The Land Girls Page 7

  He arrived at Buxton Street in a taxi at eight o’clock, already in a sombre mood. He said a polite hello to Lily’s parents at the front door, took her arm rather hurriedly and barely said a word as they made their way to Evelyn Wood’s twenty-first birthday in Fitzroy. Lily had made a special effort that night. She’d had her hair done at Myer, and it was curled up and away from her forehead and brushed back over her ears in sweeping waves. Dangling pearl earrings matched the rope of them around her neck. And the gown she wore, the one she’d refashioned, looked rather lovely. Her sewing lessons had been a success.

  She clutched her gloves and stared out the window into the warm summer night, trying not to fret over David’s lack of attention to her frock or her hair. How should a young man act once he’d made the decision to go to war? Was he terrified? Was he feeling brave? His brother, Bill, was in hospital at Milne Bay in New Guinea, still too injured to be moved. How could anyone be jolly in the face of that?

  When the taxi pulled up on Robe Terrace, a street filled with a row of Adelaide’s finest mansions in art-deco brick and turn-of-the-century bluestone, David hopped out first and rounded the vehicle, opening Lily’s door for her. She took his hand and stepped out. They stood together in silence as the dimmed headlights of the taxi disappeared into the parklands.

  David pulled a pack of Woodbines and a matchbox from the inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket. He slipped a cigarette between his lips, struck a match and lit it, taking a long drag. His exhaled breath was a small cloud in the night air as if it were the middle of winter and not December.

  Lily needed to make him happy. She needed to make this night a fond memory for him. ‘This is going to be such a marvellous party. Evelyn told me her parents have turned the sunken garden by the tennis court into a Persian tent, with lights and overstuffed cushions and champagne. The waiters are all going to be dressed like genies. Doesn’t that sound like fun?’

  David smoked and looked out into the night. ‘Lily, can we just wait a minute before we go in? Would you mind terribly?’

  ‘Of course not. You want to finish your cigarette.’

  He took another puff.

  She waited a long moment before asking, ‘Who knows that you’re going?’

  ‘Only my parents, my sisters and you.’

  Lily adjusted her squirrel-fur cape and sat on the low brick front fence. She kicked out a foot, her pink dress draping elegantly from her slim leg.

  ‘You haven’t even noticed my new sandals.’ Lily turned her ankle left and right. When David was like this it was best to distract him, humour him.

  He glanced down and his eyes held on her ankle for a moment before he turned away. ‘You’re wearing new sandals.’

  He took a puff and offered the cigarette to Lily. She pinched it between her index and middle fingers and watched the smoke rise. She didn’t like it much but everyone smoked these days so she pretended to. She drew in and coughed when the smoke burnt her throat.

  That made David smile. Finally. He came to sit next to her and she handed him the cigarette. They smoked and looked on as other guests arrived and began the long walk down the driveway, the soles of their shoes rustling the fine grey gravel.

  ‘It’s all a little bit pointless, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’

  The end of his cigarette waved from side to side in the dark. ‘Parties and tuxedos and champagne.’

  ‘Champagne is never pointless, David.’

  He looked at her, his gaze direct and serious. ‘We’re alike, you and I.’

  ‘Not at all. I’m the life of the party and you’d rather sit out here and smoke. I detest coffee and it’s all you drink. Not to mention that you like poetry and it bores me silly. I can’t imagine why we’re even friends.’

  And you’re so brave and I’m not in the slightest.

  David looked across Robe Terrace into the darkness of the parklands. Somewhere past the trees and the newly dug trenches in the old playing fields, O’Connell Street would be filled with people. ‘I mean, we’re alike on account of my brother and your sister.’

  ‘I suppose we are.’ She smoothed her gown down over her thighs and her hand grazed David’s leg. His head jerked to look at it, her gloved little finger against the satin stripe in his tuxedo trousers.

  ‘Both our families have made sacrifices for the war.’

  ‘Some more than others,’ she replied.

  ‘Do you think about Susan? Where she is? What she’s doing this exact moment? The things she might have seen?’

