Chapter 1

Seven months later

Lily went downstairs to the large, airy high-ceilinged front room of their ramshackle home in Caryl Street, just off Liverpool’s Dock Road. The Laffertys had lived here for as long as anyone could remember. Lily’s mother had grown up here, and her mother before that, but with each passing year a few more roof tiles slid off, a few more floorboards turned as soft as marzipan, and the chimney stack had begun to crumble. But it suited them. The rent was cheap because nobody else in their right mind would have stayed there. The front room was the beating heart of the Lafferty household and when the chaise longue was pushed back and the battered armchair shoved against the wall, this was where Lily’s mother, Stella, gave dancing lessons. They called it the ballroom and every Saturday and Sunday it would be full of the sounds of her mother yelling ‘Eyes and teeth!’ at the gaggle of children who came to learn how to shimmy and polka and step in time whilst her father bashed out ‘You Are My Sunshine’ on the piano with a Woodbine cigarette permanently dropping from his lips.

There was a residue of dust on the surfaces from all the preparations for the bombing that they had been waiting for since the previous autumn. When Lily had put her hands on the wooden rail screwed into the wall that they called the barré, her fingers left long slender imprints so she had brought a bucket of water in from the kitchen, placed it on the floor, and wrung out the cloth to wipe it down. Lily slid the cloth across the piece of wood, then dropped it, with a splash, into the bucket, pushed the sleeves of her pale blue blouse further up her arms and wandered over to the piano where she played a couple of notes. The keys were brown with muck – you could barely tell the black ones apart from the white ones – but it didn’t matter. Her father might not be sitting there with cigarette smoke curling from the side of his mouth, now that he was working at the docks – that was the war’s fault as much as her mother’s – but the sound of him thumping out a tune still rang in her head. She paused and looked at the poster that sloped to one side, one corner hanging off the wall It was a picture of her and her younger brother, Matt, in Pierrot costumes. ‘Liverpool Empire: Puss in Boots,’ it said in bold letters, and underneath, in tiny script, below the names Arthur Askey and Gracie Thompson, you could just about make out ‘The Laffertys Limber Dancing Babes’. On the piano top there was a framed photograph caked in dust of her nine-year-old brother, little Bobby, in his sailor suit and tap shoes. Then one of Deirdre, aged seven now, the youngest of all the Laffertys, with a blob of shoe polish on her nose, and her head, a mass of quivering ringlets, tipped coquettishly to one side.

She ran her finger over the sideboard, regarded the black smudge on the tip of it and was about to wipe it down when she heard the slam of the front door.

Oh no, she thought, not Luigi from Bertorelli’s, asking her to go and do a few extra hours at the mobile cafe, or the woman from the WVS centre seeing if she was free to do practice with the firewatch girls or cut up a few more sheets to make into bandages? But, to her delight, it was Vincent Wharton who stuck his head around the door. She beamed and thought how much he had grown. She hadn’t seen him in three months since his job with the civil service had taken him to St Anne’s just outside of Blackpool. He looked so strikingly handsome, with his steel grey eyes and his light brown hair swept back off his face, his broad shoulders perfectly in proportion to his long legs. He grinned, stepped inside, and undid the top button of his collar. When he walked in, she noticed that he almost had to duck to avoid hitting his head on the door frame. He was wearing brogue shoes, a suit with baggy knees, and a shirt that was fraying at the collar, but he had finished it off with a white silk scarf tied loosely around his neck and, with his hair slicked back, he looked as though he was trying to be someone from the movies – she couldn’t quite put her finger on who, maybe Leslie Howard?

‘Vincent!’ she cried.

‘All right, lovely? Mam and Da out?’

Lily nodded a yes.

‘You look grand,’ he said.

She pushed a piece of hair behind her ear. He had made her blush. Had he noticed, she wondered, that she was different from when he had last seen her, that her clothes, tighter now, showed off her newly developed curves? Everyone had been saying it lately.

‘Thanks,’ she replied.

‘Though this place looks a bit sad since I was last here …’

‘We’re broke. Things have slid. Like painting the Forth Bridge, it is, keeping this house clean. And us being so near the docks, it’s worse every day. All the army vehicles coming and going and tearing the place up under our flaming feet.’

He grinned.

Lily continued, ‘Mam doesn’t really care. Impossible to keep on top of it, she says, what with all the bull-dozing and digging, so why bother? Though that’s just her excuse for choosing a natter over cups of tea and glasses of cheap brandy over chores.’

‘That’s unless she can get someone else to do it,’ he joked.

‘Of course. She’s just the same.’ She smiled.

‘And the school?’

‘No one comes any more for dancing lessons. In fact, no one’s here much at all. What with me working at Bertorelli’s and then in the evenings I’m doing my WVS work, and Mam’s at the parachute factory and Dad’s at the docks.’

