The Mersey Daughter (Empire Street #3)(72)
Impulsively Kitty gave her friend a tight hug. ‘You can’t blame yourself, Laura. You heard what the admiral said – gosh, imagine Killjoy Cavendish having an uncle who’s an admiral. After all, if you hadn’t been there, then that baby would have died – and maybe the mother too, if she was going to go back in after it like you told us. You’re both heroes. Captain Cavendish would have known the risk he was taking. He’s probably done all sorts of training for that sort of thing.’
‘Probably,’ Laura agreed, but she knew it had been an instinctive reaction that had driven him into that burning building. All the training in the world wouldn’t have changed the essential facts. The image of him throwing the baby to her and then how he teetered for those awful few seconds on the windowsill came back into her mind and she could have screamed. She’d thought that was when he was in greatest danger, but she’d been wrong. Now he was in that silent wing of the hospital with the formidable matron, no doubt receiving the best possible care, but fighting for his life all the same. She remembered how he had touched her nose, and a groan rose to her throat. Now she would never know what was behind his expression when he’d done that; if it was a joke, or if he’d sensed some deeper, more vital connection between them. Had she imagined it? The prospect of going through the rest of her life not knowing would be unbearable. Yet that was what she was faced with. She didn’t know if she could do it.
‘Come on, then,’ Kitty urged her, breaking away and then linking her arm through her friend’s. ‘We should be back at base in time for tea. Let’s not hang about. At least now we can put anyone right about the captain. We should tell Marjorie; she’ll want to know. She rather liked him.’
‘Likes him,’ said Laura fiercely. ‘Not liked. He’s not dead yet.’
‘Likes him,’ Kitty corrected herself, not reacting to her friend’s abruptness. ‘Anyway, she’ll want to hear what we’ve been up to. Funny that you feel this way now, considering he was your very worst passenger, isn’t it? It’s such a coincidence that both of you were in the car when the bomb went off. Anyway, it makes a change from you always complaining about him.’
Laura felt her heart contract with sorrow. Kitty had no way of knowing how her words were twisting the knife, and there was little point in confessing why it hurt so much. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said instead. ‘It’s all I ever did. He was a confounded nuisance and made my life hell day in day out, but I don’t want him to die. I really, really don’t.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
‘There’s absolutely nothing in it, Winnie, and nobody will convince me any different,’ Vera Delaney assured her friend as she drained her cup of tea. ‘I just thought you should know what folk are saying so you can be prepared next time you go out and bump into them. Some people will do anything to spread a bit of gossip, you know that.’
Winnie nodded glumly.
‘Not that you’ve been out and about much recently,’ Vera added, snapping shut her battered handbag and getting up to leave Winnie’s cramped table. ‘Not that I blame you. I always tell them as says you’re hiding away from them that you’ve got enough on your plate what with managing a shop when there’s a war on and taking in that girl out of the goodness of your heart. Just because she was left homeless when the house where your Charlie was staying got bombed. They should be praising you for doing a good deed, not casting aspersions about you and her.’ She stopped to snatch a breath. ‘Talking of which,’ she said slyly, ‘heard anything from him lately, have you? Your Charlie?’ She turned her gimlet eyes on her friend. ‘Only my Alfie was asking about him. Alfie’s working ever so hard down the docks now half of the men have joined up, and it’s wearing him out; sometimes I hardly see him from one end of the week to the next. It’s no soft option having a reserved occupation, no matter what anyone says to the contrary. He’s doing his bit for king and country and almost dropping dead of exhaustion, and I won’t hear a word said against him. Do let Charlie know he was asking after him if you hear from him, won’t you?’ She waited eagerly for an answer. She’d give her ration book to know the whereabouts of Charlie Kennedy. Alfie had dropped several hints that his associates – Vera didn’t question him too closely about who they might be – would love to find him, and might even be prepared to give a reward to anyone who could say where he was likely to be. Then of course the military police were after him as a deserter – plenty of people had seen them come knocking more than once on Winnie’s door, for all that she denied it.
Winnie made a noise that could have meant anything, and then got to her feet. ‘Don’t let me keep you, Vera,’ she said, a touch of the old firmness in her voice. ‘I know how busy you are, what with your boy still being at home.’ She waited until the other woman had left and then sank back on to her favourite seat in the breakfast room behind the shop. She could imagine Vera walking down the street, head held high, turning to look around her, no doubt keeping an eye out for anyone else she could pass her malicious tales on to.
The sound of the door to the back yard made her jump. ‘Rita? Is that you?’
Rita poked her head around the breakfast room door. ‘I thought you still had company or I’d have come in,’ she said. She was in her nurse’s cloak, ready to go out. ‘Vera’s gone, has she?’