  Lily reached for the cigarette and took a good, deep puff. ‘I tell myself she’s on a grand tour, taking in the last of the seven wonders of the Ancient World, and she’s been delayed in Egypt.’

  ‘At the pyramid of Cheops?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lily said. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘To be able to think like that. Like there isn’t a war.’

  ‘It’s not about luck,’ Lily said, closing her eyes. She lowered her voice, almost whispered her confession. ‘I work extremely diligently at it. It’s my role to be the cheery one, don’t you see? It takes an effort to keep everyone in my house smiling so they don’t think about Susan quite so much. All this frippery, as my mother calls it … it’s hard work. But if they’re thinking about me and how frivolous I am they might not think about Susan with quite so much dread. I’m the naughty little distraction, don’t you know.’

  ‘Lil,’ David sighed, his deep voice almost disappearing into the darkness.

  ‘I can’t listen to the radio. When Davina fetches the newspaper in the mornings so my father can devour every line of the news over his boiled eggs, I can’t bear to look at it. It’s full of Japan and Hitler and war bonds and battles in the Solomon Islands and other places I’ve never heard of. And if it’s not that, it’s demanding we girls be brave and go and work in factories making bullets or sign up for the armed services, for those girls who are good at typing. I can’t even do that.’

  A burgundy Dodge pulled up to the house and tooted its horn, and a clutch of young ladies stepped out, laughing. One called out to Lily and waved. It was Winifred Wills, a girl from her school days.

  ‘Shall we see you on the dance floor shortly, Lily? Or are you staying out here all night with that handsome young man?’

  ‘I’ll see you inside,’ Lily called back, and that seemed to satisfy them as they giggled their way into the party. Did they not know what was happening in the world? Or were they acting too, as she had been for so long?

  ‘I think about Bill,’ David said quietly. ‘I dream about him. Sometimes I see him floating in the ocean. There’s smoke and fire and planes flying overhead and it’s simply horrific.’

  ‘How ghastly, David.’ Lily’s heart shrank a little. She cast her eyes down into her lap, where her white-gloved fingers lay as limp as wilted flowers. ‘In February, when the Australian nurses escaped Singapore before it fell and were killed on Bangka Island? That was such a dreadful day. I didn’t think they’d go after our nurses. And then I realised that if they would go after our nurses, they’d go after our women doctors, too. That’s when I decided not to read the papers any more. It’s safer this way.’

  David moved in and his arm slipped around her. She breathed deep and rested her head on his shoulder. When she opened her eyes, his tender face was close.

  ‘You’re too young to think like that,’ he said.

  ‘Eighteen doesn’t feel especially young any more,’ she replied.

  ‘You are young. And so, so beautiful.’ His voice was low and gruff and Lily stilled. Was this to be his confession of his love? Her gaze drifted to his mouth.

  ‘May I kiss you, Lily Thomas?’

  She held her breath. ‘I’ve wanted you to forever.’ His forehead dipped to hers, his nose gently brushed hers and his soft lips were on her cheek, kissing her there not once but twice. When he pressed his lips to hers for their first kiss, she slipped an arm inside his jacket and felt his warm skin under
her palm.

  A car horn honked and there was a shout from a passing car. David pulled his lips away and stared into her eyes, his breathing heavy. ‘My lovely Lily.’

  She shivered and it wasn’t from the cold.

  ‘Feel like a walk?’

  She slipped a hand in his. ‘Yes.’

  They didn’t care about missing the party. They walked hand in hand back through North Adelaide to David’s apartment. They slowly took the stairs to the second floor and when he slipped his key in the lock, Lily stepped inside.

  David flicked on the small lamp on the bedside table. Lily shrugged off her cape and put it on the bed. The room was small and plainly decorated. She’d never been there before. It wasn’t the done thing for a young lady to go to a man’s apartment but now she didn’t care. The war had changed everything. There was a desk large enough for studying, a bentwood chair and a single bed pushed up against one wall. A dark wardrobe with two doors. A landscape painting on the wall, featuring flat plains, a gum tree or two and a large flock of dusty sheep. A low bookcase was crowded with books. She ran her fingers along the spines.

