The Heart of the Family (37 page)

As she had said to Grace before she had finally given in to Katie’s gentle urging that they should leave for the church, ‘There’ll be good times and bad ahead of you in life, Grace love, but remember always to hold strong to the way you feel about Seb today.’

‘Oh, Mum,’ Grace had returned, going to hug her, but Jean had shaken her head, reminding her daughter of the need not to crush her veil, and now here she was in the front pew, with a space left for Sam, and on her other side, Bella, who had just given her hand an unexpected little squeeze. Next to Bella were Fran and her new husband.

On the other side of the aisle were Seb’s family, his parents as happy with the marriage as she and Sam were, whilst Seb himself was standing proud in his uniform, not with Luke at his side as his best man, of course, much to Jean’s regret, but with an old friend from his schooldays who had also joined the RAF.

Behind them, on both sides of the church the pews were packed with Jean and Sam’s friends and neighbours, along with Grace and Seb’s friends, young people in uniform, Grace’s fellow nurses, some of whom had given up their precious hours of sleep to be here.

Unlike the church where Bella had been married, St Thomas’s did not have an organ but the pianist was doing them proud with her rendition of Handel’s
‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’, and Jean could already hear beneath the rustle of fabric and the gasps of admiration that told her that Grace was on her way down the aisle.

How lucky Grace was to be marrying the man she loved and who loved her, Bella acknowledged, but she had warned herself before coming out that she must not think those kind of thoughts today, and that she must instead hold on to the happiness she had felt at knowing that Jan loved her, even if they could not be together.

She hoped that Lena wouldn’t overdo things. She and Gavin were going out Christmas shopping and Gavin had assured Bella that he would take good care of Lena. Vi was still in the nursing home, and furiously angry about the fact. She had raged at Bella when Bella had gone to see her, insisting that she was to go home, but the doctor had warned Bella that it would be some time before he felt that Vi was well enough to leave the nursing home.

How different this wedding was from her own, Fran thought tiredly. She hadn’t slept well, but she was too much of a trooper to let it show. Seeing Marcus had left her feeling dreadfully low, and guilty because of that when Brandon’s every thought was naturally for his country and his fellow countrymen after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. All Brandon wanted to talk about was the fact that now America would be forced to enter the war and how much he wished he could be part of what he knew would ultimately be an Allied victory.

Even so, she had been caught off guard this
morning when Brandon had said quietly over breakfast, ‘You still love Marcus, don’t you?’

‘I’d be a fool to love a man who would rather believe the lies of others than trust me to tell him the truth,’ she had responded, but she had known that Brandon wasn’t deceived. He was such a dear boy, so very brave and so deserving of all the love and loyalty she had to give him.

Fran closed her eyes to suppress the ache of her threatening tears. She was a fool, a fool who loved a man who had traded his proclaimed love for her for contempt. It was Brandon she needed to think about now, Fran reminded herself. Brandon who needed her so very much, and who was so very afraid of dying. As she was of living?

Sam and Grace were standing in front of the vicar. The proud and happy tears in Jean’s eyes blurred her daughter’s white-gowned image.

All that was missing to make this day perfect was Luke. Jean had been thinking of him the whole time they had been getting ready, trying to work out what time it would be for him and what he would be doing, hoping that he was not in combat and that the love she was sending him would reach him.

Katie bent discreetly to straighten the short train of Grace’s veil. It had been Bella who had stepped in and insisted that Grace must have the pretty tiara and veil that she herself had worn, and it did go perfectly with Grace’s dress.

This morning in all the excitement of getting ready, Grace had still found time to tell Katie, ‘I mean to take care with the dress, Katie, ’cos it won’t be long, I know, before you’ll be wearing it.’

Katie had hugged her and blinked away her tears. She was missing Luke dreadfully today, despite the busyness of her role as chief bridesmaid. As for them getting married soon, though, Luke hadn’t made any mention in any of his letters about coming home any time soon. It must be wonderful to be in Grace’s position, Katie thought wistfully, but then fair-mindedly she reminded herself of the dangers Grace and Seb had both already experienced during the blitz and tried not to feel too envious.

