Chapter 20 Lilias #2
“Not to worry. He’ll turn up soon enough, I daresay,” she said brightly. “His stomach won’t allow him to stay away too long. Speaking of which, let’s get you indoors and cleaned up, shall we? Auntie Ruth will be arriving with her friend at any minute. I shall be needed for tea-making duties.”
David’s head drooped again, the rag returning to his face, but Lilias reached out for it. “Let’s put that nasty thing in the bin; I don’t think you need it any longer. We’ll give your face a nice gentle wash.”
Inside the kitchen, David’s glance flickered over to the food set out on the table. “What do you think?” Lilias asked. “Will our guest of honour be impressed? I do hope so. Come along, we’d better sort you out upstairs. You go on up; I’ll bring some water.”
When she went into David’s room with a flannel, towel, and a bowl of water, he was sitting on the end of the bed, kicking the bedstead with the heels of his scuffed shoes.
He looked utterly dejected, and perhaps because of his expression, Lilias could see Nadine’s features in his face.
Always before, she’d only been able to see Harry’s open, smiling disposition.
Did he want to talk about what had happened at school?
It was impossible to tell. Lilias had never seen him closed up like this.
Certainly, it wasn’t the most convenient time for him to open up about it, with Gloria set to arrive for tea at any moment, but, then, life had a distinct habit of being inconvenient.
Lilias set the water down on the dresser before approaching the bed.
“Let’s get your pullover off,” she said, and the little boy obediently raised his arms. “Over your head. Good boy. Now, I’ll just get the worst of the blood off with the flannel.
I’m afraid the water’s cold. I didn’t have time to boil the kettle. ”
Lilias went to fetch the flannel and the bowl of water from the dresser. Behind her, David finally gave way to his tears, and she hurried back over to him, kneeling to hold him close. “Oh, David,” she soothed. “It’s all right. What a horrid time you’ve had. That’s it; you let it all out.”
He sobbed for a while with his face buried in her shoulder, and as Lilias held him, stroking his back, her heart felt as if it were overflowing with love. He was normally such a happy boy. What on earth had the vile Cook boy said or done to make him react the way he had?
“That’s it,” she said, drawing back to smile at him when his sobbing began to quiet down. “Let’s get you cleaned up, shall we? And if you want to tell me what happened at school, you go ahead and do so, all right? I promise I won’t be cross with you.”
David nodded, the tears starting to slide down his face again as she dabbed carefully at his nose with the flannel, the bowl of water soon turning bright red.
“He . . . he was saying things, that boy. Horrible things.”
“I’m not surprised,” Lilias said, carefully drying David’s face with the old towel. “Toby Cook’s not a very nice boy. He’s the sort of boy who flicks pellets at the choir boys while they’re singing. Or deliberately squashes a toad with his bicycle if he sees one crossing the road in front of him.”
When David was silent, absorbing this grizzly information, Lilias sighed.
What on earth had she said that for? Even though it was true—for she had once seen the wretched boy do exactly what she had just described, and with a chillingly devilish look of pleasure on his horrid face, too—it was hardly the thing to share with David, when he had recently been traumatised by said devilish boy.
David glanced warily up at her. “He said . . .” he began. “He said . . .”
But then all hell broke out downstairs, causing David to promptly clam up again.
Lilias sighed and squeezed his hand. Ruth was yelling at Compass, and it was all too easy to guess why. “I think Compass is home,” she said. “And that he’s got at the tea. I’ll be back in a minute, all right?”
She hurried downstairs to find Compass under the table, Ruth on all fours shouting at him to come out, and a tall, startled-looking woman in a long coat and fancy hat standing by the back door clutching her handbag and looking as if she wasn’t sure whether to stay or go.
“I should let him have it, whatever it is, Ruth,” Lilias said. “There’s plenty more.” And she strode across the room to the woman with her hand extended, catching a glimpse of red curls beneath the hat. “Hello,” she said, “you must be Gloria. I’m Lilias, Ruth’s sister.”
Gloria took her hand cautiously, her green gaze apparently riveted by Lilias’s dress.
“Goodness, Lily,” said Ruth, straightening and smoothing her own dress down, having given up on Compass. “Whatever have you been doing? You look as if you’ve come straight from the slaughterhouse.”
It was only then that Lilias looked down and realised her best dress was covered in blood from David’s battered nose.