  ‘If there’s anything you want to read.’

  ‘No,’ Lily replied, swallowing her nerves and the tightness in her throat. She went to the bed and sat, pulling off her white gloves one finger at a time. She slipped them in her purse, clasped it shut and held it in her lap.

  ‘I have some sherry. I’ve just remembered. Would you like a glass?’

  Lily said she would and David opened his wardrobe, rummaged around on the bottom shelf and pulled out a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. There was a water glass on his writing desk and he filled it. When he handed it to Lily, she took a good slug before passing it back to him.

  He emptied the glass and then poured another.

  Lily savoured the sweetness in her mouth and waited for the heat and the kick of it to slip down inside her. ‘When do you go exactly?’

  David closed the wardrobe door and stood pressed back against it, slipping his free hand into pocket of his tuxedo trousers. ‘Next Wednesday. Straight to Mildura for six months of pilot training at the RAAF base.’ He cleared his throat. ‘My parents and sisters are coming up from Millicent for a goodbye dinner on Tuesday night.’

  ‘How lovely for you,’ Lily said but she couldn’t look at him. Everything from now on was too real, all this final detail. His final farewells to his family. This last night together.

  ‘Would you like to—’

  She shook her head. She couldn’t meet his family. She wasn’t brave enough. If something were to happen to him, she would be forced to bear their sadness as well as her own and she feared her heart wasn’t big enough or strong enough for their grief, too.

  If there was going to be grief, and that seemed inevitable, she was determined to make sure there was love first. She’d been thinking about the possibility of it all week and knew this was right. She could be brave. She could send him off with this gift, the memory of this night and perhaps even a promise.

  She stood, walked to him, leant in to him so her stomach was pressed against his. His eyes flared and his breathing seemed to stop. She tugged at one side of his bow tie and it came loose. She slowly pulled it out of his collar and dropped it on the floor. She undid the top pearl button of his wing-tipped collar shirt. Then the next. And the next.

  He stroked the curl of hair by her ear. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever told you how lovely your hair is. Like an angel’s.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I would have remembered if you had.’

  ‘You would have?’

  ‘Of course I would have. You’ve barely given me a compliment the entire time I’ve known you.’

  ‘That can’t be true,’ David said with a nervous smile as he sipped his sherry. She took it from him and drank some more. She was feeling rather lightheaded already, but perhaps that had more to do with David than it did the alcohol. He slipped off his tuxedo jacket and tossed it onto the chair by his desk. He took a hand and kissed her fingers one by one. ‘I haven’t told you how much you make me laugh?’

  ‘No. Not ever.’

  ‘Or what a terrible tennis player you are?’

  She pulled his shirt out of his cummerbund, spread it open and splayed her fingers across his chest. His skin felt smooth and warm and her fingers tingled against it.

  ‘Oh, yes, I distinctly remember that. But that hardly qualifies as a compliment.’

  David freed his hand from hers and stroked an index finger down her face, slowly over the curve of her cheekbone, into the hollow of her cheek, before tracing the shape of her lips. Something tightened inside her.

  ‘Then I probably haven’t told you how I’ve longed to kiss you before tonight.’

  ‘You do like to keep a girl waiting.’ She held his gaze as she pressed her lips to his chest, as she kissed him right where his heart thumped, and she took in his scent, the soft heat of his skin. His breath hitched and she moved with him as his chest rose and fell. She looked up into his eyes. ‘Why did you keep a girl waiting?’

  His expression was pained and she thought he might be about to cry. ‘I didn’t want you to fall in love with me.’

  ‘Whyever not?’

  ‘Because I was always going to go off to the war. How could I do that to you?’

  She brought her cheek to rest on his chest. His heart beat furiously.

  ‘It’s too late, David.’

  ‘I thought it was better that we remained friends.’

  ‘Not for me.’

  He held her face in his hands and angled it up to meet his eyes. ‘Do you know what I was thinking the entire walk back here?’

  She shook her head. His thumbs stroked her cheeks.

