Annie Groves - London Belles

Olive went over to her daughter, smoothing her curls back off her face and dropping a kiss on her forehead as she told her, ‘You’ll see, it will all work out for the best.’

‘But what if there’s a war, Mum, and the lodgers and us get evacuated?’

Olive’s expression firmed. ‘No one’s going to evacuate me from this house, Tilly, I can tell you that, and we don’t know yet that there will be a war.’

‘But what if there is?’ Tilly persisted. ‘I’m not a child any more, Mum. I read the papers and listen to the news. There’s all that blackout material you bought for us to cover the windows with, and our gas masks. No one’s said anything about us handing them back, have they? And boys are still having to do their military training. Clara in the office said only tonight that her Harry is going to be starting his soon. I don’t want you worrying about things and not telling me, Mum. I want to share them with you.’

Olive smiled both sadly and proudly, as she stroked the silky darkness of her daughter’s hair.

‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘You aren’t a little girl, you’re a young woman, Tilly, and if there’s to be a war, then we’ll deal with whatever it brings us together.’

They smiled at one another, and then Olive added briskly, ‘Meanwhile, as soon as we’ve finished eating and washed up, you and me are going to sit down and write out an advertisement to let the attic rooms. I was thinking that if you could get permission to type it on your typewriter at work then it would look properly businesslike and attract the right kind of lodger. Now eat your fish pie before it goes cold.’

Later that evening, in her bedroom, cold-creaming her face before she went to bed, Olive paused. There would be those Olive knew who would disapprove of her plans and even be opposed to them. A small tremble, part apprehension and part determination, ran through her body. Her father-in-law had been fond of boasting that he had got this house at a good price because of its number – thirteen. Thirteen was lucky for some, he had often said, giving a wink as he added, ‘Especially for those who have the good sense to make their own luck.’

Now with the respectable silence of the Row settling round its inhabitants, Olive hoped desperately that it would be lucky for her as well in her new venture. Because if it wasn’t then she would face having to sell the house, and she and Tilly would have to take a step down in the world.

Chapter Two

‘David, do come along, otherwise we’re going to be late meeting Emily and Jonathon at the Ritz.’ The sharp female voice was accompanied by an equally sharp and pointed glare in Dulcie’s direction, as the smartly dressed brunette placed a very possessive and expensively leather-gloved hand on the arm of the dashingly handsome man Dulcie had been flirting with from behind her makeup counter in Selfridges cosmetics and perfume department.

‘You’ll be for it now,’ Lizzie Walters came out from behind her own counter to inform Dulcie. ‘You know who she is, don’t you?’

‘No. And I don’t care either,’ Dulcie informed the other girl, tossing the blonde hair that swept down onto her shoulders as she did so, her attention more on her own reflection in the nearby mirror than on what Lizzie was saying to her. And hers was a reflection well worth any man’s second look, Dulcie knew. She was, after all, a looker. Everyone said so. It was her looks that had got her this very desirable job at the department store in the first place. Women customers looked at Dulcie’s flawless complexion, and the way in which the makeup she was wearing emphasised her dark brown eyes and her pouting lips, and wanted to look like her, whilst men listened mesmerised when Dulcie sprayed her wrist with scent and then invited them to ‘test’ the fragrance. It was perhaps no wonder that in the six months she had been working in Selfridges, Dulcie’s sales had earned her praise from their supervisor, but Dulcie herself had become unpopular with some of the other girls. Not Lizzie, though. Lizzie, small, plain and good-natured, worked on a counter selling bath salts, favoured by the store’s more elderly Home Counties customers.

‘Well, you should care,’ Lizzie warned, ‘because her dad’s one of the directors here. Arlene wot works on the Elizabeth Arden counter and whose dad is one of the managers is pally with her.’

Dulcie tossed her head again. ‘You mean that Arlene sucks up to her. Well, I’m not going to. And anyway, it’s not my fault that her beau was gentlemanly enough to pay me a compliment.’

Lizzie gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘Wasn’t it? I mean, the way you put that lippy on yourself and then pouted at him like you did . . .’

‘I was just showing him how it looked on,’ Dulcie defended herself virtuously. ‘So who is he anyway, then?’

Lizzie knew everything about the store and those who worked there. She’d been there herself for over ten years, after all.

‘David James-Thompson, his name is, and he’s proper posh. Lydia Whittingham met him at a house party in Surrey, according to Arlene, and the talk is that she’s going to land him and that they’ll get engaged this Christmas.’

‘Well, good luck to her, but I can’t say as I’d want to get engaged to a chap who’s always going to have an eye for other girls and flirt with them.’

‘You encouraged him.’

‘He didn’t need encouraging; that kind never does,’ Dulcie retorted smugly. ‘You can take my word for it.’

It was true. One look into David James-Thompson’s laughing hazel eyes and she’d known exactly what sort he was. Her sort, with his good looks, his thick wavy brown hair, his dashing man-of-the-world air, and most of all the devilment she had seen glinting in his eyes when he had looked at her so appreciatively. Whatever else David James-Thompson was, it certainly wasn’t good marriage material.

‘I must say, I envy Lydia being taken to the Ritz,’ Lizzie continued.

‘Well, I don’t. If he was to ask me out, I’d want to go somewhere like the Hammersmith Palais where we could have a bit of fun, not the Ritz, with all those posh types and snobs.’

Lizzie laughed at her. ‘The Palais? You’d never get a man like him going somewhere like that.’

‘Want to bet?’ Dulcie challenged her. Everyone knew that the Hammersmith Palais was simply the best dancehall in London. That was why Dulcie was prepared to make the trek from the East End to Hammersmith every Saturday night, instead of going somewhere local.

‘Don’t be daft,’ Lizzie said, but Dulcie persisted.

‘Come on, bet you five bob I can get him to meet me at the Palais, and before Christmas.’

‘You’re never serious.’

‘I certainly am.’ It was just the sort of challenge that Dulcie loved; daring, reckless, breaking the rules, pushing against boundaries, and using her looks to get her own way.

Born into a noisy cockney family, with an elder brother and a younger sister, Dulcie had learned young that she had to fight and use what nature had given her to get what she wanted, and to hang on to it once she had.

Two hours later Dulcie had left Selfridges and Oxford Street behind her, along with her white overall with its pink collar and trimmings. An admiring look from a motorist in a rakish-looking soft-topped car had her pausing to admire her reflection in a nearby shop window, and reflect that the bows she had added to the dress she was wearing, and which she had had copied by a local dressmaker from her own sketches of a dress in Selfridges Young Ladies Models Department looked much fancier than the original. The dress had small puffed sleeves and a close-fitting bodice, the bows adorning the ends of the long seams that ran from the bust down to below the waist. The fabric – silk, no less – had a dark plum background and was covered in a pansy print in a variety of hues from pale lilac through off-white to darkest purple – colours that suited her dark eyes and nicely tanned arms and legs, as well, of course, as drawing attention to her blonde hair.