held them closer, so that they wouldn’t see her tears.
‘I won’t go away again,’ she promised him. ‘Never, never.’
The words closed round the four of them, and they made an unbreakable, invisible circle on the grass.
It’s over, Annie thought.
She listened, straining her ears, but there was nothing. The last echoes of the bomb’s terrible roar had died away into the stillness of the garden.
Bad Girls, Good Women
BY ROSIE THOMAS
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in the United Kingdom in 1988 by Michael Joseph
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1988
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © APR 2014 ISBN: 9780007560561
Version: 2014-05-13
Contents
Copyright
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
The music, very loud music, filled the corners of the old house.
In the big room where the musicians in their corner were lapped by a sea of dancers, it was as solid as a wall. Overhead, where Julia stood in the shadows at the top of the stairs, it penetrated the thick stone walls and the oak-boarded floors as an insistent bass beat. She stood for a minute to listen to it.
Beneath her was the blaze of lights and the noise of people, laughter and shouting all knitted together by the throb of the music.
Julia swayed dreamily, moving her hips inside the silky tube of her dress. She was smiling, because she loved parties and her own parties were always the best of all. She loved this particular moment, when the party was off and running on its own, and she could step back to admire it, her creation.
Somewhere behind her, in the dimness of the gallery, a door opened. A thin finger of light reached past her. Julia didn’t look round, but she heard a man’s voice and then a woman’s low laugh before the door closed again. The man walked quickly along the gallery and stopped beside her at the head of the stairs. Turning to look now, Julia saw that it was her old friend Johnny Flowers. He had arrived hours ago in one of the packed cars that had raced each other from London to Julia’s party.
She smiled, and saw the whiteness of his teeth as he smiled back at her.
‘Good time, Johnny?’ she whispered.
He leaned forward to kiss the corner of her mouth and his hand rested lightly on her waist.
‘Mmm. The very best time. The party to end all parties, this one.’
Julia murmured, ‘Good. But it’s early yet.’
Johnny’s hand slid over her hip as he passed her, and fleetingly she remembered other times. Other places, a long way from this big house beached in its dark gardens.
She tilted her head backwards at the closed bedroom door.
‘Who?’
‘Sssh.’ The white smile came again as he put his finger to his lips. ‘You haven’t seen me.’
‘I haven’t seen you.’
Julia watched him run downstairs and disappear into the brightness. A swirl of laughing people poured out into the hallway and the colours of the girls’ dresses blurred exotically against the wood panelling.
Someone called out, ‘Ju—lia!’ and the faces
