LITMIR.BIZ

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started to turn into the road where his sister’s house was, intending to take a short cut down it to his mother’s. A young woman wearing a swing-back brown coat, a neat-fitting hat perched on her dark hair, was walking along the pavement, her child in a pushchair. Charlie recognised Lena immediately, with a feeling like a violent punch in the chest.

      God, but she was pretty. Pretty, willing, married to another man, and Bella had warned him off her. Any combination of two of those facts would have been enough to have Charlie itching to break the rules and have some fun. Throw in his bad temper and his boredom, and seeing Lena was exactly the antidote he needed to cheer himself up.

      

      Lena was aware of the car on the road behind her slowing down. Automatically she turned round, assuming it must be one of their neighbours, the colour coming and going in her face as Charlie brought the low-slung MG alongside her, slowing it down to match her walking pace as he leaned towards her and gave her his best smile, stopping the car and telling her cockily, ‘Hello there, gorgeous. Remember me?’

      She should have ignored him, Lena knew that. He was nothing to her after the way he’d treated her. She had a good husband now in Gavin, and in another few months she and Gavin would be giving Janette a little baby brother or sister – a baby that would have a father who had wanted it right from the word go. Not like Charlie.

      Her legs had turned to jelly and she was glad to have Janette’s pushchair to hold on to. She’d forgotten how confident Charlie was, and how good-looking. She waited for her heart to react to him with the excitement it had done when she had first known him but instead of thudding with excitement it was thumping with dismay and anxiety. She wished he wasn’t here, she wished he hadn’t seen them; she wished he hadn’t stopped and most of all she wished that Gavin was with them, Lena acknowledged.

      It was a funny feeling knowing at last, after all the times she’d secretly worried about how she might feel if she ever saw him again, that she was truly safe, and that she felt nothing at all other than deep gratitude for the fact that Gavin loved her and she was safely and happily married to him. In fact, it was a marvel to her now that she had ever found Charlie attractive at all, despite his good looks. Good looks were nothing when compared to a kind and loving heart.

      ‘Pleased to see me, are you?’ Charlie grinned at Lena. ‘I’m here all weekend; I could come round and we could have a bit of fun together, just you and me.’

      ‘We’re both married now,’ Lena pointed out firmly.

      ‘So what? Come on, Lena, you remember how good it was with you and me, don’t you?’ Charlie coaxed, moving close to her, putting his hand on her arm and looking down at her breasts, feeling his body harden in anticipatory eagerness.

      

      High up in the old oak tree at the bottom of the garden, sawing off one of the branches, Gavin had a clear view of the bottom of the street and what was happening there. He’d been on the point of climbing down when Charlie had first stopped his car, but now, with Charlie holding Lena’s arm and his wife showing no signs of moving away, Gavin felt too heartsick to do anything. Lena had really fallen for Charlie – Gavin knew that – and although she’d told him that she hated Bella’s brother now for the way he’d treated her, in his own heart Gavin had secretly worried that Lena didn’t love him as much as she had done Janette’s father. Now it looked as though he’d got proof that he had been right.

      ‘I’ve got to get home. My Gavin will be waiting for his tea,’ Lena told Charlie, pulling away from him. ‘And little Janette will be wanting to see her daddy as well,’ she added pointedly.

      Charlie frowned. ‘Her daddy? The kid’s mine, not his,’ he told Lena, her refusal to play along with him making him belligerent. Charlie hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the child he had fathered, apart from being relieved that his parents had flatly denied that it could be his, and yet now hearing Lena refer to someone else as its father, a dog-in-the-manger possessiveness took hold of him.

      ‘Gavin is Janette’s father,’ Lena contradicted him. ‘He’s the one who’s provided for her and he’s the one she loves.’

      Before Charlie could stop her she had wheeled the pushchair past him and was walking away from him as fast as she could.

      Ruddy women, Charlie cursed her under his breath. Well, there were plenty more where she’d come from. And as for the kid, why should he care about someone else being her father? He didn’t want to be saddled with her or any other kid. The man who’d married Lena was a proper fool. You’d never catch him taking on another man’s kid.

      Getting back into his MG, Charlie slammed the door and roared off at speed. He’d had enough of Wallasey, and he couldn’t wait to leave the place and the people in it behind him, he decided as he drove past Lena.

      

      ‘See anyone whilst you were out?’ Gavin asked Lena as casually as he could. Lena had called him into the kitchen for the cup of tea she’d made for him.

      Lena hesitated. She desperately wanted to tell Gavin what had happened but she knew him and she knew how protective of her he was. If she told him there was no saying that he might not go straight round to Bella’s mother’s and call Charlie to account for the way he had behaved towards her. Lena didn’t care what her Gavin might do to Charlie, but she did care about Bella, and she knew it would cause trouble between Bella and her mother if Gavin went rampaging round there, demanding that Charlie gave an account of himself. Mrs Firth doted on Charlie. He could do no wrong in her eyes, as Lena herself had good reason to know.

      No, it was best that she didn’t say anything to Gavin, she decided, as she shook her head and fibbed, ‘No.’

      Lena had lied to him. Gavin felt the pain explode inside his chest. His Lena, whom he loved so much, had lied to him and all because of that no-good rotter who had already hurt her so much. Gavin looked away from Lena. Janette was smiling up at him from her high chair. The minute he’d stepped inside she’d held up her arms to him to be lifted out, and Gavin had felt that same spike of emotion now that he’d felt the very first time he’d held her, minutes after her birth. She was his girl, his child, the child of his heart, and he loved her every bit as much as he would do the new baby Lena was carrying.

      The new baby. A knife twisted in his heart. Was Lena wishing that she hadn’t married him and that she wasn’t having his child now that she’d seen Charlie again?

      

      They were almost midway through September, but although the days might be growing shorter, double summertime meant that thankfully it was still possible to go out in the evening in daylight, even if blackout curtains had to be put in place ready for one’s return in darkness, Katie reflected, carefully applying a thin coat of precious lipstick, using a small brush so as to use as little as possible of what was left of her favourite Max Factor pink, bought just before the war. Once that was done she ran her comb through her thick naturally curly dark gold hair and then studied her reflection critically in her bedroom’s full-length mirror. The outfit she was wearing had been a second-hand find, bought when she and Gina had spent a couple of days together in Bath, just before it had been badly bombed, and the silk of her dress floated delicately round Katie’s slim legs. She did feel rather guilty about the fact that she was wearing a pair of silk stockings that had been given to her by a grateful young American GI who had enjoyed the tour of London’s historical sites she had planned for him so much that he had insisted on giving them to her as a ‘thank you’. The ATS girls with whom she shared the house in Cadogan Place had teased her unmercifully about both the stockings and the young GI, but Katie knew that his desire to thank her had been genuine and not a prelude to some sort of ‘come on’.

      She had been extremely lucky in her billet, she knew; the house, right in the centre of the city, was in a terrace of elegant late Georgian buildings. Her bedroom was enormous, with a high ceiling and its own bathroom. Luxury indeed, as Katie’s parents were fond of reminding her when she made her fortnightly visits to Hampstead, where her mother and father were now living with friends in a rather run-down Victorian house, both of them missing living in the

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