absence was felt by all the family, though to different degrees. One fewer wage coming in made a difference to all of them, so did one fewer ration book. Mum missed a strong pair of hands to help with the many chores involved in running a guest house. Wendy missed having her blonde curls tamed into cute ringlets. They all missed Eileen’s cheerfulness. Her stories of difficult customers at the hairdresser’s where she worked had livened up the tea table no end.
But Lillian felt it most of all. She had lost her friend, her ally, her source of love and security. There was nobody now to give her a big hug and ask how her day at school had been, nobody to take her on their knee and tell her how sweet she was, nobody to stop the others from treating her as a general dogsbody. Lonely and miserable, Lillian would creep inside the wardrobe and breathe deeply through her nose, taking comfort from the lingering remnants of Evening In Paris. But there came a day when even that had gone, and Aunty Eileen with her ready laugh and her unquestioning love seemed to have disappeared from her life for ever.
Chapter Two
‘YOU’RE not going to wear that tie, are you?’ James’s sister Susan nagged.
James looked at the tie in the spotted mirror over the fireplace and adjusted the knot. ‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’ he asked.
‘Can’t you see? It’s too loud.’
James laughed with sheer disbelief. Who could possibly say that dark red with small interlocking yellow squares was ‘loud’?
‘What you mean is, it’s not the sort of thing that Boring Bob wears,’ he said, and waited for the explosion.
Susan’s pretty round face went quite red and her eyes glittered. She clenched her fists. ‘Will you stop calling him that? Bob is my young man and he is not boring!’
James grinned at her. At seventeen, he was taller than her now and able to look down at her, which she hated. She was the elder by two years and had bossed him around when they were children.
‘Not if you like watching grass grow,’ he teased.
‘You—! You’re just so hateful! Mum! Mum, James is being horrible.’
Cora Kershaw came out of the bedroom that she and Susan shared in their tiny flat. Her blue frilly blouse was not yet tucked into her pleated skirt, and her thin hair was all over the place. Her soft face looked even more anxious than usual.
‘Children, please—Jamie, darling, you mustn’t—’
Susan took in her mother’s appearance and found a new target.
‘Mum! You can’t wear that blouse with that skirt!’
Cora looked mortified. ‘Oh, darling, really? Are you sure? Only I thought—Mrs Jefferson gave me this blouse, you know, and she buys her clothes in London. But if you think—I don’t want to let you down. Not when we’re going to tea with the Parkers.’
James went and put an arm round her. He faced his sister.
‘Leave Mum alone, Suse. She looks perfectly all right. More than good enough for the flaming Parkers. Anyone would think we were going to Buckingham Palace.’
Tears of frustration were gathering in Susan’s eyes.
‘Can’t you see? This is important to me. The Parkers have invited all of us to go round and meet all of them. I want it to be perfect. I mean, look at this place—’ She gestured at their home, three rooms and a kitchenette on the first floor of a small terraced house, with an outside toilet that they had to share with the people downstairs. ‘The Parkers live in that great big place just off the seafront.’
‘It’s a guest house,’ James stated. ‘They don’t live in all of it.’
‘But it’s theirs. They own it. They don’t rent it.’
Their mother sighed. ‘I know it’s not what you want, darling. You deserve better than this, both of you. It’s so poky in here. When I first got married, I never expected to still be living somewhere like this, all these years on. Never in a month of Sundays. We had such dreams, you know. We were going to have a big house with a garden and a garage and everything, one of those lovely places down in Thorpe Bay. If only your poor dear father had survived…’
Her voice trailed off. James and Susan were silenced, as they always were, when their mother started on this subject. The words ‘If only…’ had threaded all through their childhood. There was nothing meaningful they could say, for it was true, things would have been completely different for them if their father had not been killed in the war. The eyes of all three of them turned to the photograph in pride of place on the mantelpiece, showing a tall man in cricket whites with dark hair and eyes and a narrow, clever face who looked back at them with a sunny smile. As James grew older, it was becoming ever clearer that he was the image of his father.
James gave Cora another hug. ‘You won’t live here for ever, Mum. I’ll buy you a house with a garden one day, you’ll see.’
He might be the youngest of their little household, but he was the man of the family, had been since he was five years old, and it was up to him to provide.
Cora reached up and patted his cheek. ‘You’re a good boy, Jamie.’
He could tell that she didn’t really believe him. How could a boy who worked in a garage ever get to buy a house?
‘And anyway,’ he said, returning to the argument that he and Susan were having, ‘just because the Parkers live in their own place down by the seafront, it doesn’t mean they’re better than us. So stop having a go at us, Susan. We’re not going to let you down.’
‘I didn’t say you were. I just said I wanted it to be perfect, and you—’ Susan broke off, catching sight of the clock. ‘Look at the time! We’ll be late if we don’t set off in five minutes. Come on, Mum, I’ll help you do your hair.’
After a brief flurry of activity they set out, James and his mother arm in arm, Susan walking just ahead of them.
‘Doesn’t she look a picture?’ Cora said, smiling proudly at her daughter’s back.
‘Lovely,’ James agreed, to keep her happy.
Susan was tip-tapping along in her polished court shoes, neat and proper in the powder blue suit that she had made herself on the old hand-cranked Singer sewing machine. She wore a little blue felt hat perched on top of her head and new white gloves. Her black handbag hung from her arm. The whole outfit had taken months and months of saving from her wages as a junior in the office of a department store in the High Street.
‘Just like something out of a magazine.’ Cora sighed. ‘You look just like something out of a magazine,’ she called ahead to Susan.
Susan turned her head and smiled back at her. ‘Really?’
Even James had to admit that his sister was looking pretty. Plenty of men would be delighted to go out with her. Why she was so stuck on Boring Bob was a mystery to him.
‘I do hope the Parkers will like us. This is so important to Susan,’ his mother said.
‘Mum, the Parkers aren’t as wonderful as Suse
