Ellie

  She had allowed him to stroke her breasts on many an occasion, but he’d never seen them naked before. He looked down at the small hard nipple between his fingers and squeezed it gently. Her eyes were closed and her mouth open slightly, soft moans of pleasure coming from deep in her throat. Jack moved down to take her nipple in his mouth and her moaning grew louder, her hand reaching out to stroke his head and neck, urging him closer still.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ she gasped. ‘More.’

  Jack forgot all the warnings. The taste and smell of her skin drove out all thought but to possess. He sucked on her nipples, his hands roaming down her body, fingers pressing into all the soft, hidden places. Even through her dress he could feel the heat of her, her thighs yielding to his touch, opening enough to let his hand in.

  She drew his face back to hers, her lips hot and insistent, tongue probing sensuously against his. Jack’s hand rested for a second on her knee, then slowly slid up her thigh under her dress.

  He expected her to stop him, but instead she moaned again, arching her body against his. Slowly his hand crept up, stroking and smoothing the hot silkiness of her inner thighs until it reached satin knickers.

  Jack could hardly contain himself as he rubbed her there. The combination of silky damp satin, the triangle of soft pubic hair and the soft womanly folds of skin that he’d dreamed about for so long was unbearably erotic. But instead of Bonny stiffening as he expected, her thighs parted further, urging his fingers deep inside her.

  Jack’s knowledge of women’s bodies came only from crude male jokes. He hadn’t expected it to be so hot and slippery or to feel such awe and tenderness all at once. He found as he slipped his finger in and out that Bonny’s moans grew louder and his desire to please her was greater than his own need. He grew bolder as she writhed under him, pulling her knickers to one side and experimentally stroking her all over. The musky smell of her, the whispered cries for more, her darting tongue against his, her hard nipples against his chest were inflaming him to such a pitch he had to unbutton his trousers.

  ‘Hold me,’ he begged her, pushing his fingers deep within her, hoping that she wouldn’t suddenly push him away. ‘Please hold me.’

  ‘I love you, Jack,’ she whispered huskily in his ear. ‘It’s so wonderful.’

  Her hand closed round Jack’s penis willingly, but she was insinuating her body towards it too, drawing him on to her.

  ‘No,’ Jack whispered with little conviction. ‘No, we mustn’t.’

  ‘But I want you, Jack,’ she said, her hands reaching down the back of his trousers and cupping his buttocks. ‘Please!’

  Nothing on earth was as wonderful as the moment when he thrust himself deep inside her. It was like the thrill of driving a motorbike at full throttle down an empty road, the blast of heat on opening a furnace door, and yet the sweetness of stepping into a garden after a summer shower.

  ‘I’ll love you for ever,’ he heard himself call out at the moment of eruption and all at once he was crying.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Bonny whispered, lifting his face from her shoulder to kiss him. She wiped away his tears, her blue eyes troubled.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jack whispered.

  Bonny had never looked more beautiful, her hair tousled, lips swollen with kissing, her face rosy. But it was the tenderness in her eyes which affected him the most. She’d never looked quite that way before.

  ‘We shouldn’t have done it,’ he said hoarsely. ‘You’re under-age. We should’ve saved it till we got married.’

  The purr of a car engine outside startled them. Jack leaped up, fastened his trousers and tucked in his shirt. Bonny was quicker still. She buttoned her dress, smoothed down her hair and pushed her feet back into her sandals all in one swift movement.

  They had just plumped up the sofa cushions as Lydia opened the front door.

  Lydia saw Bonny sitting sedately on the sofa as she came into the hall and didn’t immediately notice Jack in an armchair tucked behind the door. It had been a long, weary evening, trying to sort out a home for a young, pregnant woman with two small children who had turned up in Bognor after her house in London had been bombed. On the drive home Lydia had thought long and hard about Bonny and she had come reluctantly to the conclusion that it would serve no purpose to oppose the girl about this dancing job.

  ‘Still up?’ She smiled warmly. ‘Was the film good?’

  Lydia took a step closer, about to suggest they had some cocoa. When she saw Jack, her smile faded.

  ‘Jack came back to tell you his news,’ Bonny said too quickly. ‘He’s got his call-up papers. He’s joining the Royal Army Service Corps.’

