“Seven,” she interjected. Then hated herself for interrupting him.
“Good Lord! That makes it yet more scandalous that we’ve not had the opportunity for you to tell me all about New York. Let’s rectify that, shall we? I don’t suppose you have dinner plans Saturday night?”
The pogo stick scooped up her heart and sent it bouncing down the corridor.
Her tongue remembered to move.
“I . . . er, yes . . . I mean no. I mean I don’t have plans, so I’d love that.” She hoped she didn’t sound as squeaky to him as she did in her head.
“Wonderful,” he said. “You’d best be off now—we don’t want you having to slink back to the States because you’ve been sacked!”
“Oh. Yes, no, right, thank you!”
She couldn’t decide if it was encouraging or disconcerting that she could hear him chuckling as she jogged away, her run so very different from Beanie’s.
FIVE
“You really haven’t any choice.” Lola was adamant, brandishing the dress she called her “pink silk”—though the fabric had no more met a worm than Maisie had the king.
“I don’t know,” Maisie demurred, valiantly trying to neither insult Lola nor cry. A date should mean a new frock, jewelry, perfume. Hair in soft waves. A smaller nose. The smile he called pretty radiating as though powered by the BBC’s new transmitter at Selfridges department store.
“At least your shoes are smart,” Lola encouraged. “They’re not evening shoes, but they’ll do.”
The longed-for new shoes had at last been purchased without an ounce of the expected ceremony. Increasingly, and to her astonishment, the BBC dominated Maisie’s mind even when she wasn’t there, so her life outside it, tonight excepted, was rendered mundane. She needed shoes; she saved the money; she bought them. Chocolate-brown, double-strap, low-heeled beauties that would last. Comfortable, practical, and smart. They would do.
“I bet we can do something with that dress.” Lola waved a hand at the stalwart brown wool that comprised nearly the whole of Maisie’s wardrobe.
A strip of mulberry-colored velvet ribbon from Lola’s bottomless stash was tacked to the top of the drop-waist skirt. A matching ribbon wrapped around Maisie’s head, set off with a pink flower. A pink-beaded necklace.
“You’ve got to have some makeup, you know,” Lola insisted.
The mascara, shadow, blush, and lipstick didn’t transform her, but even Maisie could admit the effect was rather nice. As she finished touching up her lips, she wondered what would happen if Cyril tried to kiss her.
The lipstick dropped, and she concertinaed to the floor after it. She had no experience, none. Miss Havisham was the local good-time girl compared to Maisie. By her age, most girls had kissed at least one boy. Nurses used to giggle about it in the hospital.
“I kissed him in the altar boys’ changing room at our church!”
“I think he thought he’d won the prize—didn’t have the heart to tell him anything worthwhile was too far under the corset to be felt.”
“He really knew his stuff. I barely held on to the goods—sometimes wish I hadn’t. But who wants the first time to be in his father’s motorcar?”
The stories were endless—kisses, pinches, squeezes, giggles. Filling the hospital ward with men who were hale and hearty and ribald and laughing, hiding the shadows of the men lying bandaged and broken. Some days it had felt as though there would never be any kisses again. The memories had to be made bigger, filling the space despair created.
“Much better,” Lola said, appraising Maisie. “But do try not to look so terrified.”
Maisie nodded, too scared to talk.
“Best get downstairs,” Lola advised. “You don’t want Mrs. Crewe to open the door to him.”
Maisie catapulted down the stairs. The bell rang as she reached the hall, and she skittered around Mrs. Crewe, yelping, “Sorry, sorry, so sorry,” and flung open the door to receive Cyril, smoking a cigarette, handsome and at ease.
“Well, New York, don’t you look smart?”
“Good evening, Cyril. Thank you,” she said, attempting poise between pants.
“It’s almost properly warm tonight, but you might as well bring that wrap anyway.”
Wrap? She looked down to see Lola draping a pink shawl—more fringe than fabric—over her arm. She took the bag Lola held out, smiling at Lola’s enormous gestures of approval.
“Well, then.” Cyril grinned. “Let’s see where the night takes us.”
At Cyril’s direction, it took them to the outskirts of Soho, to a street whose scruffiness unsettled Maisie. But she felt safe with Cyril.
“I think you’ll like this.” He waved her into a steamy fish-and-chip shop, so packed, every other chip shop in London must be empty.
“The place is always stuffed to the gills,” Cyril confided, his eyes twinkling.
“Stuffed? Looks fried to me,” Maisie rejoined, pointing to “Plaice” on the menu, quite forgetting her role was to giggle prettily.