Folly's Child (10 page)

‘You're upset. Let me take the dress to Donna while you find something else to put on.'

Sally let her take it. Then before she could stop herself she asked: ‘You're not really going to Australia are you, Harriet?'

‘Yes, I am.'

Sally caught at her arm. ‘Don't go, darling, please. You never know, you might find out something you'd rather not know.'

Harriet's brows came together in a puzzled little line.

‘Dad said something similar. You're afraid, both of you, that I might discover Mom isn't dead at all, aren't you?' Sally said nothing, and Harriet went on: ‘You don't really think she could do something like that, do you? Disappear and let us all think she was dead if she wasn't?'

For a moment Sally did not answer.

‘Your mom was a very determined lady when she wanted something,' she said, avoiding Harriet's eyes. ‘ She usually got it one way or another.'

‘You mean you
do
think … Sally, she was your sister, dammit!'

‘Yes', Sally said softly. ‘She was my sister all right.'

She crossed to one of her closets, sliding hangers along the rail.

‘Go back to the others, Harriet. I'm all right. I'll be down in a minute.'

For a moment longer Harriet hesitated, then she nodded.

‘If you're sure you're all right.'

‘Yes, really. Go along with you.'

The door closed after Harriet, and Sally rifled through her wardrobe looking for a dress of mauve-sprigged white seersucker, slightly yellowed now, and quite out of place amongst the designer gowns. She should have thrown it out years ago but somehow she'd never had the heart. She'd loved that dress, felt so grown up in it! She slipped it off its hanger and held it against herself and it was almost as if the face looking back at her from the mirror across it was fourteen years old again. As she stood there holding it the memories came flooding back – and not all of them pleasant. For she had been wearing this dress the night she had first glimpsed the truth about her sister, a truth that was as unpalatable now as it had been then.

‘Oh Paula!' she whispered and suddenly tears were running down her cheeks, making rivulets in her carefully-applied make-up. ‘ What happened to you? And dear God, what happened to me?'

She stood quite still, holding the dress with arms folded around her waist, and remembered.

As she climbed the stairs Sally could hear the low voices and the giggles coming from the bedroom she shared with her sister and knew what it meant. Paula had brought her friend Louise home with her and they would be sharing the sort of older-girl talk that always made Sally feel like an intruder – and a very gauche, childish intruder at that. She hesitated, torn between the unaccountable shyness she always felt in Louise's presence and the overwhelming desire to be in on whatever it was they were giggling about, even if she was only a barely tolerated spectator. Fascination with the older girls won just as it always did and she crossed the landing, an expanse of lino dotted with what her mother referred to as ‘slip mats', pushed open the door and went in.

Two pairs of accusing eyes focused on her. Paula, wearing tight pedal pushers and a cotton off-the-shoulder jersey, was sprawled on her elbows on the tiled fire-surround, smoking and puffing the smoke up the chimney whilst Louise, stripped to her sexy black lace underwear, was lying on the bed pounding at her thighs with some kind of massager which appeared to consist of a collection of rubber pimples on a brush head.

‘Sally! What are you doing here?' Paula demanded.

‘It's my room too,' Sally said defensively. ‘I can come in if I like.'

‘Oh you're such a nuisance! Go and listen to the radio or something.'

‘There's nothing on the radio. I want to get a book.'

‘Well hurry up and leave us alone.'

‘Oh,
chérie
, don't be so hard on her!' Louise said, still pounding away at what she considered to be her fat legs. Louise was French and luscious, as every male in the district between the ages of fourteen and eighty-four would testify – most from wishful thinking but quite a number from experience. Louise was what was known as an ‘ exchange student'; at home in Nîmes she was training to be an English teacher and she was doing a year's exchange as part of her course, teaching French conversation at the local grammar school. She and Paula, who was in the sixth form, had struck up a close relationship; when Louise was not occupied in tantalising and inflaming some poor young man she and Paula were always together, drinking endless cups of espresso coffee to the accompaniment of Elvis and Cliff and Tommy Steele on the juke-box in the Black Cat Coffee Bar, haring about on Louise's smart little Lambretta scooter, or simply spending an evening painting one another's toenails, plucking one another's eyebrows and generally trying to make themselves even more fatally attractive to the opposite sex, which, without doubt, they already were.