She was never going to get married, Lou decided. It was all such a fuss. Sasha, on the other hand, loved every minute of the day, and had been going on as though being a bridesmaid was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. That was when she wasn’t going bright red at the thought of her UXB beau having been invited to the wedding, just like they were a proper young couple, even though her mother had stressed that he was being invited because he had saved Sasha’s life and had no family in Liverpool, not because of any imagined special friendship between him and Sasha, who was, after all, far too young to be walking out seriously with anyone. Well, Lou didn’t care about Sasha or getting coupled up. She was going to be doing something much more exciting soon. She and Gemma, the girl she’d got chatting to outside the recruitment office, had agreed to meet up there on Monday and go to be measured up for their uniforms together, and Lou just couldn’t wait. There was, though, an uncomfortable squirmy feeling in her tummy at the thought of telling her parents what she had done, even if Mr Churchill was calling for more girls to go into uniform.

‘Hey, steady on. Bella said you weren’t to do too much rushing around, remember,’ Gavin cautioned Lena as she darted between the stalls at the busy St John’s Christmas Market.

‘Oh, pooh,’ Lena laughed up at him, shaking her head as he made to take her arm. ‘I’m only having a baby.’

The truth was that she would have loved to have taken Gavin’s arm, and she would have loved it even more if she could have proudly held on to it and to him with the right that came from being his wife and the mother of his child. Lena had seen the smiles their appearance together had attracted as passersby obviously looked at them and thought them a young couple expecting their child. She was so enormous now that Bella’s big swing-back check coat barely fastened over her. Gavin was such a lovely man, and so very kind. She had been out with him before several times. In fact, earlier in her pregnancy, when he had taken her to Lyons to have tea with his mum and his gran, or to the pictures, with Dolly sitting between them, giving a loud running commentary on the film, she had known that she felt safe and happy being with him, but she had not known what those feelings really meant. Then she had still been thinking like the silly girl who had been so taken in by Charlie and who had thought of falling in love as something that came out of nowhere like a big explosion. Now, though, she knew better; now she knew that the best kind of love came quietly and filled you up with a warm happy glow; that real love made you feel safe and comfortable, and that it was the most natural thing in the world to tuck your hand through a man’s arm and put your head on his shoulder, but of course
she could not do any of those things with Gavin, because of what she had already done with Charlie. Lena suspected that if things had been different and there was to be no baby and there had been no Charlie, then she might have had a chance with Gavin, but there
had
been Charlie, and there
was
to be a baby, and she couldn’t for all the world wish the poor little thing away, not even if doing so meant that she might win Gavin’s love. The poor little mite was going to have a hard enough time of it as it was, with no dad and no proper name, so it would need all the love she could give it.

Gavin looked down at Lena’s dark head. He too had seen the smiling looks they had attracted and his own heart had contracted on a surge of sadness and regret. The poor kid was going to have such a hard time ahead of her, with no husband and a baby. He felt for her, he really did, because there was bound to be gossip, no matter what story Bella had fabricated to try to protect Lena. Bella had been wonderful to Lena, but Gavin feared that the posh folk of Wallasey would never really accept Lena as ‘one of them’. Not that it was his problem. He wasn’t the one who’d gone and got her into trouble, and if he had, she’d have been wearing his ring by now and nothing said about the baby coming a couple of months or so early.

They were just heading for a stall selling roast chestnuts when it happened. Lena turned to look before crossing the road and then froze as she saw her aunt and her cousin standing right across from her.

They’d seen her too, and before she could do or say anything, her auntie had marched across the road
to confront her, announcing in a loud voice, ‘Well, look who it isn’t, and flaunting herself as bold as brass too, just like the shameless hussy she is. Come on, Doris,’ she told her daughter, ‘I’m not staying here whilst her sort’s parading herself about.’