He jangled coins in his pocket. ‘Shame. I miss it here.’

He picked up the photo of them both when they were fourteen, dancing. He blew off the dust and rubbed at the glass with the heel of his hand. ‘I remember this day. The Grafton, wasn’t it?’ he said.

Lily smiled again and her brown eyes shone.

‘Look at you, dressed up to the nines in that suit and dickie bow. Smart little fella, you were,’ she said, standing beside him, squinting at the picture.

‘Your mam hired the hall and we made a grand pair, Lily. First prize, wasn’t it? The tango? Right couple of bobby-dazzlers we were.’

She laughed her tinkling laugh. ‘Lindy Hop,’ she said. She peered at the photo. The shimmering drapes hung at each side of the raised dais, gathered in folds, looked like waterfalls, the men looked dapper in their white dinner jackets, their instruments held casually at their sides. It was another world – one of Palm Court orchestras, sweet sherries, whisky sours, patent leather shoes and high heels. She was wearing her mother’s frock; it bagged around the waist, but she was holding the frilled skirts out to her sides – there were small loops that she’d slipped her fingers through – and it fanned into a shell shape. She remembered how beautiful she’d felt wearing it. Vincent looked pretty good too, in his smart suit that had belonged to her father. The cream jacket sloped off his shoulders and he’d turned up the white trousers to shorten them, but he looked just the ticket. She remembered her mother saying those words. Just the ticket.

Now he took a packet of sandwiches from his pocket and sat on the dusty, faded piano stool after he had brushed it down with his cap. He unwrapped the greaseproof paper and offered her one. ‘Want a jam buttie?’

She nodded, took one, and ate it greedily.

‘You working later, Lil?’

‘No. I did the early shift. Shame, that’s changed an’ all. Supposed to be an ice-cream bar but there’s no ice cream at the moment. There’s not much food either. Except spuds. It’s potato pie, potato mash, potato cakes,’ she said, smiling. ‘So I’m mostly peeling potatoes.’ She laughed. ‘Still, it pays. People – mostly Italians and Irish – come to chat and drink tea and there’s plenty of beer. Sometimes Dad turns up and plays the piano with a couple of the accordionists – my cousin’s new husband is a wizard on the squeeze-box – and they sing songs. “O Sole Mio” and “Danny Boy”. The old stuff. Mam hates it, of course. Says it’s common.’

He grinned, then got up from the stool, flicked breadcrumbs from his trousers, tilted his head and smiled at her.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. He didn’t answer the question, just shrugged.

Looking at him leaning against the piano, one foot crossed over the other, just staring at her and grinning, she repeated the question.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘You,’ he said. He moved a step forward to her. ‘You’ve changed.’

What was this? This strange look on his face? His loitering gaze and smile? She felt a pang of something, unsure what it was exactly, a mixture of excitement and nervousness. This wasn’t the Vincent she knew.

Feeling herself blushing, she looked away from him, down at the piano that had sat there in the corner for ten years now. The one that had plinked and plonked as she and Vincent had sashayed around the room together, had grown up dancing to the sounds of. Other memories came of her and Vincent, all mixed up with cascading hairpins, slipping her feet into tiny salmon-pink shoes, and her mother wielding a can of hair lacquer saying ‘Shut your eyes, this will sting!’. There were the concerts at the Rialto and the pantos when they would swell the dance teams at the Empire. Memories of standing on this battered old piano stool, with Vincent laughing at her until he cried, wearing wilting ears made out of corners torn out of the Liverpool Echo, an old stocking stuffed with newspaper pinned to her bottom, supposed to be a cat’s tail, the sharp sound of her mother’s hand slapping her thighs as she sewed a white bib onto her leotard and told her to stop being so bloody daft, playing up to Vincent.

‘So how’d you fancy a quick belt around the Rialto before the crowds arrive, if Betty will let us?’ he asked.

‘That’d be grand,’ she said.

He plucked at the Senior Service cigarette pack poking out of his jacket pocket.

‘Be like old times.’ Until now, when they hadn’t been dancing, she and Vincent had mostly spent time together when he would visit her at Bertorelli’s after Luigi had nipped out to put a bet on a horse, giggling and flicking tea towels at each other, racing around tables, until a customer walked in and she would have to shoo him out. This was different.

She cast her eyes down to his brogue shoes. They were in a right state. She could see the shape of his feet moulded into the leather, those lovely feet that she had stepped in time with since she had been six years old. Shoving her hands into the sleeves of her jacket, she said, ‘Give us a ciggie,’ turned off the light and, with Vincent pulling on her hand which was gripped tightly in his, they set off to Upper Parly Street.

