both chuckled at the absurdity, leaning in so that their arms and hands were as close as could be. Their hips and thighs bumped as they strolled, sending electrifying pulses of desire coursing through her body.
‘I hope Geer doesn’t think we’re frightful, not asking her along.’ She thought suddenly of her dear friend with the tiniest pulse of guilt.
‘She’ll understand. And I really don’t want to waste our’ – he again looked at his watch – ‘fifty-one minutes talking about my sister.’
‘So what do you want to talk about?’ she asked as they headed towards Horse Guards Parade.
Johan placed his free hand over the one he had captured under his arm, his tone level. ‘I want to talk about you, Marvellous Molly. I want to say that you have been in my thoughts, and I wanted nothing more than to tell you that and to see you in the flesh, just to make sure.’
‘To make sure of what?’ she asked, unable to wipe the smile from her face as his thoughts echoed her own. There was something quite incredible about the thought of her feelings being reciprocated.
‘To make sure that you really did make me feel how I remembered and to make sure your eyes actually are this big and your face just . . .’ He shook his head and looked away, as if it was all a little too much.
‘Just what?’ She swallowed, her mouth a little dry.
‘I like how smart you are, M, how direct. You’re not coy or false. You seem steady and . . . as I say, I just wanted to make sure.’
‘And was your first assessment correct?’ she teased. ‘Have you made sure?’
‘Yes, I have.’ He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers. ‘We have so little time, so let’s get down to it. Questions,’ he bellowed. ‘I have so many questions!’ He spun in a circle on the pavement, as if dizzy with all the things he wanted to ask.
‘You can ask me anything!’ she breathed as they slowed their pace.
‘Right.’ Johan bit his bottom lip and seemed to consider where to start. ‘Your parents. Tell me about your parents.’
‘Well, Papa was a bank manager before enlisting and becoming Major Lindsey Arthur Collway. He died when I was very small. He was badly wounded in the war, suffered terribly, and never truly recovered. I didn’t know what he was like before, but in my mind I steal the memories told me by my big brother, David, and my sister, Joyce, and I make them my own. It helps.’
Her brother had told her often how their father would sit in a chair by the fire in his study, his face animated, eyes bright, moustache twitching to conceal laughter, foot tapping on the rug, as David and little Joycey gathered around his feet in the parlour. Their mother rapt – a plain woman ordinarily and yet on these occasions, by all accounts, quite beautiful in the candlelight. Her hands, consciously or not, would clasp over her heart as if to witness such joy and tenderness in her own home between those she loved was almost more than she could bear.
Molly’s own memories were very different, with her father a shadowy figure resting upstairs. A world away from the man who before her birth had penned poems and ditties for his older children, always far funnier in the telling than when she read them alone as an adult. One memory came to her now, of one Christmas when she was no more than five or six. With her father asleep upstairs, a tree had been decadently festooned with pom-poms, which she and her older sister Joyce had made in a variety of colours, as well as old family baubles depicting Nativity scenes. These were made of the thinnest glass that splintered almost to nothing if dropped, leaving piles of glittery Christmas dust on the wooden floors. It would fall between the cracks of the floorboards and David, her big brother, would whisper to her that it meant a little bit of Christmas magic lurked in that room for the rest of the year. She had loved this idea.
Molly also pictured herself ripping the brown wrapping paper from her present to reveal a china-faced baby doll with rosy red cheeks – and how happy and excited she had been at the sight of it. Her mum had been smiling, her sister Joyce similarly engrossed in freeing her own gift, a doll with long