“Oh, golly,” she said with a sigh. “Sorry about that. David—he’s our evacuee, Gloria, I expect Ruth has mentioned him—well, he got into a bit of a fight at school this afternoon. I’ve just been sorting him out. I haven’t found out what it was about yet.”
“Goodness,” said Ruth. “Is he all right?”
Lilias thought of the pale figure at the end of the bed, no doubt longing right now for his parents, and of how he had just been about to tell her what had happened.
“Not really, but no doubt he’ll live,” she said. “Listen, Ruth, put the kettle on, will you? I’ll just pop upstairs to check on him and get changed. Please excuse me, Gloria.”
She went out, pulling the door to behind her, but not before she had heard Ruth say, “Sorry about all the kerfuffle. But you’re honoured, you know; Lilias usually dresses in a pair of old trousers and a moth-eaten jumper. She obviously wants to make an impression on you.”
“I’d rather she just felt she could be herself,” came Gloria’s smooth reply, and Lilias ran quietly up the stairs, smiling to herself and deciding she already liked the woman. Which was just as well, if Ruth was besotted with her.
When she popped her head round David’s door, it was to find he had fallen asleep and was curled up on one side with his thumb in his mouth. Resisting the temptation to go in and pull a cover over him in case it woke him up, Lilias quietly pulled the door to and went on to her own room to change.
“Ruth says you’re an artist? And you did the pictures for one of your dad’s books?” Downstairs, Gloria questioned Lilias over tea.
Lilias smiled. Funny, how she and Ruth had never thought of their beloved father as Dad, but always as Daddy or sometimes as Father. “Yes, that’s right, I did. We travelled around Europe together one summer while we were working on it.”
“Blimey,” said Gloria with a shake of her glossy head. “If me and my dad spent that much time together, one of us would be sure to end up dead. We drive each other round the bend.”
“What does your father do?”
“For a job, d’you mean? Or to get my goat?
” Gloria laughed, taking a bite from a rock cake and chewing for a while before she answered.
“He’s a factory supervisor. Suits him down to the ground, because he gets to tell everybody what to do.
Always has thought he was important; Hitler before Hitler was invented, he was.
Mind you, he doesn’t have it so easy nowadays, with the factory full of women.
They take the mickey out of him something rotten.
” Gloria laughed. “I heard these girls on the bus talking about a prank they’d played on him once; they stuck a notice on his back saying, ‘I like to goose-walk naked.’ He didn’t find it until he got home.
” Gloria put her head back and laughed heartily at the memory.
Beside her, Ruth giggled. Lilias suspected she did rather a lot of giggling when she was with Gloria.
“Joined the home guard now, he has. It’s really put his back out that he had to be in the ranks rather than in charge. Bet he’s always putting his oar in and driving people nuts.”
Lilias smiled. “And what about your mother? What’s she like?”
Gloria pulled a face and shrugged. “Oh, Ma’s the meek and mild never-say-boo-to-a-goose type.
I’m nothing like either of them; or at least, I darn well hope I’m not.
Don’t know the meaning of the word fun, those two.
Still, they mostly leave me to do what I like, so that’s something, I suppose.
But then I do bring in some much-needed cash.
Seven brothers and sisters, I’ve got.” She winked.
“Told you my mum was the meek type. Just can’t say no. Just lies back and thinks of England.”
“Gloria, you’re making my sister blush,” reproved Ruth with a laugh, and Lilias, who hadn’t been blushing before, promptly did so.
“Not at all,” she said, although, having been brought up to respect as well as to love her parents, she did feel slightly uncomfortable about the way Gloria was speaking about hers. “Are you close to your brothers and sisters?”
Gloria nodded. “Yeah. Love them to bits. Like to think they feel the same way. Follow me round the house when I’m in, anyway. Even wait outside the outhouse for me, daft things.”
“I can’t say I blame them,” said Ruth, who had been gazing adoringly at Gloria with her chin cupped in her hands ever since she had finished eating, which, since she had only pecked at her food, had been for some considerable time.
“Get away with you,” Gloria said with a shrug. “I’m just a girl, doing her best, that’s all. I’m nothing special. Certainly not perfect, anyway, not by a long chalk.”
A sudden hammering on the door made them all nearly jump out of their seats. Compass began to bark, and, when he ran over to sniff at the bottom of the door, he growled, too, his hackles rising.
“Do you think you ought to open it, Lily?” Ruth asked, but it was too late. Fearing some kind of an emergency, Lilias had already yanked the door open, revealing the imposing and wholly undesirable figure of Percy Cook.