The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [96]
To punish herself for this weakness, Diane refused to allow herself to look at him, sitting face forward and bolt upright in her seat until she heard him exhale and say drily, ‘I thought it was a stiff upper lip you Brits were supposed to have.’
Now she had to turn to look at him. ‘It is,’ she agreed coolly.
‘Then relax. The way you’re sitting right now is making my spine ache, never mind what it must be doing to yours. These Jeeps aren’t the most comfortable things to ride in. Or is this another way to prove how superior a tough Brit is to us mollycoddled Yanks?’
He was laughing at her, Diane recognised, and the truth was that she could feel her own lips wanting to curve into a responsive smile, but of course she couldn’t let them. That would be giving in, although she wasn’t sure she knew what exactly it would be giving in to, other than her own dangerous desire to let herself enjoy his company.
‘OK, let’s get this show on the road,’ he said. ‘We’re going to be heading out towards Knutsford today, home of the late Mrs Gaskell.’
Diane shot him a surprised look.
‘What’s wrong?’ he queried. ‘Surprised that an ignorant Yank knows about a British writer?’
‘No,’ Diane denied. ‘If I was surprised it was because I would have thought that Knutsford is a fair distance from Burtonwood.’
‘Uncle Sam’s orders are that the top brass mustn’t risk their necks by bunking down too close to the airfield, just in case Hitler decides to come over and drop a few bombs on them,’ he told her lightly, but Diane knew that he was not deceived by her answer and that she had been surprised by his reference to Mrs Gaskell. Why was it that he kept on managing to catch her out and make her look, if not stupid, then certainly prejudiced?
‘What will you do when this is all over, Diane?’
His question startled her. They never discussed anything that wasn’t ‘business’, and this was the first personal question he had asked her.
‘I…I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I haven’t really thought about it. What about you? What did you do before you were conscripted?’
‘Drafted, we call it, not conscripted, but I wasn’t drafted. I’m a career soldier. I joined the army straight out of high school. My dad had been a farmer. It’s a tough life and in the end it killed my mother, then him. They lost everything in the Depression. My mom died of hard work and lack of money, and my dad died of shame because of it.’
His voice was clipped and low, empty of emotion, but Diane knew better than to believe that he wasn’t feeling any. She had known too many men use the same defence mechanism -including Kit.
‘Joining the army was my way out,’ he told her. ‘It was the best decision I’ve ever made. The army’s the most important thing in my life.’
‘Apart from your wife,’ Diane murmured.
The look he shot her made her heart slam into her ribs.
‘You’re putting words into my mouth that I didn’t speak,’ he told her curtly. ‘Career soldiers shouldn’t marry.’
‘That’s crazy,’ Diane objected. ‘You can’t mean that.’
‘Why not? If my wife were here she’d tell you straight that the worst thing she ever did was marry a soldier. Hell, she’s told me often enough, and anyone else who will listen. If a soldier does marry then it should be a woman who understands what the army means to him and accepts that, not a—’ He broke off, his mouth compressing so grimly that Diane guessed he had said far more than he had intended.
Well, his silence now suited her, because she certainly didn’t want to discuss his marriage with him, or start exchanging cosy stories of love affairs gone wrong.
An hour later, when the major still hadn’t broken the silence between them, Diane acknowledged that if she had wanted to find a way to get under his skin she had certainly succeeded, but then she had noticed that he had become increasingly snappy and irritable with her over the last couple of days. Because he couldn’t wait to get rid of her? So what if he did feel like that? She didn’t