The Best Of Times by Penny Vincenzi

Author:Penny Vincenzi [Vincenzi, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary

CHAPTER 32

She’d hoped, very much, that things were about to be better. The TV programme had definitely had an effect on Christine; it had made her realise what a lucky escape her mother had had. Seeing the size of the crash-again-realising how easily Mary could have been just a few cars farther forward, or even hit by one of the freezers, had sobered her. She was quiet during supper, and when Mary had said good night to her, later, she had kissed her and said, “Night, Mum. Thank goodness you were where you were-on the road, I mean.”

Mary felt more cheerful than she had for a week as she got herself ready for bed.

She had switched on the radio and turned the light out; she was too tired to read, and she liked being lulled to sleep by the well-bred voices of the World Service announcers. But it wasn’t quite time for the World Service, and there was a programme on Radio Two about popular music over the past sixty years. Starting inevitably with the war. And equally inevitably with Vera Lynn, singing “White Cliffs of Dover.”

The hours she’d spent listening to that song. On her gramophone. The gramophone Russell had bought her, as a parting present. She’d been worried her mother would want to know where it had come from and had invented a woman at work who didn’t want it anymore.

“But they’re expensive things, Mary. I’m surprised she didn’t want to sell it.”

“Oh, she’s got a lot of money, Mum.”

“Even so. Well, you’d better look after it.”

As if she wouldn’t: the very last present Russell ever gave her, before going off to Normandy. He’d given her other more personal things, the brooch-that had been easier to explain: she’d said she’d spotted it in the Red Cross jumble sale, and her mother would never know that his eye was a real diamond-and of course all the usual things that the GIs had been able to afford that the British troops couldn’t-like nylons and perfume. And the gramophone record (together with the sheet music) of Vera Lynn singing what she always thought of as the bluebird song.

She’d played it over and over and over again, until it had become too scratched to hear it any longer, and of course it was always on the wireless too, the song that had seen so many romances started-and had kept them alive through the long years of separation. Whenever it was played, when she was with Donald again, married to Donald, but most of all when she was coping with her unhappiness at saying goodbye to Russell, it was him she thought of, whom she could almost feel beside her again, dashing, handsome Russell, with his perfect manners, dancing with her. He’d been a wonderful dancer, not born with two left feet like poor Donald-they had fox-trotted and waltzed, him holding her very close and telling her how lovely she was. They had even jitterbugged together in dance halls like the Lyceum and

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