Song of the Skylark Read online

  Dedication

  For Edward and Samuel, Rebecca and Ally, and a certain little boy of infinite adorableness.

  I would also like to dedicate this book to the publishing tour de force that is Susan Lamb.

  Title Page

  Song of the

  Skylark

  Erica James

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Also by Erica James

  Copyright

  Thanks and Acknowledgements

  Thanks to J.P. Devlin for allowing me to poke and pry into his extensive radio station knowledge. And for the best Christmas tree ever!

  Thanks to Neil Bright for his wealth of USAAF knowledge and for giving me an invaluable helping hand.

  Thanks to David Deacon for being my local East Anglian expert. Is there anything this man doesn’t know?

  Special thanks to Trevor Newell for being an all-round top man, and also because he wanted his name in a book!

  A cheeky thank you to one of my readers for letting me pinch her name – thank you Betty!

  Lastly, thanks to Mary and Dave and Jack for all the laughs, and to John for coming up with Skylark Radio.

  There were others, too, who helped me in so many ways in pulling this book together, and they have my grateful thanks.

  I would like to add that this is a work of fiction and therefore allowances must be made for an author’s right to make things up, or twist things round to suit the purposes of the story. I would also like to point out that the SS Belle Etoile never existed, other than in my imagination. I took my inspiration from the SS Normandie, one of the most beautiful ocean liners ever built.

  ‘Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them’

  George Eliot

  ‘Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more’

  Virginia Woolf

  Chapter One

  Radio Central

  To: [email protected]

  Reply To: [email protected]

  Re: Position of Research Assistant

  Hi Lizzie Moran,

  Thanks so much for your application for the position of research assistant at Radio Central. We’ve been swamped with applications and I’m sorry to tell you, you haven’t been selected for an interview.

  Cheers and better luck next time!

  Tamsin Hyde

  Lizzie knew that there would be plenty of people who would take the view that she was the author of her misfortune. But the blame wasn’t all hers. She had been made a scapegoat and unfairly so in her eyes.

  She still couldn’t believe what had happened to her: one minute she was riding high on the crest of a wave of ecstatic happiness and the next she was unreasonably sacked from a job she loved and, as a consequence, separated from the man she loved. If that wasn’t bad enough, and with no money coming in, she couldn’t pay the rent on her flat and in the absence of any so-called friends rushing to offer her a spare room to use temporarily, she had no choice but to leave London and slink home to her parents in Suffolk until she got herself back on her feet.

  Not that she could tell her parents the real reason she’d been sacked from Starlight Radio. She shuddered even now to recall the appalling moment when her affair with Curt had been so thoroughly exposed. To spare Mum and Dad the sordid details she had told them some story about the owners of the radio station having a draconian attitude towards relationships in the workplace and, with sweeping cutbacks to be made, she had been conveniently got rid of. The only element of truth in what she’d told Mum and Dad was the bit about a draconian attitude.

  Now, at the age of thirty-two, here she was in her old bedroom surrounded by piles of bursting bin bags and boxes and effectively trying to squeeze toothpaste back into a flattened tube. No matter how hard she tried, there simply wasn’t enough space in the wardrobes, drawers or shelves to accommodate what she’d accumulated in the ten years since she’d left home.

  As was only right, the bedroom bore little resemblance to the room she had left behind. Just as soon as Mum had thought a decent time had elapsed, it had been redecorated and turned into the best guest bedroom, decked out with flowery curtains and matching bed linen, bars of fragrant Provençal soap strategically placed, along with neatly folded towels that no member of the family would ever be allowed to use.

  She had been home for a week now and she really should have got the mess sorted, but the days had been mostly spent feeling manically sorry for herself and firing off job applications, all of them resulting in rejection emails that were irritatingly similar, with their matey flippancy wishing her luck. Luck? She should like some, thank you very much!

  Poor Mum and Dad, it couldn’t be easy having her back with them again. Not only that, they were still a long way from understanding why she’d ended her four-year relationship with Simon in favour of a man they’d yet to meet – a married man to boot. To all intents and purposes they had treated Simon as a bona fide son-in-law and Lizzie knew they were struggling to make the adjustment to not seeing him any more.

