He grunted. ‘Good old Arthur. Always reliable. Always ready to do the right thing.’ His eyes were anguished. ‘When all I want to do is the wrong thing. All I want to do is hold you in my arms again and never let you go.’
‘Please. Don’t talk that way. You’re making it worse for us both. After today we must never again speak of this. We need to pretend we’ve never said what we’ve said. Never felt the way we feel.’
‘What’s said can’t be unsaid and what’s felt can’t be unfelt.’
‘But we can make sure we say no more.’
He got up and began to pace up and down.
‘When will you leave?’
‘Within the next few days.’
Her heart lurched. ‘Why so fast?’
‘There’s a lot to do. I’m going to be involved in a new joint liaison committee. They’re planning to up the military presence in the Straits. Don’t know how much or when, but there’s talk of a new man coming out later this year to coordinate the Allied forces. We need someone to make it clear to London that Malaya needs more defences.’ Arthur shook his head again, frowning. ‘It’s impossible to get decisions out of them at the moment. Now that Churchill’s taken over and things have hotted up in Europe, no one in Whitehall wants to think about Malaya.’
Evie didn’t want to talk about the war. She didn’t want to talk about anything. All she wanted was to be held by Arthur, but her duty was to Douglas, Jasmine and her unborn baby. She bit her lip to force herself not to give in to tears.
Arthur moved to her and drew her to her feet. He stood, holding her against him. She could feel his chest rise and fall as he breathed, could hear the beating of his heart. Her eyes filled with tears but she swallowed them and eased herself away from his hold. ‘You’d better go.’ Looking over his shoulder, she saw Aunty Mimi at the kitchen window watching them. How much had she witnessed?
Arthur went to take her in his arms again.
‘No! Aunty Mimi can see us. Please just go, Arthur. Go.’
He looked into her eyes, his reflecting his visible pain.
‘Goodbye, my darling. I love you. I’ll always love you.’
Evie turned her head as he walked away, then went down the garden, away from the kitchen windows, so that prying eyes wouldn’t see that her heart was breaking.
24
As Evie’s pregnancy advanced, so too did the war in Europe. With the invasion of France, the surrender of Belgium, the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force to Dunkirk and their subsequent dramatic evacuation, all the news from England seemed to be bad news.
Sitting in the King’s Theatre, watching newsreels of German Panzer tanks rolling through the streets of Paris, Evie felt numb, hollowed out. She remembered a few glorious days she had spent in the French capital with her parents en route to the Cote d’Azur for a holiday. Seeing giant swastikas hanging from the Arc de Triomphe and jackbooted troops parading in triumph along the tree-lined boulevards, was chilling. Placing her hands over her swollen belly she asked herself what kind of world she was bringing her child into. What kind of future might he or she expect when it looked a foregone conclusion that Hitler’s next target would be across the channel? And were he to succeed, there would be no need for any Japanese invasion of Malaya, as the spoils of the British Empire would all fall straight into Hitler’s hands.
In the darkened theatre, a tide of loneliness and hopelessness washed over her. The hole that Arthur Leighton had left in her life was vast. She may not have seen him often but knowing that he was in the same town, that she might bump into him any day in the street or at a function, had made a greater difference than she had realised, until he was gone. Yet every time she allowed herself to think this, she was consumed by guilt. She had to focus on her family. Arthur had no part in that. Despite his past infidelity, her husband was her future and dreaming of another man was disloyal.
These last weeks, as her delivery approached, all she wanted was to free herself of the cumbersome burden of carrying the baby. She wanted her body back, to be free of the weight, the discomfort, the constant need to go to the lavatory and the crushing backache. Yet here in the darkened picture house, watching what was happening in the world, Evie wanted to keep her baby safe inside her. Bringing it into such a terrible terrifying world felt too heavy a responsibility.
The baby was in no hurry to be born anyway. It was into July when Evie finally went into labour – what turned out to be just a few days before the start of the Battle of Britain. The only battle Evie cared about now was the one in her own body as she struggled with the pain of delivering her child.
To her great relief she produced a healthy boy. Douglas arrived at the hospital in Butterworth, grinning broadly, behind an enormous bouquet of flowers. He bent over the bed and kissed her lightly on the brow. ‘Thank you, Evie,’ was all he said, but his delight was evident.
Sitting stiffly in a chair at her bedside, he gazed, rapt, at the tiny red-faced, wrinkled bundle as Evie cradled her son in her arms. A frown creased Doug’s face and he looked at her, anxiety in his eyes. ‘I don’t know how to be a good father to him.’ He stretched his lips into a tight line. ‘I don’t know what to do, how to be all the things my own father wasn’t.’
Evie was about to laugh. Such an odd thing to say, but she could see his nervousness was genuine. She wanted to say, just love him, but that seemed a step too far for a man like Douglas. He’d
