by Katie King
Whatever the reason behind this was, James agreed with Jessie that nothing was going to help Connie much if she had now been lumped with others who were toiling equally ineffectively.
James wasn’t sure whether he could be of any practical use in the situation, but he thought he would see what he could do.
A fleeting impression of a warm smile that Peggy might bestow on him if he managed to get Connie to read with confidence and ease sprang into his mind, but James managed to damp that down without Jessie noticing the doctor’s distraction.
‘Now Jessie, tell me all about your first few days at the new school. I remember feeling very strange when I moved up from my first school,’ James said to encourage Jessie further, and Jessie was happy to chatter for quite some time.
A little while later James popped back to the counter and was able to beg a rock cake for Jessie to enjoy on the way home.
He waved Jessie on his way, and then James gave himself a metaphorical pat on the back for not openly questioning the youngster as to what Peggy had gone to London for, much as he had been itching to nudge the conversation in that direction.
What had been brought home to James by seeing Jessie was that at some point he was going to have to speak to or write to Peggy. He wasn’t sure whether he was excited or perturbed by the thought.
Jessie felt much more cheerful as he made his way back to Tall Trees. He might not be able to help Connie ultimately, but the fact that he had tried to do something – and the manner in which James had treated him as if he was in no way a silly nitwit for being concerned about his sister – filled him with a sense of achievement all the same.
Once he was back at the rectory, as it wasn’t yet teatime because both Mabel and Roger were involved in something over at the church hall that meant everyone’s supper was pushed back an hour, Jessie popped a peckish-looking Milburn (if the whinny in Jessie’s direction and the pony’s velvet nose poking insistently over the top of the stable half-door were anything to go by) into his rope halter.
Then Jessie slowly led him up the road to where the grass verges were particularly lush following some rain the previous week.
Now that the pony had had his metal horseshoes removed, his hooves were almost silent on the road as he walked, and Jessie was delighted to see that Milburn was moving as if his various cuts and bruises weren’t badly paining him any longer. He certainly had lost the noticeable hobble he’d had following his brush with the police car.
As the road became more of a country lane and the verge widened, Jessie stopped and allowed Milburn to graze. The pony kept his nose close to the sod as he tugged at mouthful after mouthful of the bright green grass and hedgerow herbs that he pulled with his yellow teeth in what looked like a continuous motion that didn’t allow time for chomping or swallowing, while he stood in the lee of a drystone wall that was taller than his withers and rump.
The weather was warm that afternoon, and it wasn’t long before Jessie slumped down, sitting on a large stone as he toyed with Milburn’s loosely-held lead rope. For a while it was all very relaxing and Jessie even closed his eyes in contentment.
He listened to birds singing their getting-close-to-bedtime songs, which were accompanied by the hypnotic sound of Milburn grazing, and all felt well with the world.
Until, that was, the unmistakable ring of Connie’s commanding voice rang out from somewhere that sounded like it was only just over the other side of the wall to where Jessie was sitting.
Presumably she was messing about in the field that the wall separated from the lane and the green verges, but that didn’t mean it was anything other than a disturbing discovery for Jessie, as his eyes sprang open and he slipped off the stone to crouch in as small a way as he could down in the ditch beside the wall.
Milburn flicked a toffee-coloured ear in Jessie’s direction although the rhythm of his chewing never altered.
It was Connie’s utterance that had so shocked Jessie.
‘Dave,’ Connie had giggled, and then she laughed in a sing-song, almost saucy way. Her voice had a coquettish timbre her twin had never heard come from her mouth before, and it was as if she and whoever she was addressing were quite alone.
Where were Tommy and Angela? There was certainly no sound of them there, and in any case Angela’s wheelchair would have made it difficult for her to be in a field in the middle of nowhere. Jessie knew that Connie had been going to go home with them – she had definitely told him that – and he didn’t think Mabel or Peggy would then have allowed Connie to go out again on her own, being a girl. And so this must mean that Connie had never walked home from school with Tommy and Angela in the first place.
And ‘Dave’ had to be that Hull lad, Jessie realised, as they didn’t know any other Davids or Daves. And if Dave were there with Connie, then it was most unlikely that Tommy and Angela would be there too, at least so silently.
What an awful and unexpected to-do!
Jessie’s face was a caution as quickly he ran through the ramifications of what might be occurring nearby, although he didn’t dare stand up to take a peep over the wall to see if he was correct in any of his assumptions.
Connie gave another uncharacteristically girlish tinkle of laughter, one that was answered by a boyish chuckle, but a boy with a deeper, more on-the-way-to-being-a-man laugh than anything Jessie and his friends could manage.
Jessie recognised the laugh, definitely. He didn’t think he’d ever forget the sounds of the bullies laughing as they had viciously kicked him as he lay on the floor to the alley and they rained blows on to his small huddled frame. They had thought that giving Jessie such a pasting was hilarious.
Jessie didn’t approve in the slightest that Connie’s tone now verged on the downright flirty.
How could his twin sister be a girl aged only eleven in the morning, and by the very same afternoon, while not yet a woman, have grown into someone who was definitely no longer just a girl? Jessie didn’t understand it.
