Lovely War(12)

If he’d wanted a goddess of hearth and home, of safe domesticity and simple loyalty, Hephaestus could’ve married Hestia. Maybe he should have. She was single, and by all accounts the cooking was good.

But Hestia could never be . . . Aphrodite. There’s no going back once you’ve known the goddess of love. There is no forgetting. No moving on. No letting go.





APHRODITE


     A Walk—November 24, 1917





I FELT LIKE a mother watching little Junior toddle off to school for the very first time when those two exited J. Lyons tea shop, huddled together against the cold gray morning.

They took Guilford Street to Upper North Street till it became Bow Common Lane. “This way,” Hazel said, “I’ll be less likely to run into anyone I know.”

James’s face fell. “Am I a secret, then?”

Hazel glanced sheepishly at him. “Secrets are fun, aren’t they?”

He said nothing, but tipped his hat low over his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Hazel said after a moment. “I’m new to all this. You shan’t be a secret.” She grinned. “Just last night, Father said I ought to live a little.”

James wanted to hug the man. “If I’m not a secret,” he said, “what am I?”

Hazel’s mind raced. What to say? What words might tumble out in spite of her?

Horses and wagons, noisy motorcars, hawkers, bickering children, haggling shoppers all passed by them on the street, but Hazel and James might as well have been alone on a desert island.

“You’re a brand-new piece of sheet music,” she said slowly, “for a song which, once played, I’d swear I’d always known.”

“Always known” meant something, didn’t it? Clever, clever girl.

She turned her face up toward his and waited for proof that she’d said too much. Opened her heart too much. If his heart had wanted to meet hers halfway, surely he would’ve smiled.

Or had he, only just?

“A piece of sheet music, am I?” he teased. “Makes me rather flat, doesn’t it?” The joke was so terrible, it was perfect.

“I prefer gentlemen who are sharp” was her quick reply.

She got the joke! Of course she did. “There’s nothing ‘new’ about me, Miss Hazel Windicott,” he told her. “I’ve been rolling around Chelmsford for years.”

She shook her head. “No, you haven’t,” she said. “You sprang from the ground.”

“No,” he said simply. “That was you.”

Both of them realized, then, that Hazel’s two hands had found their way inside James’s. The discovery took them both by surprise. Neither remembered having done it.

They hadn’t. That was me. I wasn’t about to be idle, now, was I?

And, no, that was not interfering. Hazel’s hands were cold.

James looked down at the numb fingertips pressed between his own, and instinctively folded the whole bundle under his coat, to the warmth over his heart.

Perhaps, for James, it was his heart, but for Hazel, her hands had just been placed over the muscular chest of a handsome youth who, it seemed, had played an active role in the building trade this past summer. A series of little explosions began firing throughout her brain, and spread quickly elsewhere.

She snatched her hands away—I won’t deny I was irked by this—and groaned.

He closed the distance between them. “What’s the matter?” he cried. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head. “Who are you?” she said. “What are you? I go to a dance, and suddenly I’m sneaking off to meet a young man, and saying things to a perfect stranger that I would never, ever say.” She tapped indignantly at her collarbone. “I am a nice, quiet girl who plays the piano. Mostly for old ladies. And you’ve got me—”

“Kissing a chap you just met on the cheek?”

She covered her eyes with a hand. “Did you have to say that?”

He gently pried her hand away. “It’s all I’ve thought of since.”

Hazel’s innards writhed like Medusa’s hairdo.

I whispered in her ear. “Don’t be afraid of him, Hazel.”

“I’m afraid of you, James Alderidge,” she told him, the naughty girl.

He backed away, palms raised in surrender. The look of dismay on his face broke my heart. Hazel’s, too.

“No,” she said. “You’re a perfect gent. I’m afraid of me when I’m with you.”

“Come with me tomorrow,” he said. “To the Sunday concert at the Royal Albert Hall.”

“All the way over there?”

He shrugged. “What, is it far?”

She shook her head. “You really don’t know London, do you?” She looked up into his dark brown eyes and blinked at all she saw there. She smiled and nodded. “All right, then.”

His dimples flashed. He bent and kissed her forehead.

“There,” he said. “We’re even. Feel better?”

Hazel made her choice. She could be who she ought to be with James. She decided instead to be that terrifying person who she evidently wanted to be.

It was the dimples. Empires have swiveled on less.