this the feeling that made women want to slip into white frocks and give up their ambition?
‘Don’t worry, Moll, there’s someone for everyone!’ her older sister had trilled just recently while trimming crusts from cucumber sandwiches and warming a pot for the tea.
Joyce, by the age of seventeen, had swept up the aisle with Albert, quite possibly the most boring man on the planet. Her sister was content to stay at home and fill her time running the carpet sweeper over the rugs and making crumbles in the winter, salads in the summer and cakes on a Sunday. Molly had decided she would rather be an old maid than settle for someone like Albert and their ordinary life in a neat red-brick house in Tonbridge, Kent.
But Molly loved Joyce and didn’t wish to insult her sister or her lifestyle, so she chose not to say that if marriage meant doing little more than baking, polishing scuffs and scratches from dark wood and washing, starching and pressing white table linens or shirt collars without breaking a sweat, she’d rather remain an old maid with a career in the Diplomatic Corps or the Foreign Office.
But suddenly it felt as though everything had changed. Maybe Joyce was right.
For the love of God, slow down, Molly! These thoughts were as terrifying and alien as they were wonderful. The idea that he might be feeling the same, thinking the same, made her grab her pillow to squeal silently into the feathers and drum her heels against the mattress.
When she removed the pillow she saw her mother standing at the end of the bed.
‘Jesus, you scared me!’ Molly laughed.
Her mother stared at her. ‘What on earth are you doing, Mary Florence?’
‘I was having a dream . . .’
Her mother shook her head and muttered under her breath as she left the room, but Molly guessed it was something along the lines of ‘Lord, give me strength . . .’
Not that she cared. In fact, she felt so giddy she nearly confessed that maybe her mum and Joyce might be right about this whole marriage malarkey. Instead, she smiled and called out into the darkness, ‘Goodnight, Mother dearest!’
THREE
Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London
December 20th 1943
Aged 18
‘So you like him?’ Geer asked casually over lunch, as she dunked a biscuit into her tea, a habit Molly found quite disgusting.
‘I don’t . . .’ She shrugged, swallowing the uncharacteristic impulse to let her feelings gush.
‘You don’t like him or don’t know if you do?’ her friend prompted.
‘I don’t know if I should say. I mean, you’re his sister and, to be honest, it all sounds faintly ridiculous.’
‘Of course you can say, no matter how ridiculous!’ Geer rolled her eyes. ‘I’m your pal, and I’m in the perfect position to pass on any messages and act as go-between.’
‘You’d do that?’ She couldn’t help the note of excitement in her voice.
Geer grinned, nodding frantically, then dipped her biscuit into the hot dark brew again before lowering the whole soggy mess into her mouth.
‘We’ve only met once, but I can’t stop thinking about him,’ Molly confessed in a lower tone, wary of anyone else at the lunch table overhearing. ‘It’s as if every thought I have and everything I see now has to pass through a Johan filter.’
Geer widened her mouth. ‘I am honestly trying my very hardest not to say that it’s fast work!’
Molly sighed. ‘I know, I know, and if you were saying that to me, I’d be taking you to task and telling you to pull yourself together.’
It had been mere hours since Geer had introduced Molly to her brother at the Army and Navy Club, hours that felt simultaneously like months and mere moments. Molly found herself distracted at work, the direct result of a whirring brain and as yet no word from the object of her desires. For the first time in her life she felt unbalanced, thrown by her own thoughts. The plan in her head of forging ahead with her career, undistracted by love, was now a little frayed at the edges and, she feared, with the right words of encouragement from Johan, might unravel altogether. And it was all based on no more than a single evening of dancing and an exchange of smouldering looks. She reminded herself not to be so silly: this was, after all, a fledgling thing and might never get off the ground. The words sounded sensible in her head, but her heart, it seemed, had no intention of listening. All she