Women on the Home Front: Family Saga 4-Book Collection. Annie GrovesЧитать онлайн книгу.
in her bedroom she looked towards the window, covered with its blackout cloth, as the law decreed. When she had first moved to London she had been afraid that someone from home – her father, Callum or even Morag herself – might try to get in touch with her, but as the weeks had gone by she had begun to feel safer. Nothing could protect her from the pain of what had happened, but at least she had felt protected from fresh misery. Until now.
It was just gone seven thirty when Callum knocked on the door to number 13.
Unable to stay on her own in her room as she had intended, Sally had gone back downstairs to the kitchen where Olive had been putting the final coat of icing on her Christmas cake. Watching her, Sally had immediately been transported back to her childhood and her own mother’s kitchen. Tilly didn’t realise how lucky she was to have her mother, but at least Sally knew what it was to have a mother’s love, unlike poor Agnes, who was perched on a kitchen stool happily helping to cut out red berries and green Christmas trees from the marzipan to which green and red colouring had been added by Tilly as the two girls did their bit towards decorating the cake.
‘I’ll go,’ Olive announced when they all heard the door, putting down in a bowl of hot water the palette knife with which she had been smoothing the royal icing, then removing her apron before heading for the door.
Sally let her go. It was going to take all the emotional and mental strength she had to face Callum.
When Olive opened the door to Sally’s visitor, she felt very much as Tilly had done when she’d first seen him, liking his strong manly features and feeling reassured by his friendly smile. The uniform did its bit to establish him as someone to be trusted, of course. But then Sally had never said that he was someone who could not be trusted, and Olive could well understand why her lodger did not want to see him. She admired Sally’s love and devotion for her late mother and sympathised with her feelings.
Callum’s, ‘I’d like to see Sally if she’ll see me,’ received a small inclination of Olive’s head and a calm, ‘Yes. She is expecting you. If you’d like to come this way . . . ?’
He wasn’t wearing an overcoat, and since she wasn’t sure what the etiquette was with regard to the naval officer’s cap that he was carrying, she didn’t like to offer to relieve him of it.
She showed him into the front room, its gas fire hissing warmly and its green, fern-print curtains drawn over the blackout fabric to give the room an air of cosy warmth.
Olive was very proud of her front parlour. She had redecorated it herself, painting the walls cream, with the picture rail painted the same green as the curtain pelmet. A stylish stepped mirror hung over the fireplace. The linoleum was patterned to look like parquet flooring and over it was a cream, dark red and green patterned carpet. The dark green damask-covered three-piece suite had been a bargain because there’d been a small tear in one of the seat cushions, and on the glass and pale wood coffee table, which was Olive’s pride and joy, was a pretty crystal bowl that had caught her eye in an antique shop just off the Strand.
A radiogram in the same pale wood as the coffee table stood against the back wall behind the sofa, and Olive couldn’t help but give a very satisfied glance around her front room before telling Callum that Sally would be right with him and then whisking through the door.
When Olive opened the hall door into the back room, Sally was already getting up from her chair, her face set and tense.
‘I haven’t offered him a cup of tea or anything,’ Olive began anxiously.
‘No, please don’t,’ Sally begged her. ‘I don’t want to encourage him to stay.’
In the hall outside the front-room door Sally took a deep breath and smoothed her damp palms against the pleats in her neat flecked tweed skirt. She’d bought the skirt on a shopping trip with Morag early on in the autumn before her mother had died. Morag had said how much the heather colours had suited her, bringing out the colour of her eyes, and had persuaded Sally to buy a pretty violet twinset to go with the skirt. She wasn’t wearing that twinset now. Instead she had chosen a plain dark blue blouse.
She took a deep breath and pushed open the door.
Callum was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, his hands folded behind his back. Seeing him in uniform was disconcerting. In her memories of him he was always wearing his patched tweed jacket softened by wear, a Tattersall checked shirt worn with a sleeveless pullover, and a pair of cavalry twill trousers. In his naval uniform he looked taller, stood straighter, the slight scholarly stoop she remembered gone. She looked away from him, aware of the pulse beating in her throat and the unwanted pang of longing seeing him brought her. His cap was on the coffee table.
‘You’re in the navy.’
It was stupid thing to say, but somehow the words had formed and were spoken, sounding, to her own dismay, almost like a reproach, as though she had the right to reproach him for doing something without her knowledge.
‘Yes. Sublieutenant. I’ve just finished my training at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, and I should receive orders as to which ship I’m to join pretty soon.’
He paused and then came towards her, saying, ‘Sally . . .’ Immediately she stepped back from him, holding up her hands as though to ward him off, relieved when he moved away.
‘Your father misses you,’ he told her abruptly, ‘and so too does Morag.’
‘He’s all right?’ Sally couldn’t hold back her anxiety.
Immediately Callum’s smile deepened, as he said reassuringly, ‘Yes, apart from the fact that he misses you.’
Sally stiffened and turned her head away as she told him fiercely, ‘I miss my mother and I always will.’
‘Sally, you aren’t a child,’ he told her in a sharp voice. ‘I can understand your loyalty towards your mother but do you really feel she would want this? For you to cut yourself off from your father?’
‘He cut himself off from her and from me when he married Morag.’
‘You’re being unfair.’
‘I’m being unfair?’ She made a small bitter sound. ‘Morag married my father three months after my mother’s death.’
‘Your mother would never have wanted your father to be alone; she would have understood.’
‘Understood what? That your sister, and my best friend, whom she had treated as another daughter, was offering him the . . . the comfort of an intimate relationship whilst she lay dying? And as for my father being alone, he would have had me. I’d like you to leave. Now. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know why you came here. After all, I’ve made my feelings plain enough. Your sister betrayed our friendship and the kindness my mother showed her.’
‘Your mother encouraged them to be together.’
‘Not in that way! You say that because it’s what you want to believe, because Morag is your sister, but it isn’t the truth.’
‘Because you don’t want it to be the truth? Your mother wanted your father to be happy, to be cared for and loved as she had cared for him and loved him. She told Morag so.’
‘Do you really expect me to believe that? Well, I don’t.’
‘I thought better of you than this, Sally, I really did.’
Now his voice had become colder, sharper, critical, stabbing into the soft vulnerability of her emotions.
‘Just as I thought better of your sister,’ Sally defended herself. ‘Now we’ve both been disappointed. How would you have liked it, Callum, if our positions had been reversed? It’s all very well for you to come here and tell me how I should feel; you’re bound to take Morag’s side.’
‘Sally, it isn’t a matter of taking sides. Your father loves you and misses you. I know you were upset and shocked by their marriage, but surely out of your