  As happy as she and Simon had been together, marriage had never been discussed – the nearest they got to it was when Simon started talking about his Five-Year Plan and how he saw their lives rolling out in the future. As Lizzie was puzzling over her less-than-enthusiastic reaction to these projected hopes and dreams, Curt Flynn pitched up as the new Head of Programmes at Starlight Radio and in one fell swoop
everything she had thought she’d loved about Simon paled into insignificance.

  Forty-two years old, Curt was dynamic and fun – dangerously fun. He always seemed to know what she was thinking, and all it took was one glance from him with those flashing, intuitive eyes of his and she’d fall about laughing, often at the most inopportune moment. His sense of humour was scathingly cutting and delivered in a flat Mancunian accent she had originally thought was put on, a throwback parody of the Gallagher brothers. ‘I’m from somewhere I bet you’ve never heard of, much less visited,’ he’d said, when she had asked where he’d grown up.

  ‘Try me,’ she said.

  ‘Levenshulme?’ he’d told her. ‘No, I thought not; even I would have to admit that it’s not exactly a belting tourist destination.’

  She’d immediately made it her business to Google Levenshulme – she was a researcher, after all. ‘Most notable people from Levenshulme,’ she’d said casually when she’d found herself arriving for work at the same time as him the next morning, ‘the architect Norman Foster, the actor Arthur Lowe, the comedienne Beryl Reid and the original drummer from Oasis.’

  Pressing the button for the lift to take them up to the studio on the fifth floor, he’d said, ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘Not even the Oasis drummer?’

  ‘Especially not him.’ His expression was deadpan.

  Alone in the lift, he’d turned full square to face her. ‘I’m impressed that you went to the trouble of doing a background check on me. Do you do that for everyone you work with?’

  Technically she worked for him, and liking the fact he hadn’t played the boss card, she’d smiled. ‘I live by the maxim that forewarned is forearmed.’

  He’d laughed; a sexily louche laugh that had bounced off the mirror-lined walls of the lift. She had enjoyed the sound, had enjoyed knowing that she had amused him.

  ‘I can see that I’m going to have to watch myself around you,’ he’d said, putting a hand to the small of her back and nudging her forward when the doors opened. The touch of his hand had been like a bolt of electricity passing through her, a sensation she had never before experienced. Bad Lizzie! she’d reprimanded herself that evening when she was on her way home and guiltily replaying the moment.

  A month later, and despite knowing he was married, she had agreed to have a drink with him after work one evening. She had known exactly what she was doing. So had he. ‘There’s no point in pretending we don’t feel the way we do for each other,’ he’d said bluntly. Knowing that he felt the same way about her as she did for him made her believe that it was meant to be, that his marriage had been a classic case of marrying the wrong person and for the wrong reasons. It happened all the time, didn’t it? One in three marriages ended in divorce.

  Telling Simon that she didn’t love him any more was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do. He was devastated, just hadn’t seen it coming. But then neither had she. She did what she thought was the decent thing and moved out of the flat they had been renting together for the last two years. She found herself a small flat in Hackney, and that was where Curt would come and spend whatever time he could with her.

  Initially the secrecy surrounding their affair had given Lizzie a frisson of excitement, but it wasn’t long before it became a burden. More than anything she wanted to share her happiness of being in love. In the end, the one person in whom she could confide, knowing she could trust him not to tell anyone else, was her twin brother, Luke. He was shocked and cautioned her to take care. It was advice that was typical of her brother – not for nothing had she nicknamed him Mr Careful when they were children. With hindsight she could see she should have heeded his advice.

  When the affair was revealed and she was summarily fired, Curt had been in danger of losing his job too, but because he was married and had a young child, along with a hefty mortgage, the owners of the radio station had let him off. It was a bitter pill for Lizzie to swallow, that she should be so unfairly treated. Curt had promised her that it was only a minor setback, that when the dust had settled at work he would sort things with his wife and they would be together. In return he’d made her promise not to contact him, especially not at work. ‘I need this job,’ he’d explained, ‘you can understand that, can’t you? I can’t afford to rock the boat again.’

  It was Curt’s promise that kept her going, gave her the hope to believe the awful situation in which she found herself was only temporary. He was adamant that, just as soon as he had the situation under control, at work and at home, it would all come right in a matter of months. ‘We just have to play the game,’ he’d said. ‘Can you do that for me, Lizzie? Can you?’

  She had said she could when she had his arms around her, but now – a fortnight since she’d last seen him – her resolve was crumbling. She didn’t feel at all like playing the game. She wanted her job back, she wanted her flat back – but most of all she wanted to be back with Curt.

