Penny Jordan - The Hidden Years

That quality of cloth never wore out, Aunt Vi declared firmly, and indeed it did not, Lizzie reflected wryly, fingering the heavy, pleated tweed.

It was a pity that Lady Jeveson had not favoured the soft pastel colours more suited to her own fair colouring, rather than the dull, horsy tweeds of which she had apparently been so fond. The blouse she was wearing might be silk, but it was a dull beige colour which did nothing for her skin, just like the brown cashmere cardigan she wore over it.

She had seen the other girls, on their days off, going out in bright, summery dresses, with thin floating skirts and the kind of necklines which would have shocked Aunt Vi, and, while she knew that she could never have worn anything so daring, this morning Lizzie found herself wishing that her blouse might have been a similar shade of lavender-grey to her eyes, and that her skirt might have been made out of a fine, soft wool, and not this heavy, itchy stuff, which was a physical weight on her slender hips.

There were no nylons for her. She had to make do either with bare legs, which the rough wool made itch dreadfully, or the thick, hand-knitted stockings her aunt had sent her for Christmas.

She wasn’t sure what had made her opt for bare legs, what particular vanity had decreed that this morning she would not be sensible and wear the hated stockings, knowing that they made her slender ankles look positively thick, even if they were warm and practical.

The hostel was just across the village from the hospital, and Lizzie cycled there on an ancient bicycle. When they were on duty, the girls ate at the hospital; not the same food as the patients, but meals which the others often angrily derided as ‘not fit for pigs’.

Certainly, the meals were stodgy and unappetising, and not a patch on Aunt Vi’s dishes. Her aunt might almost be bordering on the parsimonious, she might make every penny do the work of two, but she was a good cook, and Lizzie missed her appetising meals, the fresh vegetables and fruit in season which she always managed to obtain by some country means of barter.

This morning, since she wasn’t on duty, there would be no breakfast for her at the hostel, and, since the girls were not allowed to cook food in the hostel, that meant either whatever she could buy and eat on the way to the hospital, or an expensive and not very appetising snack in the village’s one and only café.

Trying not to let herself think about her aunt’s porridge, thick and creamy with the top of Farmer Hobson’s milk, Lizzie told herself stoically that she didn’t really want any breakfast.

All the girls were always hungry; their workload was heavy, and no matter how unappetising they found their food it was always eaten.

All of them were a little on the thin side, Lizzie in particular as she was more fine-boned than the rest, with tiny, delicate wrists and ankles that sometimes looked so frail that they might snap.

As she cycled towards the village, she could feel the sun beating down on to the back of her head and smell the fresh warm scent of late spring, mingling with the tantalising suggestion of the summer still to come.

As she rode, wisps of blonde hair escaped from her coronet and curled in feathery tendrils round her face. At first, the other girls had refused to believe her hair was naturally fair, accusing her of dyeing it.

She chose not to ride through the village but to circle round it, using a narrow side-road which meandered towards the rear entrance to the hospital.

Before the war, the hospital had been a grand house, and the lane she was using had originally been that used by the tenants and the tradespeople.

She was cycling happily down the centre of it when she heard the car, the sound so unexpected that at first she made no attempt to move off the crown of the road. The village saw its fair share of wartime traffic; the squire’s wife still drove her car on Red Cross business and Lizzie was used to the imperious sound of car horns demanding the right of way, especially when they were driven by excitable young men in uniform.

She was not, though, used to them being driven down this narrow little lane which led only to the hospital, which was why, lost in her own daydreams, she did not initially react to the sound of this one until it was almost too late.

The realisation that someone was driving up behind her, that the car was one of those expensive, open-topped sporty models driven by a young man with wind-blown thick black hair, bronzed skin, and the dashing uniform of an airforce pilot, hit her in a series of small shocks as she glanced over her shoulder and saw the shiny dark green bonnet of the car, realised that there wasn’t room for both of them on the narrow little road, tried desperately to turn to one side, and lost her balance at the same time. The young man stopped his car with a cacophony of squealing tyres, protesting engine and angrily bellowed complaints about her sanity.

Lying on the dusty road, her knees stinging with pain and her eyes with tears, Lizzie wished devoutly that a large hole would appear beneath her into which she could conveniently disappear.

Her face scarlet with mortification and embarrassment, she struggled to her feet, at the same time as she heard the car door slam.

‘I say, are you OK? That was a nasty tumble you took… I thought you’d heard me…’

‘I did…but I didn’t realise… Well, no one ever drives down this road…’

She was on her feet now, her face still red, a tiny voice inside her deriding her for her vanity in not wearing the woollen stockings which would have protected her now smarting skin from the road, all too conscious of the appearance she must present to this unbelievably handsome young man who was now standing next to her, towering over her, looking at her in a way which made her loathe and castigate Lady Jeveson for ever being stupid enough to choose such unflattering clothes.

Two bright spots of colour burned on her cheekbones as she realised what was happening to her. For the first time in her life she was experiencing the dizzying, dangerous sensation of falling helplessly in love with a stranger—that sensation, that awareness…that feeling which she had heard so often described by the others.

The unexpectedness of it distracted her momentarily, her mouth half parting at the wonder of it, so that Kit Danvers found his attention caught by her, despite the awfulness of her clothes and the hairstyle that made her look like photographs he had seen of his grandmother.

If one really studied her it was possible to see that she was quite a looker, he recognised with the ease of a master long used to seeking out his quarry in the most unexpected of places.

Finding pearls hidden in dull oysters was Kit Danvers’s speciality—the other men in the mess envied him for it, admiringly, if sometimes resentfully, recognising that when it came to women Kit Danvers had something, some unrecognised quality that the female sex found it impossible to resist.

Lizzie knew none of this. She only knew that as she looked into the laughing blue eyes looking back into hers, as she studied the handsome tanned face with its firm male bone-structure and its warm smile, something inside her melted and uncurled, something completely new to her and yet as old as Eve.

‘You’ve got a smudge on your nose… There, it’s gone.’

She held her breath as he leaned towards her and carelessly rubbed his thumb against her skin. A thousand pin-pricks of sensation were born where his touch had been, an odd yearning constricting her breathing, her body suddenly tense and yet languorous at the same time.

‘Look, you can’t ride that thing now… Why don’t I give you a lift to wherever you’re going…?’

‘The hospital—I’m going to the hospital,’ Lizzie told him breathlessly, scarcely conscious of what she was saying, unable to take her wondering gaze off his handsome, smiling face. ‘I work there.’