EMMA WAITED FOR Charles by the Council House that following Wednesday. The two massive stone lions in front of the building were now almost blanketed in a layer of sandbags. She stood by the left lion, the one nearest where Barton’s buses with their inflated gas bags dropped people off, making it a popular meeting location.
She’d only just come to stand in front of old Leo when Charles approached, wearing a black wool coat and matching fedora, looking as striking as a cinema actor. Her heart tripped a beat.
“You look lovely.” He gave her an easy smile, and offered her his arm, as debonair as he was handsome. “Shall we?”
She didn’t look any different than normal, with her usual gray wool coat and no cosmetics. Though Emma had spent extra time pinning her hair back from her face that morning.
Still, heat crept up her neck and cheeks at the compliment despite the frigid November evening.
She eased her gloved hand into the crook of his arm to be cradled in the warmth there. The strength beneath her fingertips reminded her of how his arms had come around her, of just how well she’d fit in his embrace. In fact, she’d often recalled the kiss that followed. Far more than she probably should.
“I made reservations at a restaurant near the Palais,” he said. “I confess, I’ve never been there, but thought you might enjoy it after we eat.”
The Palais de Danse was a popular dance hall in Nottingham, known for bringing in great performers like Louis Armstrong and Jack Hylton, and for the special dance nights and themed parties. “I haven’t been to the Palais either,” she admitted.
There had been enough talk around town about it though, how the soldiers staying overnight in Nottingham went out dancing with the young women who lived in the city. There was a grand turning stage for dancing and massive chandeliers overhead that sparkled like diamonds.
“Margaret has told me about it,” Emma added. “Before her fiancé was shipped out, they used to go there often.”
Two women walked by and glared at Charles. “Still not out there with the rest of our boys, even as his brothers are putting their lives on the line,” one woman said to the other without bothering to lower her voice.
His forearm tensed under Emma’s hand, but he didn’t say anything to defend himself.
Well, if he wouldn’t, Emma would.
She stopped and turned toward the women, her body stiff with indignation.
But before she could offer a retort, he put a hand on hers and shook his head. “It’s not important.”
“It is important. They can’t talk about you like that.” Emma glared back at the two women huddled together, hissing their vitriol to one another.
Charles gently squeezed Emma’s hand, his palm warm as he resumed leading her onward through the square. “Mrs. Emerson, on the right, is my neighbor. I’ve known her my whole life. Her son and I were mates growing up, but we eventually drifted apart. He liked to find ways to sneak off for a nip of this or that, which didn’t interest me, and I started playing rugby, which didn’t interest him. We were just different people. But Randal was Mrs. Emerson’s only child and she doted on him. She never understood why we weren’t chums the way we’d once been.” Charles paused, and the clip of their soles on the cobblestones filled the silence. “She received a telegram this past June. Randal was killed at Dunkirk.”
Emma closed her eyes, feeling the pain of the woman’s loss. Even hearing the word Dunkirk brought to mind all those bedraggled soldiers with bandaged limbs and haunted stares.
“Mrs. Emerson is not angry at me,” Charles said. “Or rather, she likely is because I’m not off fighting for Britain. But her rage comes from a place of overwhelming grief. I’m home with my mum, helping her and my father around the house. While her son...he’s never coming back.”
Emma studied Charles’s profile, his hard, square jaw, the straight line of his nose beneath the bill of the fedora. He looked so much like the rugby player he said he was, but he had a reader’s soul, one that was able to look beyond what was presented to see what lay below the surface.
“That is very considerate of you to think of her rather than yourself,” Emma said softly.
“Our country is hurting right now.” His throat flexed as he swallowed. “For the soldiers who won’t come back, and for those who do return, but with horrible injuries. And from all the bombings. There’s so much pain.” He stopped speaking abruptly and shook his head. “Well, I’m a fine dinner conversationalist.”
She chuckled and squeezed her hand around his strong forearm in a show of support, in the hope he wouldn’t stop talking. He had been such a mystery to her for so long, one she had forbidden herself from trying to uncover. “We’re not at dinner yet.”
His grateful smile shifted to a more serious countenance and he slowed to a stop. “You’ve never asked why I’m not at war.”
She didn’t shy from the sudden scrutiny of his attention. “Everyone has their reasons for what they do.” She quoted his own words back to him, from the day he’d realized she was a single mother. “And it’s none of my business.”
He considered her for a long moment. “Rugby,” he said finally. “I was injured playing rugby. It’s a long story and we ought to hurry, or we’ll miss our reservation.”
He guided them to resume walking once more, but Emma slowed and pulled gently on his arm in a nonverbal request to stop walking. “I’m not here for dinner. I’m here to get to know you, and as it turns out, tonight I have all the time in the world. Just for you.”
His eyes crinkled at the corners and he smiled with such earnestness that she felt it knock into her chest like something physical, visceral. “Emma, you are an incredible woman.”
“You don’t know me yet,” she cautioned. “You may change your mind.”
“I know you better than you think. You’re kind in how you always make time to listen to the subscribers at the library and the soldiers at the canteen. You’re patient in the way you handle Mr. Beard no matter how irate he is or how rude he can be. You’re an excellent mother in your care of Olivia, and how much I’ve seen you do for her in the short time I’ve known you. A mother’s love is always apparent in the way their children look at them, and Olivia thinks you hang the moon. I know you, Emma, and that’s why I like you so very much.”
