The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [145]
Now she was already a woman, experienced, knowing the desires of her body and what fed them. The hunger she felt for Lee’s touch wasn’t the excited urgency spiked with uncertainty that belonged to a virgin, but the awareness of her own deepest self that belonged to a woman who had known physical love.
She and Lee would be meeting physically as equals. Her need for him was a woman’s need for a man, not a virgin’s need for the experience of sexual intimacy, or to ‘give herself to the man she loved’ that she had felt with Kit. How naïve that girl seemed to be to her now, how naïve, and impossibly morally pure, because that Diane, that girl, would never even have contemplated experiencing, never mind satisfying, her physical desire for a married man. She would not even have accepted that it was possible for a woman to feel that kind of hunger in its own right. For her, the sexual act had only been acceptable when it was the result of a woman having fallen in love and being loved back by a man who was free to give and take that love. She would never have accepted that physical sexual desire could be something a woman could feel simply because she was a woman and because she was missing what she had once had, because she was afraid that this war might take from her the right to be fully that woman.
‘My guess is that we’ll be there in about an hour and a half – can you wait that long to eat?’
Ridiculously after what she had just been thinking, Diane could feel herself suddenly blushing because she knew that her appetite wasn’t for food.
‘God, I’m so hungry for you, Di,’ he told her in a low groan, his words mirroring her thoughts. ‘You’re all I’ve been able to think about since Wednesday night.’
Myra grimaced in distaste as she made her way along the down-at-heel street in the fading daylight. With its boarded-up houses and general air of neglect and abandonment, the whole area had an atmosphere of sullen brooding resentment spiced with danger. It reminded her in many ways of the atmosphere at home whilst she had been growing up. Angrily she shrugged aside that thought. Just as soon as this war was over she would be leaving all of this behind her. There wouldn’t be streets like this one in New York: streets where houses had been bombed and left empty, where hostile dark shapes, human and animal, slunk along in the twilight, anxious to keep out of sight but still ready to turn and fight their corner if they had to. Myra’s grip on her handbag tightened. Nick had no right to expect her to come to places like this, she decided, conveniently ignoring the fact that Nick had not summoned her to the bar and that it was her own decision to come there and look for him, because he had not, as she had expected, been in touch with her since their return from London. Apart from anything else, she needed to see him to tell him about what Diane had had to say to her. Once they were married there would be some changes made and no mistake. It was all very well him claiming that it was business that brought him to this dank sunless street, with its fetid smell of corruption and fear; there must be other ‘business’ he could make money from, surely. Wrinkling her nose in disgust, she started to walk down the worn stone steps that led to the bar.
In the well at the bottom of the steps a woman with brassy dyed hair was leaning against the brick wall, smoking.
‘’Ere,’ she called out to Myra as Myra made to pull open the door. ‘This is my pitch. Tek yourself off and go and find your own.’
Ignoring her, Myra stepped into the bar.
Unlike on the other occasions she had been here, this evening it was busy, the air thick with