‘You are not kind to your little seester!' Louise said reprovingly. ‘Don't stand in the doorway, Sally, come in. Come in quickly or the smell of smoke will go downstairs, will it not?'

‘Oh no!' Paula wailed. ‘ If Mum finds out I've been smoking she'll kill me. Don't you dare tell her either, Sally, or
I'll
kill
you
!'

‘Of course I won't tell. But she's bound to smell the smoke anyway.'

‘She won't. It's going up the chimney. And if you stay you're not to tell her what we're talking about either. Go on. Louise, you were telling me about Roger Clarke. Is he a fast worker? Everybody says he is.'

Louise giggled, ‘'ee theenks 'ee is. But I could teach 'im a thing or two. All he wants to do is to get his hand inside my blouse or up my skirt, but if I gave him the chance to do anything more he'd be so scared he'd wet his pants.'

‘You wouldn't let him though, would you?'

‘I might. And then again I might not.' Louise gave her thigh one more enthusiastic pummel, then sat up. ‘There – that ees better. Do you want a go with this theeng, Paula?'

‘No, it's made your legs go all red.'

‘That will soon go. And it's better than being fat. But then, you are not fat, are you, Paula?' She gazed enviously at Paula's long legs, slim and shapely in the skin-tight pedal pushers. ‘ What about you, Sally? Do you want to try?'

‘Don't encourage her,' Paula warned.

‘Why not? Why shouldn't Sally look nice too?' She turned to Sally, who was kneeling in the corner beside her bookcase, trying to make herself unobtrusive. ‘Come on, Sally, let me look at you. You 'ave fat legs like me. We big girls must stick together.'

Sally was unsure whether to be pleased that Louise was including her or annoyed that she had called her fat. She wasn't fat, but then neither was Louise, so perhaps it was all right.

She slipped out of her cotton skirt and the enormously full paper nylon petticoat she wore beneath it. It lay like a great wounded butterfly on the rug. Then she sat on the bed, trying not to wince as Louise rubbed cream into her thighs and pounded at them enthusiastically.

‘What are you wearing to the youth club dance on Saturday night, Louise?' Paula asked, stubbing out her cigarette and concealing the end in an empty lozenge tin she used as an ashtray.

‘Oh, I don't know …'

The older girls drifted off into one of their exclusive conversations and Sally bit her lip against the rasp of Louise's massager and wished desperately that she could go to the youth club dance too. Not only would it make her feel almost as grown up as Paula and Louise, but Pete Jackson, with whom Sally was hopelessly in love, was certain to be there.

Pete was in her form at school and whenever she looked at him little quivers she could not identify started deep inside her. Sometimes she thought from the way he seemed to watch her that he might like her too but he had never said anything and Sally was beginning to be afraid he never would. But if they were to meet away from school, out of uniform, no longer under the watchful eye of the masters and mistresses in their chalk-marked black gowns, then maybe it would be different.

‘Do you think Mum would let me come too?' she asked.

‘I shouldn't think so,' Paula said quickly.

‘There is someone you
fancy
?' Louise asked perceptively, and when Sally blushed she turned to Paula. ‘Oh, we could tell your mother we will look after her. Then she would let her go, no?'

‘No!' Paula protested. Most of her life, it seemed to her, she had been hampered by having to look after Sally and she had no intention of having her Saturday evening's fun spoiled. There was a boy she fancied herself – Jeff Freeman – and she was busy laying plans to entice him away from his steady girlfriend. The presence of her kid sister would inhibit her horribly. ‘She hasn't got anything to wear anyway', she continued scathingly.