  Just as tears of angry frustration rose to the surface of her self-pity, the ugly chacker-chacker call of a magpie in next door’s silver birch tree came through the open window. It sounded for all the world as if the bird was laughing at her and it had the effect of giving her the strength to fight off the tears. Going over to the window, she rested her elbows on the sill. Leaning out into the warm, still June air, she breathed in the lemony scent of the creamy-yellow rose that Dad had trained to climb up the back of the house. In the distance, in the delicately pale blue sky, a pair of swallows tumbled acrobatically above the field of rapeseed at the end of the garden. The dazzling blaze of yellow flowers had gone over now; come early August the harvest would begin.

  And where would she be then? she wondered. Back in London, she hoped, starting a new life with Curt.

  Chapter Two

  Tess Moran was a great believer in doing her bit.

  It was a trait that had been drummed into her when she was a child. Her mother had been responsible for that; she had brought Tess up to believe it was everybody’s duty – hers in particular – to make the world a better place. Now in her early sixties, Tess knew no other way to be. Idleness was anathema to her and there was no such thing as a spare minute, every minute of the day was to be put to good use. Which was why, when she retired from working as a health visitor, she volunteered to become a Befriender at Woodside, a care home for the elderly. Her role didn’t actually cover caring as such, but she did whatever else was needed, whether it was playing the piano for the residents, reading to them, serving cups of tea, or just having a chat.

  She had spent most of today at Woodside on her feet and now, as she drove down the long driveway and out through the gates, she was glad of the chance to sit down. The car was stifling hot from being in the sun and, opening the windows to let some air in, she wondered what awaited her at home and how Lizzie would greet her news that Tess had found her something to do while she job-hunted.

  It went without saying that she and Tom loved both their children dearly and would do anything to help them, but they were guilty of having grown used to having the house to themselves, each of them carving out space in which they could enjoy their hobbies – sewing for Tess in Luke’s old room, and local history for Tom in what had been the children’s den when they were home from university. Having Lizzie back with them was, to put it mildly, proving to be more of a challenge than they’d anticipated. But then really they should have known better; after all, one way or another Lizzie had always had a knack for upsetting the apple cart.

  Whereas Luke had been an easy-going child who had moved effortlessly from childhood to manhood, Lizzie had tripped and fallen almost every step of the way. It never failed to astonish Tess that two beings could grow together in the womb and emerge so completely different.

  As a small child Lizzie had once told Tess that she found it so very difficult to be as well behaved as her brother. ‘I’m not good like Luke, am I, Mummy? I’m Bad Li
zzie, aren’t I?’ Her young daughter’s words had struck at Tess’s heart, especially when Lizzie had asked if she was loved as much as Luke. ‘Of course you are!’ Tess had rushed to assure. ‘Your father and I love you both equally.’

  Insecurity in a child so young had meant that the strict impartiality of parenthood, which Tess had assumed would be her rock and stay, was not always the case when it came to Lizzie, and she invariably found herself defending her daughter, no matter what.

  ‘The trouble with Lizzie,’ Tom’s mother used to say, ‘is that she’s hopelessly fickle; the girl simply doesn’t know what it is she wants. She flits from one thing to another.’

  There was much that was true in the statement, but whether fickleness could be blamed for the years of drama they’d endured, Tess couldn’t say. As a toddler Lizzie had regularly thrown herself onto the floor, arms and legs flailing like a demented octopus, all the while screaming at the top of her voice. At the same age she had also perfected the skill of holding her breath for so long she would literally turn blue. Her teenage years weren’t much easier, but by then Tom and Tess had learned to roll with the punches of whatever crisis revolved around their daughter, such as nearly drowning on holiday after drinking too much and going for a swim, or crashing the car the first time she drove it after passing her driving test, or losing her handbag and house keys, or setting fire to the toaster. Things just happened to her in the way they didn’t to Luke. She was like a magnet for bad luck.

  In common with most parents, Tess would have given anything for her children to have a trouble-free life – let somebody else’s child experience the highs and lows, the dramas and heartaches, just let her own be spared any suffering. Yet as protective as she was of both Luke and Lizzie, she wasn’t blind to their faults. Luke was like Tom and too easy-going for his own good, and Lizzie was invariably at the mercy of her pride and would refuse to admit that she had ever made a wrong decision.