Chapter 24 #2
‘Oh my God, no,’ he said, horrified. ‘Of course not. That’s not what I meant. I want you and no one else, Stella. I’ve thought about it long enough now. It’s not just an infatuation. You mean everything.’
Everything. She felt as if she was being dipped in melted chocolate. Hot, sweet, delicious. But there was still one obstacle.
‘What about Meg?’
He dropped his head and rested it on her shoulder, as if in despair. She longed to reach up and caress the back of his neck. Finally, he looked up.
‘I have to tell her. But I want to tell her in person. It would be terrible, to tell her in a letter when she’s so far away. But I won’t be able to see her until this war ends.’ He grabbed her hand and held it tight. ‘Would you wait for me, Stella?’
He understood that she could never condone any duplicity. She wouldn’t carry on with him behind Meg’s back. Not even if he had promised to break things off. But she would wait. She would wait until the end of time.
‘Of course,’ she said, and he leaned in to kiss her.
She put up her hands, placing them one on either side of his head to stop him, even though she wanted to feel his mouth on hers more than anything in the world.
Their eyes met, and they looked deep inside each other. ‘Not yet,’ she breathed. ‘Not yet.’
Over the next two years, they entered a strange kind of limbo, where they both knew the pact they’d made with each other but couldn’t share with the outside world.
Stella told no one, not even Mr C. They shared snatched scraps of time when he was between assignments, each of them burning with longing yet holding back.
She knew if she kissed him it wouldn’t stop there, and was grateful that he kept his distance.
She couldn’t respect herself if they’d gone behind Meg’s back.
It would be cruel and spineless. But sometimes she thought that both of them knowing it was only a matter of time was just as bad.
Would Meg be grateful for their restraint, if she knew? Probably not.
The lull after the end of the Blitz came to an abrupt end with the arrival of the V1s – the doodlebugs.
How could something so destructive be given such a comical name?
They were followed by the V2 bombers, with their deadly stealth.
You couldn’t hear them coming, they couldn’t be tracked by radar, they couldn’t be shot down.
They brought another level of terror. It was a game of cat and mouse.
The luck of the draw. A Woolworths store in Deptford was hit.
A hundred and sixty dead. A hundred and sixty people who had been minding their own business looking for furniture polish or new pegs to put on the line.
Her head felt as if it was filled with brick dust from the collapsed buildings.
She was used to walking past people crawling over piles of rubble looking for survivors. She didn’t look twice now.
It was Edwin who gave in, under no pressure from her.
‘It’s never going to end,’ he told her one night when he walked her back to her boarding house.
‘I can’t wait any longer. I’m going to Foxwood tomorrow.
I’m going to tell my family that I’m breaking it off with Meg.
And then I’m going to write to her. This war might last for ever, after all. ’
Stella felt a mixture of fear and elation. This was it. They were going to be together. What would everyone think? Mr C? Would he approve? Edwin’s family – what would they make of her? She was hardly an American heiress.
Edwin could see she was uncertain.
‘Trust me. This is the right thing to do. For everyone. Meg will be all right. We’ll wait a decent amount of time, and then I can introduce you to my family. They will love you. And eventually we’ll live there, Stella. We’ll live at Foxwood, you and me.’
He was so certain, she believed him. Yet when he came back from Foxwood, he was in a curious mood.
She didn’t ask too many questions, but he told her he’d spoken to his father and that he’d written to Meg.
All she wanted was to kiss him at long last, but she sensed he was preoccupied. It felt like a bit of an anti-climax.
‘Let’s go dancing to celebrate,’ he said.
Stella hadn’t felt like dancing. She felt exhausted by the tension of it all.
She was so tired, but she couldn’t let him down.
An hour later they were out in the West End, at the 400 Club in Leicester Square, drinking gin to blot out reality, letting the music take over their souls.
You had to dance each dance as if it was your last. For some people it had been, when the Café de Paris had been hit.
They’d literally dropped dead dancing to Snakehips Johnson and his band, their hearts turned inside out from the force of the explosion. You never knew.
Everyone was bent on dancing and drinking and flirting and kissing, living those brief hours at full throttle with a glorious reckless abandon, for they were all in the lottery.
You didn’t know who might be missing next time you went out, whether they’d been killed in action or the Jerries had made their home or workplace a target.
They were good dancers. She could tell by the way people looked at them with admiration as they spun and twirled.
Stella’s eyes never left Edwin’s, and to look at them you would think they didn’t have a care in the world.
The music muffled her worries and soon he was laughing too, his low mood evaporating.
And at long last they kissed, and it was everything she had dreamed of.
As their lips met, she felt all the clocks in London stop, the Underground come to a standstill, every plane in the sky halt in its tracks as she melted into him and their hearts wrapped themselves around each other.
It was gentle, it was fierce. Slow and sweet, like treacle dropping from a spoon.
If she died now, she would die happy.
Afterwards, at his flat, they made love all night long with a feverish energy left over from the dance floor, wrapped up in their own tempo, an invisible conductor driving them on, deliciously urgent and abandoned.
They stumbled out onto the street just after dawn, her to go back to the boarding house to change for work, him to head for Iceland, both of them lightheaded from lack of sleep.
‘Here,’ Edwin said, slipping the signet ring off his little finger. ‘I’ll get you something proper when I get back. But have this to remember me in the meantime.’ He picked up her right hand and slipped it onto her middle finger. Even then it was a bit big.
She looked down at it, at the funny bird pecking at its breast.
‘I’ll put it on a chain,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to lose it.’
He’d given her his ring. His family ring. He meant it. He really meant it. She was his. He was hers.
It was the last time they saw each other.
Just after two o’clock that afternoon, Stella finished the next chapter. Only three more to go, she thought. She had it all mapped out in a notebook: a page for each chapter, with a brief outline of what happened and the drawing that would go with it. The end was in sight.
What happened next would be out of her control, but she wouldn’t be human if she didn’t allow herself a daydream.
And she didn’t get carried away. She just wanted a house.
A little two-up-two-down to rent on the outskirts of London somewhere.
Nothing grand, just somewhere they could make their own with a decent grammar school nearby for Ted, so he could reach his full potential.
They could come to the boat in summertime, when the canal was at its best. It wasn’t too much to hope for.
A normal life, where she wasn’t hiding herself away for fear of someone putting two and two together and starting to gossip.
Luckily being a war widow was a respectable cover for a woman on her own with a child, so people weren’t too curious, but Ted was looking more and more like his father as he grew up.
She could stop living in fear of someone recognising their similarity if they moved back to London.
It was strange, living with Edwin’s ghost. She’d thought her sadness would fade, but if anything her dreams of him were becoming more vivid.
And during the day, too, she could feel him.
If a gust of air rippled through her hair, she thought it was his fingers.
Or she would get a drift of something that smelled like him: warm toast and turpentine.
And, occasionally, she would hear him whisper or laugh, but it would be the wind whistling down the chimney.
Sometimes at night her body would wake, pulsating with longing.
She yearned for him as much as ever, and when Ted was at school she would be overcome with grief, burying herself in the nest, weeping into the pillows.
She unwound the paper from the typewriter and laid it on the table top to be read through with the rest once she’d picked Ted up from school.
She imagined Edwin congratulating her, urging her on to finish.
Their entire future was tied up in these pages, she thought. With luck, it would change everything.