  Lydia didn’t need any sixth sense to tell her what had been going on. Jack’s eyes were puffy, he was very flushed and his eyes didn’t meet hers. Bonny’s dress was a mass of creases and there was a faint odour in the room which Lydia instantly recognised.

  ‘What have you two been doing?’ she asked. She was wearing her WVS uniform. She withdrew a long hat-pin and put her hat down on the coffee table.

  There was a highly charged atmosphere between them. Jack looked guilty, standing awkwardly at the fireplace like a burglar interrupted mid-job. Bonny was too calm; normally when she was with Jack she was giggly and restless.

  ‘Just waiting for you,’ Bonny said innocently. ‘We haven’t been in long.’

  Lydia looked at the clock. It was half past eleven, so this last remark was a lie. ‘From what I can see it’s just as well Jack’s got his call-up papers.’ She turned to look directly at him. ‘I’m not a fool, Jack, I know what’s been going on here tonight. I trusted you. How could you do such a thing?’

  Jack blanched. He had visions of Miss Wynter calling a doctor to examine Bonny, then having him run in to the police.

  ‘We haven’t done anything.’ Bonny stood up, her eyes flashing defiantly. ‘What do you mean?’

  Lydia knew Bonny would continue to lie to her last breath. ‘Go to bed,’ she snapped at her. ‘I’ll talk to you in the morning.’

  Jack sidled towards the door.

  ‘You can sit down.’ Lydia pointed towards the chair. ‘I’ll talk to you alone.’

  Bonnie flounced out, without so much as a backward glance. Lydia waited until she heard her footsteps overhead. She took out her cigarettes, took one herself and handed one to Jack. Once he’d lit them both she sat back in her chair and looked hard at him.

  Jack was normally a very relaxed lad, but now his hand trembled, his knees were braced as if ready to spring out of the chair and his brown eyes were wide with alarm. Lydia had a great deal of affection for Jack. He was endearingly ugly with his squashed-looking nose, red spiky hair and those freckles. Anyone meeting him for the first time could be pardoned for assuming he was a thug – his shoulders rippled with muscle, his hands were like two great hams. An unfortunate appearance for someone with so many fine qualities.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Jack,’ she said. ‘Bonny lies easier than she breathes, but I expect better of you. Have you had relations with her tonight?’

  Jack blushed scarlet at such a direct question. It was tempting to deny it but he knew Miss Wynter better than that. ‘We didn’t mean to,’ he mumbled. ‘It just happened.’

  Lydia nodded; she’d had her own moments of being carried away in the past. His honesty was at least admirable. ‘Setting aside the law, which makes it a crime to have relations with an under-age girl,’ she said coolly, ‘perhaps you should consider that such an act might lead to pregnancy.’

  Jack gulped. ‘I’d marry her,’ he said immediately. ‘I want to anyway.’

  Lydia shook her head, her expression one of pity now rather than anger. ‘Jack! Bonny’s fifteen. A spoilt, selfish girl who is no more capable of looking after a baby than I am of stripping down an engine. I’ve grown to love her,’ Lydia sighed. ‘But I’m not blind to her faults. We’d better both pray hard she isn’t pregnant, because I can’t think of anyone who’d make a worse mother.’
br />   ‘But I love her, Miss Wynter,’ Jack protested. ‘And she loves me.’

  ‘I believe you truly love her,’ Lydia said sadly. ‘But I don’t believe Bonny loves anyone but herself. I’m telling you this, Jack, because I care for you, not to be spiteful. She may change as she grows up – I certainly hope so. But for now she is a mass of contradictions with the body of a woman, but the mind of a child.’

  To Jack’s shame, he began to cry. He tried to prevent it but tears just cascaded down his cheeks.

  Lydia got up and went over to him, laying one hand on his shoulder. ‘Poor Jack,’ she said softly. She could guess what he was feeling; one moment a glimpse of paradise, the next cruel reality. Tom between the army and being close to Bonny. But she had to warn him. In her heart Lydia knew Bonny was just using him for practice, that in a few months he would be discarded like yesterday’s news. ‘Go off to the army, Jack, look around the world and enjoy your youth and freedom. Maybe one day it will work out for you and Bonny, but don’t count on it.’