She looked away, embarrassed by all he saw in her, things she did not see in herself.
“And you’re beautiful,” he said softly. “The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Not someone hiding behind cosmetics and flamboyant clothes. You’re naturally, perfectly lovely.”
His hand came under her chin and he tenderly guided her to look up at him. A moment passed between them, filled with quiet intimacy. Eddies fluttered in her stomach, borne of excitement, anticipation, and every glorious feeling in between.
“I think we’re going to miss dinner,” he said softly.
She laughed. “I saw a fish and chips stand around the corner.”
“Fish and chips it is.”
Several minutes later, after retracing their steps, they both held newspaper cones of sizzling fish and chips, and sat on a bench near the Council House. Despite the cold that left steam rising from their food, Emma scarcely felt the chill between the hot cone in her palm and the warm, effervescent giddiness running through her.
She broke off a piece of fish to let it cool, nearly burning her fingertips. “Will you tell me about your rugby injury?”
He grimaced. “Still want to hear that story, do you?”
“Ah, so the flattery was a distraction?” She nudged his foot with hers.
His eyes went wide. “Not at all, I—”
She winked at him, letting him know she was teasing, and he shook his head in mirth. Several people walked by, their heads tucked low into their coats against the cold evening. He watched them pass, his silence one of contemplation.
“I was playing rugby with my mates when I was eighteen and a perfectly kicked ball slammed into my face.” He pointed to his left eye. “Right here.”
“Your eye?” Emma asked, horrified.
He nodded. “Lost my sight in that eye for nearly a month. When it finally came back, I could only see what was right in front of me, nothing in my peripheral. There wasn’t a thing to be done for it.”
“Did your sight ever fully come back?” Emma asked, her food all but forgotten.
“No. I had to learn to be more cautious with things like crossing the street, and even had to learn how to read again with my impaired vision.”
Emma shook her head in amazement. “That must have been difficult.”
“It was worth the effort.” Charles popped a chip into his mouth and chewed. “I wanted to go to university.”
The fish was no longer scalding and Emma took a careful bite, warm crunchy batter with flaky, perfectly cooked fish. “And did you?”
He nodded toward a building across the square with Essex & Sutherland on a large sign above a red painted door. A local accounting firm. “I graduated with top marks and worked as an accountant for several years there. When we all knew war was coming, I tried to sign up, but was turned away. I immediately quit my job and took the position at the fire brigade, assuming I could do some good on the home front, if need be. My brothers didn’t have anything to hold them back. They all signed up.”
Charles looked down at the last few chips remaining in the wrapped newspaper. “I’ve spent my life protecting them. I can’t look after them now, not when it matters most, when they’re in places of incredible danger.” His jaw flexed. “I’ve tried to sign up several times. Six to be exact. I even memorized the pasteboard eye chart. But the doctor recognized me and saw through my guise. I was told not to come back. And so my brothers are fighting Nazis, all still alive and well, thank God. And I’m here, unable to do a thing to keep them that way.”
There was a sharp bitterness to his words, the kind that emerged from the unfairness of one’s lot in life, and how that most impacted those they love.
It was a taste Emma knew well.
“But you help people here,” she protested. “Every person you aided in Coventry, the various villages and cities you travel to. You even helped me, that day of the ARP exercise. I know I tried to be strong, to hide how shaken I was, but had you not been there, I might well have collapsed.”
He gave her a small, lopsided smile. “You were quite pale.”
“I’m sure I was.” Emma laughed. “I was in a bad way.”
Their conversation carried on, easy and smooth, until the sky deepened from the delicate notes of dusk into the velvety blue of night and their words fogged in the frigid air.
“I hate that it gets dark so early these days,” Emma lamented. But truly her disappointment wasn’t that the day was slipping away. It was that their time together would soon draw to a close.
Charles crumpled the cold fish and chips cone in his hand and tossed it toward the rubbish bin where it landed perfectly inside the metal rim. “Just because it’s dark doesn’t mean either of us have to go home yet. We can walk about the city.”
“There’s nothing I’d like more,” Emma replied, eager to continue their time together.
They spent the rest of the evening strolling down the blackout-darkened streets of Nottingham, avoiding the areas where the smoke screens were billowing their noxious clouds. All the while, Charles remained on the side of the pavement nearest the street, protecting her with his body from any errant cars that might miss the white paint directing them away from the curbs.
Thankfully they remained safe, and the night passed with pleasant conversations that revolved around memories of their lives in Nottingham, hilarious childhood stories of Charles and his brothers, anecdotes about Olivia—including the surprise that she and Charles shared a birthday—and, of course, discussions about books. There was even a brief mention of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that left Emma grateful for the blackout to hide her flushed cheeks.
When Charles finally led her up the walkway to Emma’s tenement house, he left her with a kiss that rivaled the one they’d shared after Coventry and promised to see her again, next time at the restaurant he’d originally reserved for their dinner that night.
Emma floated up the stairs, light with a buoyant excitement she’d never experienced. Charles awoke in her a pleasant sensation that left her with flirtatious replies and ready blushes. And after what they’d seen at Coventry, after knowing how ephemeral and uncertain life really was, she was eager to see him again and again and again.