to liars, don’t you?’
Lillian nodded. Liars’ tongues shrivelled up and dropped out. But she had promised Aunty Eileen not to tell.
Gran made a disbelieving sound in her throat. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me. Go and get your dad.’
Relieved to be let off the hook, if only for the moment, Lillian turned and trotted out of the room. Her father rarely had a kind word to say to her, but he wasn’t as frightening as her grandmother. She carefully closed the door behind her and went down the chilly passageway to the kitchen. There she found her mother at the sink and her father sitting at the table with a bowl of porridge in front of him, reading the Mirror.
‘Gran says you’re to come,’ she told him.
Her father sighed and turned slowly to look at her. ‘What?’ he said, as he always did, to gain time.
Lillian repeated her message. Her mother started drying her hands on her floral apron.
‘Oh, dear, what’s the matter? What does she want?’ she asked, nervous as a bird.
‘She wants you,’ Lillian told her father. She didn’t want to be accused of repeating the message incorrectly. She was in enough trouble already, covering for Aunty Eileen.
Doug Parker sighed again and stood up. He was a tall man, but already he had an apologetic stoop which made him look older than his years. His once handsome face was marred by lines of discontent and his right arm hung awkwardly, the result of a fight with his brother long ago in the butcher’s shop the family had once owned.
‘S’pose I better go,’ he said, as if he had some choice in the matter. They all knew he was just deceiving himself. In this household, when Gran said jump, you asked how high.
Lillian and her mum waited as he went down the passageway and into the front room. Neither of them suggested that Lillian might start eating her breakfast. They needed to know whether Gran would want them next. From the front room came Dad’s voice, raised in anger and dismay as he heard what his little sister had done.
‘Gone? Gone where?’
Nettie Parker flinched. ‘What is it?’ she whispered to Lillian. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Aunty Eileen’s gone,’ Lillian told her.
‘Oh, my Gawd!’
Nettie put her two hands to her thin cheeks. ‘Now we’re for it,’ she predicted. ‘Eileen! The silly girl. How could she do this to us?’ She pulled out a chair with a shaking hand and sat down. ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked. ‘Your gran’ll go mad. It’s terrible, terrible.’
Before Lillian could work out whether she was supposed to answer this, her father put his head round the front room door and yelled for her to come back in. Reluctantly, Lillian obeyed. As she walked back towards Gran’s room, she saw Wendy sitting on the stairs grinning at her through the rails. She put her tongue out at Lillian as she passed. Lillian did the same back. At that moment her two big brothers, Bob and Frank, came clattering down the stairs.
‘What’s up?’ Frank hissed. ‘What’s going on?’
Aunty Eileen’s done a bunk,’ Wendy said, her blue eyes as big as saucers with the excitement of it all.
Frank whistled and sat down beside her. ‘She ain’t? What, done a midnight flit?’
Wendy nodded. ‘She’s taken everything, even the hairbrush. She just left a letter for Gran.’
‘Wow!’ Frank was fond of American expressions. ‘She’s got a nerve, ain’t she? You got to hand it to her.’
‘She’s a very silly young woman, if you ask me,’ Bob said from his lordly position of oldest son and the accepted clever one of the family.
‘Nobody did ask you,’ Frank told him.
Their father’s head appeared round the door again. ‘Lilli—! Oh, there you are. Come in here when you’re told, girl.’ He caught sight of Wendy and his voice softened. ‘And you better come as well. She can’t of gone without either of you hearing nothing.’
This time it was Wendy’s turn to look alarmed and Lillian’s to make a face before both of them lined up by Gran’s bed. It was easier with Wendy there, as she vehemently denied knowing anything and Lillian just stood beside her, agreeing with everything she said. But Gran still had her suspicions.
‘You and her, you was like blooming Siamese twins,’ she said to Lillian. ‘I can’t believe she’d go and not say nothing to you, whatever she might do to the rest of us, the ungrateful little madam. Walking out in the middle of the night like that! I never knew the like—’
Gran went off on a long tirade. The two girls stood silent, knowing better than to make any comment. Their father nodded and agreed with everything. But eventually Gran came back to her original point.
‘So come on, what did she tell you?’
Lillian shook her head. Despite her concern not to give anything away, the full impact of what had happened was finally getting through to her. Aunty Eileen had been more like a mother to her than her real mum, who was worn down with housework and miscarriages and trying to please everyone. Aunty Eileen had always stuck up for her and put her first. Out of nowhere, tears welled up and spilled over.
‘I don’t want her to go!’ she wailed. ‘I want her to come back!’
Try as they might, her father and grandmother could get nothing more out of her. A sharp smack round the ear from her father only made her cry harder.
‘Get her out. I can’t hear myself think with all this racket going on,’ Gran ordered. ‘You get off to work early, Douglas, and on your way ask at Madame Pauline’s if they know anything. She must of told them; she can’t just walk out of a decent job. And, if they don’t, there’s only one thing for it—we’ll have to go to the police.’
Lillian found herself pushed out into the hallway again, where Frank and Bob grabbed her and demanded to know what was going on.
‘The police!’ Bob said. ‘Gran’s never going to ask them to come here, is she? She’d never do that. It’d give the neighbours a field day.’
‘You’re such an old woman,’ Frank scoffed. ‘But come on, Lill, spill it. Where has Eileen gone?’
He loomed over her, his pale face gleaming with the excitement of it all. Nothing as dramatic as this had happened in their family in their lifetimes.
Lillian stamped her foot with frustration. ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! She’s just gone. She went in the middle of the night—’
She was saved by her father putting his head round the door.
‘Clear off into the kitchen, you lot. Your gran don’t want all this row outside her door. Go on, get!’
It was the beginning of a difficult time. The police were sympathetic but, with nothing to work on, they were unable to do more than suggest that the family get in touch with the Salvation Army. Gran continued to rant and rave about the situation, but