Worse was to come, as then Connie said quite distinctly, sounding much closer to the wall, ‘I don’t want anyone to know, remember. It can be our secret.’
‘You’re a one, Con,’ said Dave. He chuckled back at her in a way that Jessie suspected very probably could be described as lustily.
Con! Jessie felt quite sick. Now Dave was daring to take liberties even with Connie’s name.
And then Connie laughed back at her companion again.
Worse! Connie liked being called Con, Jessie knew what this must mean.
Jessie wasn’t totally sure why, but he felt at that moment almost as if he could die with shame.
He didn’t have any idea exactly what was going on all too close to him, but it sounded far too much like one of those things that a brother should never see or hear a sister doing.
And the fact that Connie was choosing to do whatever it was that she was doing with a Hull lad – and not even Aiden on whom Jessie believed she’d had a pash for months – was deeply shocking. Not that Jessie would have approved of Connie messing about with Aiden either, of course, although this would definitely be the better option than her experimenting with one of the yobs who had scared him so just a few short weeks ago in the summer holidays.
And almost as bad was that Jessie felt well and truly trapped.
He didn’t dare move now in case Connie looked over the wall and saw him.
He hadn’t meant to spy on her, but now he had, in effect, been doing just this, and Jessie knew that Connie would certainly describe whatever it was that he was doing as spying.
And this meant that if he were discovered after he had been listening to her and Dave for a while, then she would never believe that it had all been a huge accident as far as Jessie was concerned.
This would make Jessie a ‘dead man walking’ as far as the gang from Hull were concerned, Jessie was sure.
Jessie wished with all his heart that he had moved away instantly the second he had first heard Connie, before he had had any thought
– or heard even a smidgen of evidence that could suggest her possibly canoodling with Dave.
But he hadn’t, and this poor choice had now put him in a real bind, with the terrible fear of being discovered growing in seriousness the more the situation went on and the longer he crouched down beside the wall.
As Jessie’s legs started to ache and then grow numb from his low crouch, there was a lot of whispering that he couldn’t quite make out, followed by far too much giggling from both Connie and Dave. Whatever they were up to was being enjoyed overmuch in Jessie’s opinion, and – worse – weren’t they taking an age about it.
At one point Milburn seemed to realise it was Connie who was nearby, and he swung up his head so that his nose was pointing in the direction from which Connie seemed to be speaking. For a heart-stopping moment it looked as if the pony were going to give Connie a nicker of recognition or, worse, stick his nose over the wall.
Jessie had to poke Milburn in the shoulder in order to disrupt his concentration, and then hiss an anguished ‘oi’ at him, with a tug on the halter’s rope.
Milburn turned his face to look at Jessie, his liquid brown eyes indignant and accusing.
To add insult to injury, once Connie and Dave had finally left, Connie rubbed salt into Jessie’s wounds with a final ‘I’d better hurry, Dave, else I’ll be late for tea and Mabel will flay me alive’, which she said in such a jolly way that nobody could have taken her words of being flayed alive seriously.
There was a boyish giggle in response, definitely as if flirting, and although Jessie suspected that Dave would probably laugh right now at anything Connie said, nevertheless he felt quite queasy again.
Connie leaving the scene of her crime wasn’t to mean, however that poor Jessie didn’t have to lurk around on the verge for a fair while after she had long gone.
He felt quite paranoid, and that he should make doubly sure that there was no danger of his sister seeing him and Milburn coming down the road back to Tall Trees in Connie’s footsteps. Or of Dave seeing him either; that would spell d.i.s.a.s.t.e.r.
Of course, by the time boy and pony were home, and Milburn ensconced safely back in his stable, it meant that Jessie was very late for tea, and consequently Mabel was quite short with him as it had been hard for her to ring-fence Jessie’s share of the Woolton Pie as Connie had turned out to be extremely peckish.
Playfully, Connie wagged a finger at her brother as if it were him who had been the naughty one, and Aiden stared back at him with a curious expression when Jessie found it hard to look him in the eye.
And then Jessie had to go through all sorts of shenanigans to stop himself and Aiden being alone together afterwards as they cut out news stories from the newspapers, just in case Aiden asked him what the matter was.
It all felt very unfair, and Jessie was relieved once the damn scrapbook had been finished, the good luck messages written inside it to Gracie, Jack and Kelvin by all the children, and they had finally been sent to bed.
After what seemed like hours, eventually Jessie heard the sound of Aiden’s faint snores drifting across the dorm where the four boys slept.
But although the imminent danger of discovery had now passed, Jessie lay awake for ages, feeling much too tense and crabby to nod off.
He wasn’t sure what to make of what he had heard, although it seemed for the best if he didn’t say anything about it to anyone, and most particularly his twin as Connie would be very quick to throw it all back in his face and make him out to be the bad guy.
What Jessie found most infuriating of all was that he had only been up the lane when he had because he’d had a little time to kill after he’d been trying to help Connie by going to see James on his way back from school.
Connie, meanwhile, had been the picture of innocence the whole evening, apparently quite happy to spend ages rather sloppily pasting the various cuttings into Gracie and Kelvin’s scrapbook that Angela had just cut out with her own customary carefulness.
