The Mersey Daughter (Empire Street #3)(58)

Nancy had signed up to the WVS on a whim, partly to get out of her mother-in-law’s gloomy house, where it got more depressing by the day. Sid’s mother had never exactly been the life and soul of the party, but she’d taken to the role of suffering martyr with a vengeance. Never had sorrow been so loudly and consistently proclaimed. Nancy screwed up her eyes at the very thought of it. All right, so Sid had been a POW almost since the fighting had started, but he was still alive, he was receiving Red Cross parcels and was probably a damned sight safer than most of them were, she told herself crossly. He hadn’t had to endure the Liverpool Blitz for a start and, even though the raids had almost stopped for the time being, who knew when they might begin again? Hitler hadn’t managed to destroy the docks, though not for want of trying, and so they would still be a magnet for the Luftwaffe’s attentions. Sid might be in a cell somewhere – truly Nancy had little idea where he was or what the living conditions might be like – but he wasn’t forced to share a stinking, overcrowded cellar with a load of neighbours he couldn’t stand.

Nancy had retreated into her shell immediately after the hideous events in the Adelphi Hotel, when she’d ended up lying in a pool of blood on the elegant bathroom floor instead of living it up with Gloria. The shame and disappointment had been bad enough, but then she had been utterly drained after the miscarriage. She’d tried to tell herself it hadn’t happened, but her body told her otherwise, and she’d been weak and shaky for longer than she wanted to admit.

She would rather have died than tell her mother-in-law what had happened, knowing the reaction she would have faced if Mrs Kerrigan had known that the young woman living under her roof had been having a sneaky affair. It would have been even worse to have confessed to her own mother what had been going on, as Dolly had very strict views on the sanctity of marriage, even if one half of that marriage wasn’t around. Rita wouldn’t have been much better. Reluctantly, Nancy had had to admit that the Adelphi had been the best place for it to have happened. There would have been no chance of her passing off the baby as legitimate, and she had to convince herself that everything had worked out all right in the end – even if in her quieter moments she wondered what the child would have been like. There was no point in thinking about that, though – what had happened had happened.

At least it was all but impossible to shock Gloria. How she missed her best friend and wished she were still around. But Gloria had gone back down south after the rest of her highly successful singing tour, and her latest letter had said she’d been approached by ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association, which had been set up to entertain the troops. Nancy sighed with envy. How she would have loved to see the world, doing nothing more than wearing beautiful dresses and singing every night, before being taken to dinner in the most glamorous hotels. She blithely ignored the less exciting parts of the job which Gloria had told her about: the weariness that came from living out of a suitcase, always having to smile and maintain the professional front, shaking hands with the most odious and pompous officials, living in fear of the voice giving out.

Now Nancy felt fully recovered and ready to try something new. She knew very well what her family thought of her choice and why they suspected she’d picked this particular canteen, but she didn’t care. Of course it would be lovely to be back in the centre of the city, even if much of it had been blown to smithereens by Hitler’s bombs. It was important to show that the people of Liverpool weren’t afraid, for a start. She didn’t intend to be cowed. It would take more than a few nights of utter destruction to stop her going shopping, searching out where was still open and what bargains were to be had. It wasn’t impossible, just much more difficult than before, but that made the hunt all the more satisfying. Besides, she reasoned, none of her family would turn down the offer of a bolt of new fabric, even if it was a little fire-damaged. That was exactly the sort of thing she’d be best placed to find.

She also felt starved of male company. She was only twenty-one; she didn’t want to be cooped up indoors, missing out on the best days of her life. She liked dressing up and the admiring glances she got when she did so. Stan Hathaway didn’t know when he was on to a good thing, she thought grimly, tossing her head a little at the memory of him, his warm hands, his intimate suggestions. He’d proved to be a faithless heartbreaker, but at least she’d had fun. While she wasn’t going to rush to make that sort of mistake again, it wouldn’t do any harm to meet a few men her own age. They needed cheering up: everyone said so.

‘If you’re sure you know what we’ll be doing, I’ll open up,’ Mrs Moyes said now, wiping her hands on her sensible print overall. She handed her latest recruit a pinafore to tie around her slim waist. ‘Take this, Mrs Kerrigan. We don’t want to ruin your pretty dress, now do we?’

‘Thank you, Mrs Moyes,’ said Nancy dutifully, knotting the pinafore’s fabric at the back, mindful that she wouldn’t easily replace her frock if it did get damaged. It was from 1939, but she’d carefully mended it and sewn on new buttons at the neck to bring it as up to date as she could, and she didn’t want that effort to be for nothing. Now that clothes rationing had come in, it was all the more important to make the most of what she already had.

Mrs Moyes was ushering a group of young men across the room to the counter where Nancy stood waiting. ‘Now here are some gentlemen just arrived from America,’ she beamed. ‘I expect they’re thirsty, aren’t you, boys?’ Her tone was motherly and comforting.