  His eyes gleamed in the low lamplight. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night / of cloudless climes and starry skies …’

  He would always be her poet.

  ‘Banjo Paterson?’ she teased.

  ‘Byron.’

  She hesitated. ‘I’ve never done this before.’

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said. ‘I won’t hurt you. I would never hurt you, Lily.’

  David undid his cufflinks and shrugged off his shirt. Lily ran her hands up and over his ribcage, smoothed them down over the curve of his shoulders and down his athletic arms to his wrists. She wrapped her fingers around them and lifted his hands to her breasts. She watched the way he cupped their fullness, and when her nipples tightened, so obvious to him even under her dress, the sensation was so unexpected and intense that she made a kind of noise she’d never heard herself make before, something between a sigh and a moan.

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed.

  He leant down and kissed her. And she kissed him back, not caring if it was because he’d loved her all along or if it was because he was leaving. She wanted this. She wanted to send him off to war with this gift of her love, so he could hold it in his heart every day.

  So it would keep him safe.

  The bed in David’s apartment was a single one but they fitted perfectly together in it. She’d loved the look of his naked body as he’d stripped off the rest of his clothes and later, wrapped in his arms under the tangled sheets, she loved the feel of it against her skin too. Its strength and softness and manliness. He’d been patient and impatient with her, all at once. His words had been whispers and his exclamations hushed and private.

  As they lay silently together, breathing in time with one another, she pressed herself into the curve of his body and he wrapped his arms tighter around her.

  ‘My beautiful Lily,’ he whispered.

  ‘Be safe, David,’ she murmured.

  This was living a life, she realised. They were living the lives her sister and his brother might not be able to. How could that be wrong?

  This, with David, was the least frivolous thing she would ever do in her life.

  ‘Be brave, Lily,’ he whispered back.

  Chapter Seven

  Flora

  January 1943

>   Flora checked her instructions for the tenth time that day. The Manpower Directorate paperwork was clear. She was to wait at the station upon her arrival to be met by a Mr Charles Nettlefold of Two Rivers at two p.m. She had been assigned to work for one month picking grapes on the family’s property.

  She’d memorised the name and the time, going over and over the details ever since she’d left Melbourne early that morning. Her anticipation for her assignment only grew as the train pulled into each station through the Mallee: Tempy, Gypsum, Bronzewing, Ouyen, Trinita, Nowingi, Boonoonar, Carwarp, Yatpool, Red Cliffs, Irymple.

  And now here she was in Mildura.

  Only it was now two-thirty and there was still no sign of her new employer. The train had left Mildura for Merbein and Yelta and the twenty or so people who had disembarked with her were now gone.

  She hadn’t made a mistake. She was definitely in Mildura. The white lettering on the railway building announced it clearly. She’d been employed by Mr Nettlefold to pick grapes on his property just outside the town.

  If he ever came to fetch her.

  Flora slipped a handkerchief from her pocket and patted her brow. It was blazing hot. The shade from the verandah, which stretched flat and wide from the ticketing office and waiting area to the edge of the platform, wasn’t enough to keep her cool. The scorching breeze swept right under it and ruffled her Land Army uniform blouse.

  She licked her parched lips. A glance at the water tower just outside the station made her feel even thirstier. She was sure she smelled of perspiration and her armpits were damp. Her feet must have swollen from all that sitting and her new regulation shoes felt tight. She’d swear it had never felt this stifling in Melbourne. And not that she would ever complain out loud, but she was hungry. The Vegemite sandwich and apple her brother had slipped into her handbag had been consumed hours and hours earlier. She would give her left arm for a cup of tea.

  Above, the sky was a bright January blue with long streaks of snow-white cloud, not even enough to cast a shadow.

  She cleared her throat, practising her introduction. ‘How do you do, Mr Nettlefold. My name is Flora Atkins. I’m with the Women’s Land Army and I’m here to work.’ She’d repeated the words over and over on the train journey. She expected this Mr Nettlefold would want to see a confidence in his new worker and she didn’t want to disappoint.