In fact, Connie looked for all the world as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and as if she would never share a secret with a maggot called Dave, and as if she were able to wilfully ignore the fact that Dave had been one of the lads that had kicked him so hard in the head that he had ended up in hospital.
Jessie felt very hard done by, and he had no idea what was going on with his sister. What he did know for certain was that his own feelings were badly hurt as he couldn’t believe Connie was being so disloyal to him, although he was sure it would be sensible if he tried very hard never to let Connie realise how easily she had cut him to the quick. A large part of this was because he was no longer sure – in the way he always had been – that, come what may, his twin sister was always in his corner as his biggest ally.
And the more he thought about it the harder he had to fight not to gnash his teeth together in frustration, just as happened in the comic strips he had been reading.
Chapter Twenty-One
The next month or so passed in a bit of a blur for most of those at Tall Trees.
Peggy had a couple of letters from Bill, neither of which she opened, instead putting a line through the address of Tall Trees and then boldly scrawling ‘RETURN TO SENDER’ on the envelope’s front before crossly shoving them back into the postbox.
At least Bill wasn’t making the plaintive telephone calls that he had earlier in the year, and she didn’t for a moment think he’d be writing to say he was sorry for all that had happened and that he was happy if they divorce, so she thought she was doing the right thing reminding her husband she wasn’t, and nor was she going to be, a pushover.
To take her mind off Bill and how annoying she found him – and the way she would almost always immediately contrast this with the memory of the innocent freshness and her hopeful excitement that still surged through her body when she thought of James, even though inevitably this was followed by the crushing disappointment that they were no longer speaking – Peggy did some long shifts at June’s café. She felt she needed to make up to her friend for her four days’ absence, but meanwhile Holly’s walking improved with every day, and it was clear to anybody who cared to look that she was growing into a very independently minded toddler. This meant that Holly made it increasingly clear that she was b-o-r-e-d with the playpen at June’s.
Peggy knew she had to do something about this, but she wasn’t sure what, a state of affairs she found disheartening.
It proved hard to hold on to the optimistic mood with which she had returned to Tall Trees when she’d enjoyed wearing her ‘special occasion only’ bright red lipstick, and over the next few weeks Peggy realised what a lot of time she had been devoting previously to thinking about James (and wondering if he would think her crimson lips alluring or too much, not that she’d ever find out, of course), and what a void in her life his absence was now making. She was missing James very much, but she felt too proud to attempt to see him again, her last try having been so bruising to her ego.
One afternoon, as she was buttoning Holly’s coat, a hand-me-down a customer had given Peggy, to get them ready to walk back to Tall Trees from the café, Peggy glanced up and, to her surprise, there was James walking along on the opposite pavement.
Peggy stopped what she was doing and stood up straight to look at him better, as her heart flip-flopped around and her mouth felt suddenly dry.
James was every bit as enticing, and handsome, and strong-looking as she remembered, and it made Peggy feel quite undone as the hairs on her arms rose and she thrilled in every part of her body.
It seemed that while her mind knew that what they had shared was over, her body certainly didn’t. It was a delicious sensation, but Peggy didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not.
James stopped and turned towards her, their eyes meeting through the window as several cars drove down the street that divided them. Peggy couldn’t read James’s face, and then she thought that she might have been staring at him open-mouthed, which wasn’t at all the impressio
n that she wanted to give. It was an awkward moment, but despite this it felt significant and important, at least as far as Peggy was concerned.
But before either could nod hello or raise a hand or do more than blink, there was a resounding crash and thunder of broken crockery, and an ear-piercing scream from Holly, and an aghast Peggy looked down to see that Holly had toddled at the speed of light to an empty table, where a pile of clean saucers had been left waiting to be stacked tidily away.
Unfortunately the part-time waitress had just left the saucers there rather than putting them away on their shelf, with a tantalising corner of a tea towel flopped over the side of the table, and the saucers balanced on the towel. Holly had grabbed the tea towel and upended the crockery on to the floor.
The toddler’s howls of fright were out of all proportion to the mishap. And she was difficult to quieten, much to Peggy’s discomfort, as well as that of a proportion of the customers; Peggy couldn’t help but notice several clench their shoulders at the sound. It couldn’t be denied that Holly’s bellows were very grating on the ears.
As Peggy brushed away her daughter’s tears, she saw the incident for what it was: a warning about the dangers lurking in that café and an insistent wake-up call that Peggy needed to get her skates on and make sure that Holly had proper, safe daytime care.
No one had been injured this time, but it might have been a very different story if a hot cup of tea or a sharp knife had been involved. Peggy shuddered at the very thought.
And then, as she picked up a panting and wailing Holly to give her a final comforting cuddle, Peggy remembered James, and she looked out of the window.
He was nowhere to be seen.
Naturally he wasn’t, Peggy told herself dejectedly as all the excitement of seeing him so unexpectedly left her body in a fizzle of disappointment.
As she and Holly trudged homewards, there was a squally shower and Peggy felt it aptly summed up her downbeat mood, while a still gulping Holly began to grizzle in earnest in protest at how badly her own afternoon was going.