  ‘Link arms, step and kick,’ Ambrose shouted from below the stage. ‘Get those legs higher, head up and smile. Now break arms and turn, faces towards the audience and high kicks again.’

  The girls held on to each others’ waists and kicked their way into the wings.

  ‘Come back,’ Ambrose yelled again. ‘To make this look right all your legs must reach the same height. At the moment you look like a drunken centipede. From the beginning again. This time I want it right.’

  The pianist pounded the introductory bars yet again. Once more the girls lined up to repeat the entire routine.

  Bonny’s back ached, her legs were stiff and her face felt set in a permanent false smile. This was nothing like Lydia’s lessons, it was torture. She could do the high kicks effortlessly, but she wasn’t used to dancing as a team. She was soaked in sweat, she was hungry and thirsty and they still had another two hours of rehearsal.

  ‘Ten-minute break,’ Ambrose yelled, just as she thought she might keel over. ‘Outside, get some fresh air.’

  Out in the tiny yard behind the café the girls sank on to the many empty crates and boxes. One of the café girls brought out mugs of tea on a tray and a pile of damp, grey sandwiches.

  ‘They’re all we’ve got,’ she said apologetically. ‘Corned beef again.’

  Bonny leaned back on the wall and closed her eyes. Right now she wished she was back at Mayfield, fresh and clean in her pink and white frock, doing nothing more arduous than tapping a business letter into the typewriter.

  She had achieved her objective of being one of ‘The Cover Girls’, but somehow she felt she’d lost something precious in the process.

  Her parents had eventually reluctantly agreed, just as they did to all her demands, yet their obvious disappointment in her had taken the edge off her pleasure. Aunt Lydia was still cool and had made some very stinging comments that Bonny didn’t choose to dwell on. Worse still, the other girls in the troupe seemed hell-bent on breaking her confidence.

  Bonny realised too late that sucking up to Ambrose Dingle was a mistake. It hadn’t made him nicer to her and now the girls went out of their way to show her up. Most of them were better singers than her, many of them danced just as well and she’d learnt to her cost that an inexperienced dancer with no friends was in for a rough ride.

  ‘Stop whining,’ one girl said to her when she dared to complain at being kicked in the shins.

  ‘Ambrose will keep you practising till your feet bleed.’ Another grinned maliciously when a blister the side of a half-crown came up on her heel.

  The afternoon sun slanted down into the yard, hitting Bonny squarely in the face, but every patch of shade was taken by the other girls. They had all formed tight little groups – one of the six girls who’d toured with Ambrose before, the remaining nine split into two more – but Bonny was excluded from all of them. Their laughter and chatter, the smell of shared cigarettes, wafted over her, making her feel isolated and vulnerable, and she hadn’t the least idea how to go about gaining acceptance.

  On top of this was Jack. Next week he would be off to Aldershot and it might be months before she saw him again. Aunt Lydia had been so cruel about her and Jack. First spelling out in graphic detail what pregnancy meant and then accusing Bonny of playing with Jack’s emotions. Fortunately her period had turned up, but she didn’t really understand what Aunt Lydia meant about playing with emotions. Surely the way Bonny felt now was love? She couldn’t stop thinking about what they did that night, she kept imagining his hands on her body, she wanted him. If that wasn’t love, what was it?

  ‘Are you all ready?’ Ambrose Dingle walked along the line of girls, looking them up and down. Sally, a statuesque brunette who led the sixteen girls, was right in the wings, waiting for the cue to lead them on. The line went right back to the dressing-room. Bonny was in the middle, a position she was secretly convinced had been given her because she was the prettiest. ‘Now, please remember to smile, smile, smile. They’ll forgive you if you stumble but not for looking sour. Forget that this is the dress rehearsal – there’s fifty wounded servicemen out there all trying to forget what they saw in Normandy. Dazzle them!’

  Bonny looked down at her costume. The opening number of the show was ‘Lullaby of Broadway’. She could only suppose that the flimsy chiffon shifts worn over skin-tight shorts and sequinned bra tops were supposed to look somewhere between evening gowns and nightdresses, but to her they were just plain tacky. Worse still, they were so old her shorts had been patched and she shuddered to think how many times they’d been worn and never washed.