‘Then I shall lend her something of mine. We are about the same size, no? I shall make her so beautiful no boy will be able to resist.' She ran the massager up the inside of Sally's thigh again but suddenly it did not hurt any more. As the rim brushed her groin Sally felt a sharp sweet pleasure which seemed to shoot up inside her on silken cords to that deep core where the trickles of excitement played every time-she thought of Pete. As Louise moved away she experienced a powerful urge to grab the massager and tug it close to her secret places again but she did not dare. She just lay thinking how wonderful it would be if she could actually make Pete notice her. It had always seemed such an impossible dream, but with Louise talking about it so matter-of-factly it seemed almost a
fait accompli
.

Much to Paula's annoyance Louise persuaded Gwen Bristow to allow Sally to go to the dance. Sally was triumphant, but by the time Saturday came she was almost sick with excitement and apprehension.

Oh, if only she looked more like Paula! she thought longingly. If only she could lose her puppy fat and get her hair done at a proper salon instead of having it cut by Ivy Tucker who lived down the road and who did hairdressing for pin money. But it wasn't easy to lose puppy fat when Mum fed her on stodgy good home cooking – stews with dumplings and meat pies with pastry crusts and steamed sponge puddings, and there was no money to spare for proper hairdressing salons. Sally knew her mother had trouble making ends meet on the nine pounds ten shillings a week that her father brought home from his job as an electrician's mate and she didn't have the heart to plead for luxuries she knew they could not afford as Paula did. Too often she had seen her mother frowning with anxiety as she divided the contents of her father's wage packet up between the jars labelled ‘ Rent' and ‘Electric' and ‘ Coal Money', too often at the end of the week she had watched her count out the pennies for a pound of sausages only to be able to buy just a half-pound, two for her father, one each for Paula and Sally, and only the scrapings of the pan to go with her own potatoes.

‘When I grow up I'll make sure I've always got enough money for a whole pound of sausages and eggs to go with them,' Sally thought, but she never said anything. She did not want to add to her mother's troubles.

At four o'clock Louise arrived on her scooter and parked it outside the Bristow's council house. The house was semi-detached, which put them on a higher social level than the people who lived in the long uniform ranks, a pleasant, gravel-faced house which had been built after the war and which had a good sized garden back and front, three bedrooms, a bathroom – and an outside toilet, coal house and glory hole. Sally loved the house. Before moving into it the family had lived with Sally's grandparents and it had been very cramped. Their grandparents had made the lounge into a bedroom so that Grandad didn't have to do the stairs with his bad legs and a bedroom had been turned into a sitting room and furnished with a table, chairs and sideboard that her parents had acquired when they got married though they had no house to put it in. When Paula and Sally played records on the wind-up gramophone in the sitting room Grandad banged on the ceiling with his stick to warn them to be quieter.

After this the council house seemed the height of luxury to Sally. She kept rabbits in a hutch in the back garden behind the rows of cabbages and the clump of rhubarb and did not mind at all that in winter she had to wash at night in a bowl set on a sheet of brown paper in front of the living room fire because there was no heater in the bathroom.

Louise was carrying a large bag which she had managed to balance on the handlebars of her scooter. Paula and Sally took her straight up to their bedroom.

‘Thees is the dress I bring for you,' she announced, pulling it out of its tissue paper and spreading it, slightly creased, on the bed. ‘You like it?'

‘Oh yes!' Sally gasped. It was a beautiful dress, white seersucker dotted with small mauve flowers. It had a deep ‘sweetheart' neckline, little puffed sleeves and a full skirt gathered into three tiers.

Next out of the bag came a paper nylon petticoat with many more layers of frothy rainbow-coloured net than the one Sally carefully washed in sugar water after each wearing, and then, to Sally's delight, a saucy little white basque, boned and trimmed with lace.

‘She can't possibly wear that!' Paula exclaimed, scandalised. ‘She's much too young – and it will never fit her, anyway.'

‘Of course it will. It fits me. And with this dress she needs a tiny waist. Why can't she wear it?'

‘You could have lent it to me,' Paula said, peeved.

‘No, it is for Sally. Please try it on, Sally.'

Sally held her breath as Louise fastened the multitude of little hooks and eyes and tried not to notice the little roll of fat that squeezed out above and below it.

‘Now the petticoat.' It rustled satisfyingly. ‘And the dress … well, what do you think, Sally?'