The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [112]
Billy’s reaction to her stubbornness wasn’t what she had been expecting, though. Immediately the laughter died out of his eyes. He gave her a sharp look, his voice filled with an unfamiliar mix of disapproval and severity. ‘I’d never have put you down as the kind of girl who goes out with a lad whose got another girl somewhere else, Jess.’
The cheek of it! For a minute she was tempted to tell him how wrong he was about her and Walter, but why should she tell him anything? He could think what he liked. She knew the truth, she decided stubbornly, and that was all that mattered.
‘What I do is no business of yours,’ she snapped back at him instead. ‘I don’t go telling you who you should see and who you shouldn’t, but if I was to…’ she paused deliberately.
‘If you was to what?’ Bill encouraged her.
Jess’s mouth compressed. ‘I’m not saying, ’cos it isn’t any of my business, but if you was to ask me then I might just have to tell you that when a girl shows off her chest like that Yvonne you’ve brought here with you is showing off hers, then there’s bound to be trouble.’
‘Got a lovely figure, Yvonne has,’ Billy responded appreciatively, with a happy sigh that made Jess want to throw a bucket of water over him.
‘Lucky thing your Denise’s ma noticed how much weight she was putting on before it was too late,’ Billy added, changing the subject.
Jess gave him a suspicious look, but she still couldn’t resist demanding, ‘And what does that mean, when it’s at home?’
‘Nowt, only that if she’d have got much bigger she’d never have got into that frock she’s wearing,’ Billy answered innocently.
Jess wasn’t deceived, but decency made it impossible for her to say to him that she knew perfectly well that he was referring to the fact that Denise was very obviously pregnant, and that if her mother hadn’t realised that fact, her new son-in-law could have been out of the country and unable to do the decent thing and marry her.
‘There you are, Billy lad. So what’s all this about you joining the bomb disposal lot?’
This was her chance to slip away before Billy asked her any more awkward questions about Walter, Jess acknowledged, and the only reason she wasn’t doing just that was because her feet in her new pair of second-hand shoes were killing her. She’d told her mother that the silver dance shoes she’d bought her from a Red Cross sale would be too tight, but her mother had said that they were so pretty that it had seemed a shame not to get them and that Jess could rub a bit of Vaseline into her feet to make them more comfortable. It hadn’t worked.
‘I didn’t join so much as get meself ordered into the bomb disposal lot,’ she could hear Billy saying affably.
Very deliberately she waited until they were on their own again before telling him sharply, ‘And that was a big fib you went and told your Uncle Fred, ’cos my dad told me that you hadn’t been told to go joining the bomb disposal lot at all, and that you’d volunteered, because he’d heard it from your sergeant. I dunno why you had to go and do summat as daft as that, I really don’t.’
‘Perhaps I did it because I wanted to show you that it isn’t just them ruddy GIs who can be heroes.’
Jess stared at him. Suddenly with one sentence Billy had changed the landscape of their relationship for ever.
‘Show me?’ she half stammered. ‘Why would you want to go doing summat like that?’
‘Why do you think?’ Billy challenged her grimly.
‘’Ere, Billy, you said you was going to tek me out somewhere special. You never said nowt about bringing me to a ruddy wedding.’
Billy was looking at Yvonne as though he could hardly remember who she was, Jess recognised with a sudden surge of satisfaction. Not that she believed any of that fancy talk of his for one minute. She knew better than to fall for Billy’s flattery.
‘Hey, cabbie…’
Myra winced as Nick let out a piercing whistle