After dodging a tram with the covers on its headlights that shot out into the street from nowhere and swerved to avoid running them over – the inky blackness in Liverpool had already taken more lives than Hitler – they arrived at the dance hall. There was a blast of music, noisy and brash, a cacophony of trumpets and horns, the sounds of a piano, heady and giddy. It was one of those clubs that craftily manoeuvred itself around the law by saying it was a dancing school as well as a club, but everyone knew the only lessons that had been taught here were how to slip an arm around a girl’s waist and whisper come-ons in her ear whilst doing the tango without getting a slap in the face.

A fog of cigarette smoke rose from the basement door, wove itself up the steps and into the street and hung in the air. Lily inhaled the smells, felt herself intoxicated, excited by the sounds as Vincent led her downstairs. Someone at the piano started up with ‘In the Mood’. There was a fellow on a trumpet and a saxophone who took up the tune, one of the Walker boys. It felt warm, familiar. At seventeen, she was a little too young to be here, but in the dim lighting, she hoped no one would notice. The small red lamps at each tabled glowed like beacons, throwing pools of light onto the tables. Half an hour and her mother would be only just leaving the parachute factory in Bootle to head home. And as Vincent slipped his hand around her waist, cigarette drooping from his lips, and steered her on to the floor to dance, the dark undertones of the music, sweet and rhythmic, made her forget herself. It was true what they said. You could lose yourself and find yourself in dancing, she thought. His hand sliding down the curve of her hip as they moved together, she wondered again, was she imagining it? Vincent? Her best friend? Her partner in crime? Surely not. And yet …

This early, they had the floor almost to themselves. They could call out to the piano player for the songs that they wanted – ‘South of the Border’, ‘Sunrise Serenade’. The men in the band in their white jackets and dickie bows, imagining they were Victor Silvester or Glen Miller, nodded and smiled back at them.

Vincent spun her around, twisted and turned her about the floor, lifted her off the ground, his chest pressed against her breasts, so that when she locked eyes with his, her head felt dizzy and her nerves tingled with excitement. People couldn’t help but stop and stare at them as they began to dance a tango to the music of D’Arienzo – ‘King of the Beat,’ whispered Vincent. With their fingers interlocking, her slender legs winding around Vince’s muscular ones, coming together, moving apart, leaning in to one another, it looked almost as though they were about to kiss at times.

Finally, Betty appeared with a broom. ‘Off you go now. Paying punters about to arrive.’

‘Thanks,’ said Vincent. ‘That hit the spot, eh Lil?’ They went outside into the street, breathless, sweat glistening on their brows, and stood leaning with their backs against the wall. He lit another cigarette and, without warning, turned in to her.

‘What, Vincent?’ asked Lily, smiling, wiping her forehead. But she knew exactly what. Dancing with him had left her in no doubt about that. She could feel it. She had felt it from the moment he had arrived at Caryl Street that evening. Felt it for years, all her life maybe, just never really noticed. The little puffs of hot breath on her cheek, the rise and fall of his ribs, the searching look in his eyes, the way he pushed a tendril of her chestnut hair off her face and behind her ear, was familiar, but different.

And that was the first time – after so many years of friendship, and both of them wondering why they had never done it before, because it was so natural and right and good – that suddenly they kissed: passionately, ferociously, fiercely.

‘You took your time,’ she said, when she broke the kiss and they paused for breath. Is this what it felt like to begin to fall in love? She felt a little sick at the thought of what her father would make of this. ‘Our children are pieces of the heart,’ he would often say to her mother. And Lily knew then, as Vincent’s hands tugged at her blouse, what he wanted to do with her, and how it would break her father’s heart in two. She wondered also what her mother would have to say about this if she could see her bare legs, skirts pushed up her thighs, top three buttons undone on her blouse, as Vince breathed hard into her face.

‘Some things are worth waiting for,’ he said, and as he leaned in for more, he added, ‘Feel that …’

‘What?’

‘You know what,’ he said, as he pressed his body against her. She was used to this body, she knew it so well, but not that – that was something new and dangerous – and it made her sick with excitement and a little terrified as to what all this might lead to. Is this what the nuns at her convent school had been trying to warn her about when they had talked about men’s ways?

Suddenly, he moved away from her.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk you home. Have to be up early tomorrow.’

‘To go back to St Anne’s?’

He paused. ‘No, love. I’ve left. Pushing papers is not for me, no matter how much me ma and da say civil service is a good job.’

‘Heard they are busier than ever at the dockyards, converting their liners to warships. Why don’t you try that? There’s jobs for everyone.’

‘That’s right, love. But I don’t need another job. I’m joining the merchant navy. I’ve already started my training.’

‘The merchant navy?’ she said in a panicked voice. ‘There’s a war on out there, despite what everyone says about it being a phoney war. This country is going to need supplies of every kind if it’s to survive – and I, for one, want to be part of it,’ he replied.