she knew absolutely that this was the truth. He was not the sort of person who would let you down. It gave her a strange glow inside.
‘You’re not like my family,’ she told him as they started towards her house. ‘But never mind them. I’ve been working really hard on my bike. Just wait till you see it! It’s shiny as new.’
He actually listened to her and asked her sensible questions. Lillian could hardly believe it. She led him in through the back way to where the curtains were still drying on the washing lines in the yard.
‘We’ve been spring cleaning,’ she explained.
‘Oh, yes. My mum goes mad on that each year for a bit, but she never gets very far. Susan and I usually finish it. But we’ve only got a little flat to clean. It must be a big job doing all this place,’ James said, looking at the back of the house as it reared up above them, the bare windows gleaming. ‘Do you all help? Wendy as well?’
‘Even Dad’ll have to tomorrow, when he’s off work,’ Lillian told him. ‘Oh—I got to go and give him these cigarettes. Would you like a cuppa?’
James said that he would.
‘You can see what I’ve done to my bike while I’m making it,’ she suggested.
When she came back out with a large cup of tea and the biscuit she’d dared to take, he was already busy with his tool kit and oil can. He admired what she had done and for a while they talked cogs and chains and brakes. Lillian soaked up all the information.
‘You’re very clever,’ she said.
James shrugged. ‘I enjoy getting things working. Bikes are easy. Cars take a lot more skill. Some of the blokes where I work, they do the job but they don’t think about it. If something’s a bit tricky, they just adjust a few things and get it moving but they don’t make it sing. If a car’s going well, you can hear it, it speaks to you.’
He gave an embarrassed smile. ‘I suppose that sounds daft.’
But Lillian knew just what he meant. ‘No, no, it doesn’t. I know when a movement is just right. It’s the same thing. Look.’
She stood up, took a pose, then executed a series of pirouettes across the concrete yard, finishing by the door. James grinned and clapped, but Lillian hadn’t finished.
‘No—that’s what I mean. Anyone could do that if they practised. Now watch.’
She came back again the other way, this time making every part of her body as graceful and fluid as possible. Everything had to be right—the angle of her head, the way she held her arms, the expression on her face—as well as doing the steps perfectly.
‘See?’ she asked.
James was looking at her in amazement. ‘Where did you learn to do that? Do you go to ballet classes?’
Lillian sighed. If only. It was her dearest wish.
‘No, my best friend Janette does, and she shows me.’
‘Well, you’re very good at it. It was different again, the second time. You looked like a proper dancer.’
Delight coursed through her. No one had ever said that to her before.
‘Really? Do you think so?’
She gazed at him, desperate for approval.
‘Yes, but—well, I don’t know much about it—’
Of course he didn’t. He was a boy and they weren’t interested in things like dancing. But he hadn’t laughed at her. That was the important thing.
‘At least you watch properly. None of my lot do.’
Lillian sighed and squatted down beside the bike as it stood upside down between them. Her sense of the unfairness of life, never very far from the surface, welled up. Here was someone who might understand. ‘You’re the youngest of your family, aren’t you? Don’t you think it’s horrible being the youngest?’
James appeared to consider this. He adjusted a nut on the rear wheel and gave it a turn, nodding as it ran smoothly.
‘I suppose it’s different for me. There’s only the three of us, and Mum—well, it’s hard for her, being a war widow. Susan and me, we’ve always sort of looked after her as much as she’s looked after us. She’s not strong, you know. When we were little, she used to go out and do cleaning jobs because what they give her for a pension doesn’t go very far. But she always found it very difficult to manage working and seeing to us. Now we’re both working she doesn’t have to any more. We made her give up the last job she had a year or so ago. If she could have carried on, we might have been able to move to a better flat, but it was making her ill. That’s why I left school at fifteen. I had to get out and get earning.’
Lillian understood this. ‘Yeah, I’ve got to leave next year. My gran says education is wasted on girls because we’re only going to get married. It’s Bob who got to stay till he was sixteen. He’s the brains of the family, so they’re always saying. He passed his eleven plus, so he got to go to the grammar and get his school certificate and his wonderful job at the bank. You should see him in the morning, making a fuss about his clean collar and his tie and his shoes, like he’s the bank manager or something, instead of a clerk. I’m the one who has to do his blooming shoes, not him. He’s too important. And Gran looks at him and goes on about at least someone in this family is doing all right. It makes me sick.’
‘Boring Bob,’ James said.
Their eyes met through the spokes of the bicycle wheel. They both smiled, knowing that the other one felt exactly the same.
‘You got it,’ Lillian agreed, revelling in the warm glow of understanding. The intimacy of the moment propelled her into further revelations.
‘Everything’d be different if my Aunty Eileen was still here. I suppose—like it’d be different for you if your dad hadn’t been killed. She used to be on my side. She was lovely.’
‘Eileen? Susan’s said nothing about an Aunty Eileen,’ James said.
‘Oh, they never talk about her. She’s our black sheep, or at least that’s what Gran says. A black sheep, or a viper in the bosom. Isn’t that a horrible thing to say about someone—a viper in the bosom?’
‘It’s from the Bible. But what did she do?’
‘She ran away from home when I was six. She went in the middle of the night.’
Lillian sat back her heels, looking back down the years to that bitter night when her aunty had left her.
‘She told me she was going to follow her dream, and I didn’t know what she meant ’cos I was only a little kid, but later I thought she meant she was going to do something amazing, like being a film star. I was so sure she was going to be a film star that I looked at all the posters outside all the cinemas to see if her picture was there.’
She glanced at him, worried suddenly that he would laugh at her for being so stupid, but there was no hint of it on his face.
‘What had happened, then?’ he asked.
Lillian hesitated. It was so lovely to talk like this, so seriously, like grown-ups. It was intoxicating just to have him listen to her without making fun. But, however much she was drawn to confide in him, still this was a family secret.
‘Promise you won’t tell?’ she begged.
‘’Course not.’
‘Not even Susan? Only I haven’t told anyone, not even my best friend Janette. And Gran’d kill me if she knew.’
‘Cross my heart,’ James said.
She thought she did see a shadow of a smile then in his eyes, but it was soon gone, and the need to draw him in, to make him a confidant, was too strong for her to resist. She lowered her voice.