The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [150]
‘I doubt it now,’ Diane told her landlady.
Diane knew from Ruthie, who was now blissfully counting off the last few weeks to her November wedding to Glen, that it was believed that Nick had either managed to leave the country or was living somewhere in England under an assumed name with the help of his connections with the American Mafia, although Ruthie had also stressed that Glen had been warned that the US Army did not want to have public attention drawn to this connection, and that officially Nick was simply recorded as AWOL – absent without leave.
It had been raining on and off all morning, a thin drizzle, which, combined with the mist that had rolled in over the Liverpool bar, was giving the whole city an air of closed-in grey, dank misery. It was Diane’s day off but she did not feel in a holiday mood as she huddled up inside her uniform greatcoat, worn to protect her from the weather despite the fact that she was not on duty.
She had become such a regular visitor at the hospital that the porter on duty recognised her, giving her a cheery smile.
During her early days in Mill Road, Myra had been put in a small side room on her own, such had been the severity of her injuries and the doctors’ belief that she could not survive them.
Now, though, she was in a bed in a large ward surrounded by other female patients, several of whom called out chirpy ‘hellos’ to Diane when she walked in.
Because they were both in uniform and because Myra had no family to come and visit her, the normal rules about visiting hours had been stretched to allow for Diane’s on-duty hours, but she tried, apart from a few exceptions, to keep to them. Today, though, was one of those exceptions.
From her bed halfway down the ward, Myra raised her hand in welcome. Poor Myra, Diane reflected sombrely as she reached her bed and pulled out a chair to sit down next to it. She had paid a dreadful price for her foolish infatuation with Nick Mancini. Her hair had started to grow back now after the doctors had had to shave her head to deal with her wound, but she was not the girl she had been, and had lost that sharp self-confidence that had so marked her out before.
She looked anxious and upset, and Diane could see that she’d been crying.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked her sympathetically. ‘You haven’t been having those bad nightmares again, have you? Only if you have you should tell Sister, because she said—’
‘No,’ Myra said. ‘Well, at least, it feels like a nightmare, and I wish that was all it was and that I could wake up from it.’ Her eyes filled with tears, and she bit down hard on her bottom lip to prevent them from overflowing. ‘I’m having that bastard’s kid,’ she told Diane starkly. ‘I’ve been sick for a while, and they’ve thought it was something to do with…with what happened, but then they asked me if there was any chance I could be carrying, and I had to say yes, so they did some tests and I am. I can’t believe it. It was only the once without a French letter, and even then…’
Diane didn’t know what to say. She was astonished after what Myra had gone through that she had not lost the baby she was carrying, and privately couldn’t help thinking that it might have been for the best if she had. What was more, she suspected from Myra’s reaction that she felt the same way. Not that either of them could ever say so, of course.
‘And as if that weren’t bad enough I got a letter from Jim this morning – the first I’ve had from him since they wrote to tell him what happened to me. He’s due back on leave any day now and he says he’s ready to talk about us having a divorce.’ Myra gave a bitter laugh. ‘He’ll be the one wanting to divorce me when he sees the state I’m in and he finds out what’s going to happen. That means that me and Nick’s little bastard are going to be managing on our own.’
‘But you’ve got your mother,’ Diane protested. ‘I know she hasn’t been able to come and see you but—’
Myra shook her head. ‘She won’t want to know. Settled now, she is, with her cousin, living in some boarding house down Brighton way. The last thing she’s going to