rowdy ready-for-anything crowd that didn’t really appeal to him, but the others he was with had insisted, and rather than be dubbed a spoilsport he had gone along with what they wanted to do.

He supposed he should have guessed that the loud American girl who had introduced herself to him the previous evening at another party, and who had insisted that he dance with her and return to her table with her, would be someone who would naturally gravitate towards a place like this.

He had no real idea why he should feel it necessary to keep an eye on Lou, it was just inbuilt into him to look after daft kids who couldn’t look after themselves, Kieran decided. Only Lou wasn’t a kid any more, she was a woman. And a very attractive woman, as well. Kieran frowned, caught off guard by the direction his thoughts were taking, and determined to stop them. There were more
than enough pretty girls around for him not to need to think about Lou Campion.

Patti Beauclerk, sitting as close to Kieran as she could, watched Lou with a look of gloating triumph in her eyes.

Patti didn’t like competition from other women – of any kind. The ATA pilot – Lou, Kieran had called her – was going to be very sorry indeed that she had crossed her.

It had been a stroke of luck meeting Nadine at the bar just as she was getting drinks for their table, and pretending that she owed Nadine a round of drinks. No one had seen her slip those amphetamine tablets into Lou’s drink – enough to make her as high as a kite, especially with that double shot of gin she’d put into it as well.

Patti had found out, from a pilot she had got friendly with when she’d first arrived in the country, that some pilots used the amphetamines ahead of a mission, or when they had thought they might have trouble staying awake on night duty. Always eager to prove her reputation for daring, Patti had got hold of some of the tablets and had found out that they gave an added buzz to partying, as well as keeping her awake.

The pilot who had introduced her to them had told her with a wink that he reckoned they were very good for removing inhibition, ‘if you know what I mean.’

She did, of course, and now she was really going to enjoy herself watching Miss High and Mighty show herself up in what she hoped would be a very
spectacular manner indeed, under the influence of the tablets she had dissolved in Lou’s drink.

Lou felt quite extraordinary, caught up in a rush of excitement and euphoria akin to what she normally felt only when she was flying. She couldn’t stop talking, chattering away inconsequentially nineteen to the dozen, and finishing her drink despite its odd taste.

‘Come on’ she urged June, ‘let’s go and dance.’

‘What’s got into you?’ June demanded, laughing when Lou pulled her onto the dance floor in her eagerness to be there. ‘I’ve never seen you like this before.’

‘That’s because we’ve never been on leave in London before,’ Lou told her.

‘You’re turning into a real party girl, and no mistake.’

Lou had stopped listening. All she really wanted to hear was the music, its beat thudding into her senses, making her whole body itch to respond to its demands.

Within minutes of them starting to dance a small space had been cleared around them, Lou’s exhilaration allowing her to overcome her normal reticence as she performed some of the complicated jitterbug moves she and Sasha had learned together.

Frowning slightly, Kieran watched Lou. She was glowing with exuberance, her face flushed, her eyes shining, their pupils huge and dark. The place of the girl she had been dancing with had been taken by a young American who was twirling Lou round
with expertise, spinning her faster and faster, egged on by the crowd watching them.

Lou might be enjoying herself now but, as his mother had told them as children, too much excitement always ended up in tears and upset, and Lou was overexcited. Kieran had seen her dancing on many previous occasions when she and her twin had been practising for the ‘competition’ his uncle Con had set up, but he had never seen her behaving as wildly as she was now, throwing her head back and laughing when her partner threw her around so speedily that the full skirt of her dress flew up, revealing the long slender length of legs Kieran was forced to acknowledge were just about the best he had ever seen.

It was no business of his how Lou behaved, of course, but the way she was behaving was certainly out of character for the girl Kieran remembered.

‘Looks like your friend from home has taken one too many of those pills you flyboys like to take,’ Patti commented meaningfully, unable to resist drawing Kieran’s attention to Lou’s wild behaviour. ‘She should be more careful about what she drinks.’

Patti’s words, said so smugly and with such gloating delight, distracted Kieran’s attention from Lou to Patti herself.

‘I reckon that tomorrow morning she isn’t going to feel anything like as proud of herself as she is right now. In fact, I’ve heard that it’s a dismissal offence for the Brit ATA girls to let the side down and not behave like ladies.’

Kieran knew women – at least as much as any
man could ‘know them’. He knew all about those smug secret little smiles, and the meanings that were hidden in seemingly innocuous little words. He’d grown up witnessing his sisters practising their art, and learning to be young women. He’d witnessed their squabbles, their fallouts with once ‘best friends’, their hostility towards other girls who had offended them in some way only understood by other females.

‘You’ve spiked Lou’s drink,’ he guessed.

Patti was enjoying herself. Kieran’s attention was focused totally on her now.

‘Now why would I go and do something like that?’

‘How many pills did you put in it?’ Kieran demanded.

‘I can’t remember,’ Patti lied.

‘One, two?’

Patti raised an eyebrow and pouted. ‘Why do we have to talk about her? What does it matter how many there were?’

There was something in the way that Kieran was looking at her now that Patti hadn’t expected and certainly didn’t welcome. She wished now that she hadn’t let him guess what she had done, even though at the time it had seemed too delicious a secret to keep to herself.

‘Tell me,’ Kieran insisted grimly.

‘All right, it was three,’ Patti admitted sulkily, ‘although why you should be making such a fuss about it and her I really don’t know.’

Three? Kieran looked towards the dance floor where Lou was being swung off her feet by her
partner. Across the space that divided them their gazes met and somehow as her feet touched the ground Lou missed her step, and lost her balance, tumbling to the floor, and then lying there, too surprised and bemused to make any attempt to get up.

‘What are you doing?’

Ignoring Patti’s outraged demand, Kieran pushed back his chair and got up, striding across the floor to where half a dozen GIs had surrounded Lou and were counting her ‘out’ in the manner of a felled boxer in the ring, whilst Lou herself simply laughed, oblivious to the disapproving looks she was being given by some of the women witnessing what was going on.

Pushing aside the GIs Kieran reached Lou and bent down to haul her to her feet.

‘Kieran…’ Lou was uncomfortably aware of the tight line of Kieran’s mouth. The look on his face rather reminded her of one her father might have given her when she was a wilful teenager.

‘Show’s over boys,’ Kieran told the watching GIs.

‘What are you doing?’ Lou demanded when Kieran started almost to march her off the dance floor. ‘I want to go back and dance some more. I was enjoying myself.’

‘So we could all see,’ Kieran acknowledged. ‘But somehow I don’t think you’d also enjoy waking up tomorrow morning in the bed of one of those GIs, which is what was going to happen.’

His brutal words shocked Lou out of the euphoria that had been gripping her.

‘No, that’s not true,’ she protested. ‘I’d never do anything like that.’ Her head had started to ache and she suddenly felt slightly sick and dizzy, swaying against Kieran.

‘Where are your friends, that girl you came here with?’ Kieran demanded. The best thing he could do for her was hand her over to her friend and tell her what Patti had done, urging her to get Lou back to wherever they were staying and keep her there until the effect of the amphetamines had worn off.

‘They’ve gone,’ Lou told him. ‘June wanted me to go with them but I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep on dancing.’