  Jack was out there tonight, with Beryl Baker and Aunt Lydia, along with most of the other girls’ relatives and the servicemen. Tonight was Jack’s last night in Sussex; tomorrow he’d be in the barracks at Aldershot.

  ‘The orchestra’s tuning up.’ Frances, the girl next in line to Bonny, turned to her, grinning broadly. In fact there was a pianist, a drummer, two very old violinists, an enormously fat lady playing cello and a saxophonist. ‘Are you nervous, Bonny?’

  Frances was the only one of the girls who was coming round, but perhaps this was because she was a misfit too. She was just a bit plump, with raven black curly hair, and very posh. Most of the other girls came from quite poor backgrounds and they were suspicious of the way Frances threw money around.

  ‘A bit,’ Bonny agreed. She wasn’t, in fact, but in two weeks of rehearsals and being left out of everything, she’d learnt not to look too confident.

  A whisper was being passed down the line of girls from Sally, who was peeping through a hole in the curtain at the audience. She had been giving a running commentary since they lined up, particularly on the men arriving.

  ‘An awful looking red-haired bloke just sat down with two older women right in the front row,’ Frances whispered word for word to Bonny. ‘Sal wants to know who he belongs to.’

  Bonny’s heart sank. It had to be Jack; she’d made sure he and Lydia had seats in the front. She hesitated, blushing furiously. To admit he belonged to her might make her a laughing stock, yet if she passed on the whisper that would be denying him. Until now she’d never considered how Jack looked to others and she’d implied to the girls that her boyfriend was something special.

  ‘Pass it on,’ Frances nudged her.

  Bonny turned to Muriel, a sharp-faced brunette, and whispered the message, trying hard not to think how hurt Jack would be by her disloyalty.

  As the overture struck up, the girls braced themselves and moved closer together, ready to start. Bonny wished she’d gone to the lavatory one last time, but it was too late now.

  They strolled on, arm in arm in pairs, singing, swirling their chiffon shifts with one hand.

  Once out there, Bonny forgot everything but the joy of singing and dancing in front of the footlights. She caught a glimpse of Jack’s rapt face and Lydia’s broad smile, but looked right out over their heads and concentrated on the rows of servicemen behind.

&nbs
p; Despite all Ambrose’s pronouncements that they were the worst troupe of chorus girls he’d ever worked with, somehow the performance was perfect. The high kicks were all uniformly chest high, the girls all turned as one and Bonny, Frances, Mary and Sally, who were the only four tap-dancing, synchronised their steps as they never had in rehearsal. As they swept off to the whispering of ‘Good-night, good-night’, the applause was deafening.

  ‘Brilliant, girls!’ Ambrose beamed at them as they came off. ‘Well done, all of you.’

  Back in the dressing-room it was chaos as they changed for the next number. Sixteen girls in a room some eight by twelve with one small mirror.

  ‘I’ve got a hole in my tights,’ Sally moaned.

  ‘My bow-tie’s gone,’ yelled Margaret.

  ‘Has anyone got any STs?’ shouted another girl. They could hear the singer Larry Lewis singing ‘You Can’t Run Away from Love Tonight’, and half the girls had to be back on stage for his next number. ‘Oh You Beautiful Doll’, changed into long, slinky dresses.

  Bonny wasn’t in on that number, so she helped those who were get ready, fastening paste necklaces, fixing feathers in hair and handing them their gloves and parasols.

  ‘Anyone discover who the red-haired horror belongs to?’ Sally called out the moment half the troupe had disappeared out the door. ‘He was looking at you the whole time, Bonny, is he your fella?’

  Bonny wanted the floor to open up and swallow her. If she said no and the girls spotted him waiting for her at the end, they’d be laughing at her for weeks. ‘He’s my cousin actually,’ she said, turning her face away so they wouldn’t see her blush. ‘He’s come with my aunt because he’s joining up tomorrow.’

  For just a second she knew how Judas must have felt. For two weeks she’d been insisting to herself she was in love with Jack, she couldn’t get her mind off making love to him and now she had relegated him to a mere cousin.

  ‘I won’t ask if he’s got a brother,’ Sally laughed. ‘Never could stand men with red hair.’