His Diamond Bride

‘Well, I was hoping she’d become my wife,’ Mark replied.

Slowly, Dee turned her head towards him as the world exploded about her, full of blazing light and riotous colours. It had happened. He’d proposed. She would be his wife. Every dream had come true. Passionate joy held her speechless.

Helen, too, was briefly dumb, but she was the first to recover. ‘That puts a different face on it,’ she said, cautious and not entirely yielding. ‘If you mean it.’

‘I was going to ask Dee tonight, only you interrupted me.’

Joe began to edge his wife away. ‘Goodnight, you two,’ he said with a touch of desperation as he managed to get Helen inside.

Dee’s head was clearing and her sensible side reasserting itself, as it had a terrible habit of doing. She’d be a fool to believe this.

‘It’s all right, Mark,’ she said in a low voice. ‘You don’t have to marry me.’

He regarded her, his head on one side. ‘Maybe I want to. Have you thought of that?’

‘You don’t want to. You just had to divert my mother. I understand.’

‘Now you’ve insulted me,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Have I?’

‘There I am, learning to take to the skies and fight Hitler, and you think I’m afraid of your mother. She’s formidable, I grant you, but I’m not scared of her.’

She gave a shaky laugh. ‘I didn’t mean that, but you know as well as I do that you weren’t going to propose if we hadn’t got caught.’

‘Well, perhaps she did us a favour by showing us the way. Are you saying you don’t want to marry me?’

‘It’s not that, it’s just-’

He put his hands on her shoulders and spoke lightly. ‘My darling, will you give a straight answer to a straight question? Are you turning me down?’

‘No, of course not, I-’

‘Then are you accepting me?’

She looked up into his face, trying to read the truth behind his quizzical expression. She saw humour and good nature, but not the answer she needed.

‘Yes or no?’ he persisted.

‘Yes,’ she said with a kind of desperation. It wasn’t the proposal she’d dreamed of, and in her heart she knew something about it wasn’t right, but there was no way she could turn down the chance to make him hers.

‘Does that mean we’re engaged?’

‘Yes,’ she choked. ‘Oh, yes!’

This time their kiss was relatively restrained, since both knew that Helen was watching them from the kitchen window. As they returned slowly to the house, she was waiting for them. Joe produced drinks to celebrate, then Helen declared that it was late and Mark would be wanting to get home. She wore a fixed smile but both her expression and her tone said, No hanky-panky in this house.

Mark gave Dee a rueful smile and departed under the steely gaze of his future mother-in-law.

‘Congratulations, love,’ Joe said, embracing his daughter.

‘Yes, you got him to the finishing post,’ Helen agreed, although she couldn’t resist adding, ‘with a bit of help.’

‘Mum!’

‘He’d have taken his time proposing if I hadn’t prodded him on. Never mind. We managed it. We should be proud of ourselves.’

‘But that’s not how it’s supposed to happen,’ Dee protested.

‘The important thing is, it happened. You wouldn’t want him going off to the Air Force without having his ring on your finger. He wasn’t going to propose, just fool around with you and then on to the next. Look what he did to Sylvia.’

‘Look what she did to him,’ Dee said quickly.

‘Does she still write to you, love?’ Joe asked gently. She had told them about the first letter and read out some, but not all of its contents.

‘Now and then. Doesn’t she ever write to you?’

‘She’s tried,’ Helen said. ‘I tear them up.’

‘Before I even see them,’ Joe said sadly. ‘We don’t even know where she is.’

‘She hasn’t told me her address,’ Dee said. ‘But she’s living with Phil and in her last letter she said she’d just discovered that she was pregnant.’

Helen stiffened. ‘So as well as being a whore, she’s going to have a little bastard. I want nothing to do with her. Anyway, at least we’ll have one respectable marriage in this family. Get him tied to you while you can, my girl. I’ve done my best for you. Now it’s up to you.’

If she’d thought to encourage Dee into marriage by this means, she was mistaken. Whatever Mark said, she couldn’t rid herself of the shamed feeling that he’d simply taken the line of least resistance. One part of her mind urged her to rush the ceremony before he could back off, but the other part refused to do it.

These days the world seemed to be thrown into sharp relief, and everything had a sense of ‘one last time before the war’. Any party or celebration, every anniversary, any piece of good fortune, must be enjoyed to the full. Just in case.

‘There’s a fair on Hampstead Heath,’ Mark told her one evening. ‘Let’s go. We never know when there’ll be another one.’

The Heath was a magical place, a great green park barely four miles from the centre of London. It had always been a popular venue for fairs, and especially now as the dark days approached.

As they neared the fair, they could hear the unmistakable sound of the hurdy-gurdy blaring over the distance. From far off, the giant wheel glittered as it turned against the night.

‘I’ve always wanted to go up on one of those,’ she breathed.

‘We will, I promise.’

Close up, the wheel was even more dazzling.

‘Ever been on one?’ Mark asked.

‘No. I’ve often wanted to, but I was always at the fair with my parents and Mum said, “You don’t want to go on those dangerous things”. And I didn’t know how to tell her that I did want to because they were dangerous.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ He bought the tickets and took her hand firmly. ‘Those seats rock back and forth like mad, so hold onto me.’

From the moment they sat down and she felt the seat swinging beneath her, Dee felt as though she’d come home. Nothing in her life had ever been as exciting as when she was lifted high into the air, over the top of the wheel, then the descent when, for a moment, there seemed to be nothing but air between herself and the earth beneath. Then again, and again, loving it more every moment.

‘Wheeeee!’ she shrieked as they arrived back at the bottom for the final time. ‘I want to go again.’

He took her up three times, finally saying, ‘Leave it for now. There are other rides, just as exciting.’

‘Lead me to them!’

Her eyes were gleaming as they approached the roller coaster, and she looked up the climb with an eagerness that anticipated the pleasure to come. She could just see a car reaching the summit and hear the shrieks as it sped down.

‘Come on!’ she begged.

He looked at her curiously. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

‘What of?’ she asked blankly.

‘You’ll find out,’ he said, grinning.

When they were seated he made as if to put an arm around her. ‘But perhaps you’re too brave to need my help?’ he teased.

‘I don’t think I’m quite as brave as that,’ she conceded, pulling his arm about her shoulders.

The cars moved off, slowly at first, climbing the long slope to the summit, then plunging down at ever