The Gown(35)

He paid for their lemonades with a five-pound note, told the barman to keep an entire shilling from the change as his tip, and carried their glasses to a small table in a relatively dark and quiet corner. He even pulled out her chair and waited for her to sit before joining her.

She took a sip of the lemonade and tried to think of something to say. “Thank you for the lemonade,” was the best she could do. Even worse, she found herself softening her accent. Not much, not enough to sound as if she were aping her betters. But enough to shrink the distance between Mayfair and Barking by a few miles.

It was a stupid thing to do, for he’d heard her friends talking, and only Carmen, who was actually the daughter of a barrister in Cambridge, had an accent that would pass in polite society. The rest of them, Miriam excepted, spoke like ordinary people, with ordinary accents.

“Won’t your friends mind?” she asked, and this time her voice was her own. But he didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow.

“My friends? No, they won’t be bothered. I’m here with my sister and some of her pals. She’s the one who insisted on wearing a fur. Silly old thing.”

Ann wasn’t sure if he was referring to his sister or her fur. “She’s very pretty.”

“She is,” he agreed, “and a handful. That’s how I get myself dragged out to these places. Not,” he added with another gleaming smile, “that I regret it in the slightest. You never know who you’ll meet when you do something new.”

It seemed like a compliment, but she couldn’t be sure, and it wouldn’t do to get too starry-eyed over the man. “It’s been ages since I did anything like this. But Miriam, one of my friends here, she insisted. She said if I didn’t go, she wouldn’t either. So here I am,” she said, cringing inwardly at how feeble that last statement sounded.

“And are you glad?” he asked, his eyes intent upon her.

“I am. I’m having such a lovely time.”

“I should very much like to see you again,” he said, and there was just a touch of diffidence in his tone. As if he felt uncertain of her answer. “I hope that doesn’t seem too forward of me.”

“No, it doesn’t. That would be very nice.”

Nice. Of course it would be nice, but was it sensible? Was it even sane? Surely he must be aware of the gulf between them. Surely he had to know.

“May I ask for your telephone number? I can give you mine. Let me find my card . . .”

“I don’t have one,” she said. She didn’t know anyone with their own telephone. Well, apart from him. “I don’t have a card either. I—”

“Well, I can’t let you vanish into the night. If I give you my card, will you ring me up tomorrow? Promise you will.”

This wasn’t happening. This could not be happening. “I promise,” she said, and took the card from his outstretched hand.

“Splendid. I suppose I’d better get back to my sister. I’ve a feeling she’ll insist we go on to at least three more clubs before she’s ready to call it a night. That girl will dance until dawn if I let her.”

He drained the last of his lemonade, winced a little, and stood. “Oh—I almost forgot to ask. What’s your name?”

“It’s Ann. Ann Hughes.”

“Delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Hughes. Captain Jeremy Thickett-Milne, though I do hope you’ll consent to calling me Jeremy.”

And then he kissed her hand.

Ann had never expected to be the girl in the fairy tale. She didn’t believe in them, for a start, and she wasn’t certain she believed in this. She shouldn’t allow herself to believe.

But did it matter? What was the harm in having supper with him? He did seem nice, and perhaps he was the sort of man who honestly wouldn’t care that she was the daughter of a motor mechanic and lived in a council house in Essex. That she lived from pay packet to pay packet and spent her days making clothes for women like his sister. Perhaps he was simply a nice man who found her appealing and wanted to get to know her better.

Her free hand, the one that wasn’t tucked against his elbow, clutched at the card he had given her, its corners digging into the perspiring skin of her palm. She had his telephone number. She would ring him up, and they would arrange to have supper together, and she would let herself believe for another day or two. And then, after he came to his senses and realized his mistake, she would set aside the memory of this lovely night, leave it by the wayside of her life, and continue on alone.





Chapter Eleven


Miriam


She wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone at their table, with the possible exception of Ann, but tonight was the first time Miriam had ever been out dancing. She’d been so young when she had begun her apprenticeship at Lesage, and the curfew at her lodgings had always been so strict, that she’d never dared to stay out past supper. And then, once the Occupation had begun, her life had shrunk to secrets and shadows and the grim business of survival. Dancing had belonged to another world. Another, saner, universe.

Her colleagues at Hartnell, however, looked upon her as if she were the embodiment of sophisticated European glamour. As if she’d spent her youth gulping down tumblers of absinthe in dubious jazz bars in Pigalle and dancing alongside Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère.