Waiting For The Right Moment

He arrived on the platform with time to spare, patting his pocket to make sure that the little box was still there. As he climbed aboard the train and made his way to a vacant seat, his mind returned to the heady moment when he’d decided to ask Violet to marry him. He’d felt giddy enough to want to blurt out his secret there and then, but a proposal needed to be perfect and so he’d resolved to do things properly: buy a ring, find a romantic little picnic spot, then go down on one knee and ask the most important question of his life.

The carriage was filling up now with the last few passengers. He checked his watch, impatient to be off, wondering how long the journey would take. He could still remember how she’d looked the first time he saw her when she’d come to tea with his sister after school.  Despite the blazer and pigtails, there had been something about her even then; but she’d been a fifteen year old schoolgirl whereas he was eighteen and about to enlist in the Royal Air Force – doing his bit for king and country – and so he forgot about her quickly, his mind preoccupied with the adventure before him.

It was more than two years later when he saw her again. He was a qualified pilot, home on leave, and his mother had instructed him to chaperone Ruby at the local dance that Friday. America had finally entered the war last December, and since then, hundreds of their soldiers – GIs they were called – had flooded the country, turning girls’ heads with their cigarettes and nylons. Neither he nor his mother wanted to see Ruby as a GI bride. Of course, his little sister had sulked, but once she realised it was the only way she’d be allowed out, she’d given in. He’d set off with her that evening, full of good intentions to defend Ruby’s virtue – and then he’d caught sight of Violet, resplendent in a dress of crimson taffeta that she later told him had been cut down from an old evening gown of her mother’s – and she’d looked up and smiled at him and his heart had been lost from that moment onwards.

He danced with her more than once that evening, one eye still watching Ruby even when he was holding Violet far closer than was strictly necessary. At one point, Violet said she felt hot, so they stepped outside the dance hall for a breath of air. In the cool evening breeze, he took her hand in his and asked if he could kiss her. He wouldn’t have normally been so forward, but he would be returning to the base in thirty-six hours’ time and no one these days had months to waste observing peacetime etiquette. When his lips met hers, something passed between them and he knew that she was the one. He could not countenance marrying anyone else and he sensed she felt the same way.

*

He settled himself with his crossword, his pen hovering over the empty squares; but try as he might, he could not put her out of his mind. What would have happened, he wondered now, if he’d asked her to marry him that evening? But he’d wanted it to be the right moment, and there were too many people milling about, and so instead he’d asked if he could see her the following day, thinking he might declare his love for her then.

Images danced in his brain: all those hours together had happened so long ago but had never been forgotten. Even now, he could remember her hand wrapped in his as they strolled down country lanes, feel the sun on the back of his neck as they sat on the grass and kissed for a thousand years. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever known and he knew that when he finally asked her, she would say yes; but a girl like her needed a ring as beautiful as she was, and a soldier’s pay wouldn’t stretch to anything that could do her justice.

His hand fumbled again with the box in his pocket. He took it out and opened it, admiring the pearlescent opal that stared back at him. When he had confided in his mother on one of his weekend leaves, she had slipped the ring off her own finger and handed it to him. “It was your grandmother’s” she’d said. “I never had a ring of my own – your father couldn’t afford one – so she left it for me when she died. I don’t know how much it’s worth, but I wouldn’t want to sell it. Give it to Violet – that way, it’ll still be in the family, won’t it?”

He’d come so close to proposing to her that evening, sitting with her in her parents’ kitchen, drinking tea and talking about her plans to train as a nurse and his to leave the RAF and find a trade once the war was finished. Neither of them voiced the possibility of him not coming home when the fighting was over: too many lives had been lost already and they needed to enjoy the now and not worry about the later.

His hand was actually reaching for the ring in his pocket when they heard the siren. Scrambling wildly, they sprang to their feet and rushed to the door, heading for the Anderson shelter outside.

“Your mother,” she began but he shook his head.

“She knows I’m with you. She won’t worry. What about your mum and dad?”

Her face went white. “They went to the Red Lion. They were trying to give us a bit of privacy.”

He squeezed her hand. “There’s a big shelter outside. They’ll be all right.”

The Anderson was cold and a little damp. They huddled together in the dark, not daring to defy the blackout by lighting the oil lamp her father kept in there. Blindly feeling around, he found a blanket and wrapped it about her shoulders, trying not to think of his mother and Ruby.

 While the noise of the planes droned overhead, he sat holding her close, knowing that words would do no good at a time like this. After a while, he turned his face to hers and kissed her. He was always mindful that each time together might be their last and perhaps she thought it too because when his hand slid beneath her sweater, she didn’t push it away.

When the ‘all clear’ sounded, she looked up at him. “I’m a fallen woman!”

“No,” he corrected her, kissing her smooth, pale shoulder, “you’re a woman who’s fallen in love.”

That would have been the perfect moment to produce the ring, but he knew her mind was still preoccupied with her parents’ safety. And an Anderson shelter was hardly the most romantic of spots – he would take her for the picnic he’d envisaged when he was home on his next leave. But when he returned to base the following day, it was to be told that he was being sent over to France to help with the training of their airmen. It would be months before he saw Violet again.

*

The time that followed seemed like an eternity. She sent him letters detailing her nursing training and he pictured her in a starched uniform ministering to the wounded soldiers who were brought into her hospital. “Don’t fall in love with any of them, Violet,” he muttered under his breath as he wrote back, reassuring her of his love and looking forward to their reunion. He couldn’t propose in a letter: he wanted to look into her eyes when he said the words and see the expression on her face when he produced the ring. Yet despite the lack of a formal engagement, there was an unspoken understanding between them: he knew that she would wait for him.

He kept his grandmother’s ring tucked securely in the breast pocket of his uniform. By carrying it close to his heart, he would not forget Violet. Besides, he wanted it close to hand so that as soon as he saw her again, he could reach into his pocket and offer her the token of his love.

He’d been out there for a couple of months when the disaster happened. He and his French protégé had taken up a de Havilland Tiger Moth for training exercises. The sky was clear and the training run should have been straightforward, but a German reconnaissance plane had appeared out of nowhere and started shooting them down. He had just enough time to recognise the markings of an Arado before its machine guns caught their fuselage and their craft began to spin into a nosedive. His last conscious thought before the Moth crashed was that he would die without having asked Violet to marry him.

*

He folded his newspaper and sat back in his seat, trying to recall the months in the French hospital. Even at the time, everything had seemed hazy, although they told him later that they had been dosing him with morphine to dull the pain. He flitted in and out of sleep, in his nightmares feeling the plane plummet over and over again, paradoxically jolted awake each time it hit the ground and he lost consciousness. One of the girls who nursed him had had pretty eyes – she was the one who’d found the ring in his clothing and kept it safe for him. His hand went instinctively to the box he’d replaced in his trouser pocket. It was thanks to that young lass that he still had it now.

She was the same girl who’d brought him the letter from Ruby. By now, he’d regained his memory and remembered Violet, wondering why she hadn’t written. Ruby’s scrawl explained everything: a telegram had been sent to say he was “missing in action” and she and her mother had both resigned themselves to the fact of his death.

He’d wept then, grief leaking out of him as he envisaged their own tears. All those wasted months... Had Violet mourned too? he wondered, scanning the letter for details.

Towards the end of the last page, his eye caught a sentence that stilled his heart. “Violet got married a few months ago.” He read on. “Like everyone else, she thought you were dead. She and her husband have gone to Lincolnshire to live with his mother.”

He thought of the ring and how close he’d come on so many occasions to giving it to her, and he knew that the perfect moment was gone forever.

*

He didn’t leave the RAF once the war was over. That had been his dream once, when Violet was still his; now, nothing seemed important anymore. Over the years, there were other girls – but none of them lived up to the memory of Violet and they never lasted longer than a few weeks. In time, he settled into bachelorhood, consoling himself with the fact that at least he had known love once.

The train was slowing to a halt. He came out of his reverie, checking his watch yet again to make sure he would be on time. Who would have thought that Violet would have tracked him down after so many years! She claimed that one of her grandchildren had found his details on a computer. He smiled now, remembering how impressed he’d been with her for keeping up with the nineties. He was too old for any of that sort of thing himself. Her letter had arrived unexpectedly, the day before his seventy-third birthday. Despite the years, he’d recognised her handwriting and torn it open eagerly. She’d written that she’d been wanting to tell him something for years and that now she was a widow, it would be nice if they could talk to each other over the phone – or maybe even meet up somewhere. Her telephone number was at the top of the page. He rang her straight away.

“It’s good to hear your voice after all these years,” he’d told her. “I thought you’d forgotten all about me.”

“Because I married Harold?” She sighed. “He was a good man, Jack, but he wasn’t you. You were my first love. It broke my heart when I heard you’d been killed in France.”

Ot was on the tip of his tongue to retort that she couldn’t have been very heartbroken if she’d married someone else so quickly, but he said nothing. It was all water under the bridge now. For the time being, he was happy just to be talking to her.

“Are you still in Lincolnshire?” he asked.

She chuckled. “I’ve been here for more than fifty years now – can you believe it?” Her voice softened then. “After my parents died, there didn’t seem much point in staying in around. You were gone, so I had nothing to keep me there.”

“What if I’d asked you to marry me?” he demanded impulsively. “If I’d asked you before I went away to France, would you have said yes?”

There was silence for a while, then Violet’s voice crackled over the phone wires. “I think we need to meet face to face. This isn’t the sort of conversation I can have with someone I can’t see. Are you free on Saturday?”

As a retired septuagenarian, he was free every day; but even if he’d had a full diary, he would have moved heaven and earth to see her. After more than fifty years of waiting, he would finally be able to propose.

*

The train had finally pulled to a halt. He climbed off carefully, looking around the station to see if she was there. He recognised her at once; she looked like an older version of her mother – or at least, the way he remembered Violet.

“Mr Hawkins? I’m Ruby. My brother’s waiting in the car.”

“Did she tell you she named you after my sister?” he asked as he followed her out to the station car park.

She nodded, her eyes moist with tears. “She always said how ironic it was that Ruby lived through the war and then died in a road accident a week or two later.”

That had been another reason he hadn’t gone home. It would have been too painful being back in his mother’s house without his noisy, talkative sister. Mum hadn’t lasted long after that. He’d come back to help his aunt nurse her through the final stages of tuberculosis. So many had died unnecessarily back then in the fifties; these days, they had medicines for everything – well, almost everything.

As they approached the car, a tall man who looked to be in his early fifties could be seen sitting at the wheel, lost in thought. Noticing the other two, he opened the car door and thrust his hand at Jack. “Good to meet you. I’m Tom, Ruby’s brother.”

Sitting in the front passenger seat as they drove along, Jack found his mind returning to the recent past. Everything had been laid out neatly for his meeting with Violet: his Sunday suit, a clean shirt, a smart tie – and the ring, of course. It didn’t matter that she was about to turn seventy: she was still the girl he’d loved all those years ago and the only woman he could imagine marrying. He felt blessed to have the chance now, in old age, to finally make her his.

At first, he had been unable to take in the words of the phone call. The male voice on the other end had claimed to be Violet’s grown up son and his voice shook as he described recent events.

Jack felt numbed by shock, his brain trying to make sense of the words. “Cancer... known for some time... went in yesterday... didn’t come round from the anaesthetic...”

She had known about her hospital appointment when she had spoken to him, but she hadn’t mentioned it.

He heard the raw grief in her son’s voice as he told him, and a part of him wondered why this unknown man was ringing a stranger.

“I know how much you meant to her,” the Lincolnshire accent continued, “and I know she’d have wanted you there when ...” The words crumbled into emotion. “...When we say goodbye.”

They had reached the Chapel of Rest. Tom turned and looked at Jack. “The cremation service is at three, but they won’t be collecting her until just before then. The funeral director said it was okay for you to come and see her – so you can say goodbye properly.”

In a daze, he climbed out of the car, his legs shaking as he tried to hold himself together. With Tom and Ruby supporting him on either side, he walked through the inner doors of the shop to the room at the back where Violet’s coffin lay. She was still beautiful: neither time nor death had robbed her of that. Beneath the carefully applied make up, he thought he could detect traces of the girl she had been. She was still his Violet.

Placing his hand in his pocket, he pulled out the tiny box and withdrew the ring. “I was going to ask her to marry me.” He looked at her children appealingly. They both nodded.

Slowly, very slowly, he reached over and placed the ring on the satin lining next to her, his mind thinking of all the times he’d come so close to asking her to marry him. “Goodbye, darling,” he whispered, his voice choking with grief. “We’ll meet again, and then nothing will keep us apart.”