As Gavin tried to step protectively in front of Lena, her aunt gave her a deliberate shove as she pushed past her. All might have been well if the cobbles underfoot hadn’t been greasy and damp, but they were and her aunt’s deliberate push, combined with the bulk of her pregnancy and the slippery cobbles, caused Lena to lose her balance. Gavin reacted immediately, trying to catch her as she fell, but Lena’s cousin was in the way, and Lena gasped in shock as she felt the cold sting of the cobbles against her knees.

‘I’m all right, really I am,’ she was still protesting to Gavin ten minutes later after he had helped her to her feet and taken her to Joe Lyons, where she had gone to the powder room to inspect the damage to her thick lisle stockings and her knees. Both were grubby, and her knees stung a bit, but thankfully her stockings were intact or would be once she had darned the scuffed knees.

Physically she was all right, but the incident had left her feeling vulnerable and weepy, and Gavin was well aware of the tears she was trying so bravely not to let him see.

‘As soon as you’ve finished your tea, I’m going to take you home,’ Gavin told her firmly. Lena’s face clouded with disappointment and distress. She’d been enjoying herself so much just being out with him and now it was all spoiled.

‘I’m sorry if you were embarrassed by my auntie,’ Lena began to say, and then stopped, her mouth
going into a round ‘Oh’ of shock and her face going a bright red.

‘What is it?’ Gavin asked her anxiously.

‘I dunno, exceptin’ that I’ve gone and wet meself,’ Lena told him, reverting to her original accent in her shame and distress.

She hadn’t said anything to Gavin about those funny little pains she’d been having ever since she’d fallen, but now they were getting stronger, and she felt really peculiar.

One of Gavin’s mother’s neighbours had been the local midwife, and he knew enough from overhearing the conversation in his mother’s kitchen from his schooldays to guess what had happened.

Several thoughts filled his head at the same time. He needed to get Lena to the nursing home pdq. Bella would have his guts for garters for not looking after her properly, and right now, much as he wanted to find and give that aunt of hers a piece of his mind, looking after Lena was far more important than anything else.

‘You may kiss the bride.’

Grace looked up at Seb, her breath catching as she saw the sheen of emotion dampening his eyes as he looked at her with so much pride and love that her heart turned over.

This was the beginning of a new life for them both, a life as a married couple, and this moment one so special and so filled with happiness that not even the hardship of the war could dim the joy she felt.

The vicar was indicating that they needed to follow him to sign the register. Grace looked towards her
parents, her father standing tall and trying to look stern, but in reality looking as proud as a man could be, whilst her mother was dabbing at her eyes with the pretty handkerchief that Katie had bought for her just for today.

Dear Katie, Grace couldn’t wait for Luke’s fiancée to join her in the ranks of new wifedom. It would be such fun to have a sister-in-law whom she liked so very much.

Well before they had reached the ferry terminal, Gavin had begun to worry that they wouldn’t have time to make it to the nursing home, so instead he had taken Lena to the only place he could think of at such short notice, his own billet, all too relieved to be able to hand Lena over into the capable care of his landlady. Mrs Stone, swiftly judging the situation, had sent him at a run to Mrs Lewis at number thirty-two, who was the area’s midwife, whilst coaxing Lena upstairs to her back bedroom where she stripped the small spare bed at speed, thankful that she still had the rubber sheets she had used when her grandchildren had been small, virtually throwing them down onto the bed, whilst trying to time Lena’s contractions as she did so.

Gavin’s landlady had had five children of her own and was the grandmother of eight, and she was at home enough with the process of giving birth to make Lena comfortable. A pilot boat captain’s wife knew a thing or two as well about keeping calm in a crisis, especially when there was a war on, and by the time Marion Lewis came panting up the stairs, Vera Stone had comforted Lena out of her panic and fear with her brisk firm manner, whilst keeping to herself the
fact that she suspected that Lena’s baby was in a bit too much of a hurry to be born.