“Will you be all right?” he asked.
“A cup of hot sweet tea and I’ll be as right as rain.” God, she sounded like one of those cheery, diary-writing nurses she had derided. She was grateful when she was allowed to escape. She was embarrassed—he had witnessed her weak and undignified, it was not how she liked to be seen.
“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Niven, for all your help,” she said, and turned on her heel and entered the Warrender.
* * *
—
“I tripped on a curb,” Gwendolen said, unwilling to tell Mrs. Bodley about her misfortunes. Mrs. Bodley was the kind who would censure you for the faults of others.
She settled in the hotel lounge with a tea tray in front of her—she really did need the hot, sweet tea. What an extraordinary few hours—from Holloway first thing, to being assaulted and robbed on Regent Street, not to mention being recruited to spy on the notorious Cokers by Frobisher the previous day. The Library could not compete.
She must have fallen asleep over the tea tray, as she was roused by Mrs. Bodley approaching. “A gentleman,” she said, giving the word the full weight of her displeasure, “has left something for you at reception.”
Following Mrs. Bodley to the front desk, Gwendolen discovered, to her astonishment, that the “something” left there was her stolen handbag. How on earth had it found its way back to the Warrender?
“It wasn’t a Mr. Niven who left it by any chance, was it?” she asked.
“Gave no name,” Mrs. Bodley said. “Good-looking sort. It might not be my place to say it, Miss Kelling, but you shouldn’t be running around London consorting with types like that.”
“I will do my best not to meet good-looking men in future, Mrs. Bodley,” Gwendolen said solemnly.
The mystery deepened, for on further investigation, Gwendolen discovered that there was nothing missing from her bag, not so much as a farthing or a handkerchief. It must have been Mr. Niven, no one else knew about the theft, but there was no note, no explanation at all as to how the bag had been returned intact. Of course, a note would have necessitated a response, an expression of gratitude. A correspondence might have propelled further acquaintance, which was clearly not desired by him. She would not flatter herself to think he had an interest in her. All he had seen was the tired tweed and dreadful hair and all he had felt was pity, most likely. She was annoyed with herself for the little pang of disappointment she felt.
Iced Fancies
A few months before Freda ran away to London, her feckless mother, Gladys, acquired a suitor, or a “fancy man,” as Freda had heard a neighbour refer to him. There was, in fact, nothing fancy about Mr. Birdwhistle (a ridiculous name!) except for his cakes. He owned a small chain of bakeries and courted Gladys with what he referred to as his “specialities”: gluey vanilla puffs and sickeningly sweet French fancies. He was always saying to Freda, “Call me Uncle Lenny.” Freda would not.
Mr. Birdwhistle made many rash promises—an engagement ring, a house on the Mount and so on—but nothing had as yet materialized. Gladys blamed Freda’s cheek. “Be nice to him,” she warned. “With any luck he’s going to be your new father.”
Freda felt that the last thing she needed was a father, new or otherwise.
She wasn’t completely au fait, as Duncan would say, with how a father should behave, but she was pretty sure it was not like Mr. Birdwhistle. He contrived to pull and pinch and pat Freda even more than she had been pulled and pinched and patted when she had been modelling the Knits. He was always inviting her to perch on his hammy thigh or give him a kiss on his tobacco-flecked moustache. She was used to being pawed, of course. The previous year she had been Peaseblossom in a Rowntree Players’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Mechanicals could hardly leave her alone, but it was just teasing really and they were easy to distract. Mr. Birdwhistle, on the other hand, was relentless.
He had begun to “stay over” at the weekends, Gladys going through the charade of making up the “guest room”—an airless, windowless box-room at the back of the house—as if Freda had no idea what was going on beneath her nose. As soon as they were all in their respective beds, she could hear Mr. Birdwhistle slithering across the landing to her mother’s room, which, after an indecent interval, was followed by Mr. Birdwhistle’s porcine snoring.
* * *
—
Not counting Vanda and Duncan—now both lost to her—Florence Ingram was Freda’s only friend. She was a veteran of the same dance school as Freda, but sadly had little in the way of either looks or talent and was usually consigned to the clod-hopping back row in the end-of-term concerts. This neglect had not made her envious of Freda’s star turns. On the contrary, she spurred Freda on to shine and basked in her friend’s reflected light. Nonetheless, Florence understood feelings. She had many, some quite dramatic.
She was a robust, kind girl, almost unnaturally clumsy, and the pantomime village never mustered her lumbering limbs to dance in its square or around its maypole, although both girls had been in a production of Dick Whittington and His Cat last Christmas at the Theatre Royal.
They had played cats. Not the Cat, just one of several who were friends of the Cat. They got billing in the programme notes, though. Freda was “A Pretty Cat.” They performed a routine called “The Cat Dance,” although Freda doubted that any cat had ever been taught to tap. They also did a great deal of washing of their ears with their paws. Florence had made it onto the stage playing “A Comedy Cat,” a plump, ponderous feline who garnered much audience laughter with its bumbling antics. “Not much acting needed,” Freda overheard the pantomime’s director say to the costume mistress. Poor Florence!
Freda had spent many hours of their friendship coaching Florence in improvements—to stand up straight and learn to carry books on her head (near impossible), to discard her thick, pebble-glass spectacles whenever possible (which led to not infrequent bruising, unfortunately), and to close her mouth when breathing and eating (which occasionally led to choking). Florence really should have her adenoids out, in Freda’s opinion. Florence’s mother had a friend who knew someone whose daughter supposedly had bled to death on the operating table while having her adenoids removed, which was why Florence was still in possession of hers. “Bleeding to death” sounded gloriously operatic to Freda’s ears. She was, of course, a connoisseur of the opera, having had all kinds of walk-on (and skip-on) parts when children were deemed a necessary addition to the scenery by the touring companies that came to York.
Florence’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Ingram, were well off and Florence lived in a big, detached house out on Tadcaster Road that Freda spent a lot of time cycling to. Mrs. Ingram had a “daily”—which meant a woman—and the house always smelt of cleaning products—Brasso and ammonia and wax polish, scents that were never present in Freda’s home in the Groves. The downstairs rooms were half-panelled in oak and the floors were something called “parquet,” which was solid and polished and a contrast to the torn lino in Freda’s house.