The Evacuee Summer: Heart-warming historical fiction, perfect for summer reading. Katie King

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СКАЧАТЬ whump that almost made her physically crumple, forcing her to grab the back of Roger’s desk chair in support, that at the very moment she herself had been close to rapture with a burst of sunshine springing from her heart at seeing a tiny Holly reaching innocently for her father’s finger when Bill came to meet his daughter for the very first time, the truth of it was that her supposedly loyal husband was nursing, close to his heart, the dangerous viperous secret of his infidelity and another woman opening her legs for him as she beckoned to him from under the covers. And so a precious memory that Peggy had believed was good and pure had been, in a crushing twinkling of an eye, tainted and besmirched for all time, leaving her flattened and despondent.

      Peggy felt a shriek of anguish building in her, but she forced herself to hold it in, although her hand holding the telephone was vibrating violently with the effort.

      ‘I noticed Maureen were plump round the middle a few days ago an’ she says she’s got three months to go.’ Bill sounded glum as he went on regardless, and as if he’d given in.

      Then Peggy did the mathematics in her head, and suddenly her need to know any further grisly details of the affair evaporated into a puff of nothingness. She understood that Maureen had almost definitely already been pregnant when Bill travelled to Harrogate to see Holly. It may be illogical, but the very idea of him playing the doting daddy in Yorkshire having already fathered somebody else’s baby was nothing short of abhorrent in Peggy’s eyes.

      ‘Well, you’ve made your bed, Bill Delbert, and now you have to lie in it. For your information, I shall take care that you never see Holly again,’ Peggy declared.

      Bill let out what she could only think of as a howl, and an instant later Peggy heard the sound of shattering glass as presumably her husband had in temper flung his beer bottle furiously to the concrete floor of the telephone box.

      ‘Holly is innocent and untainted by anything,’ Peggy went on resolutely, as if Bill were standing there eager to hear what she had to say. ‘She certainly doesn’t need to be contaminated by somebody as morally reprehensible as you, not now, and not ever, Bill. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?! And as for myself, I hope never to see you again. I don’t care what it costs, and I don’t care if I have to work for the rest of my life to pay it off and I don’t care how people will look down on me for being divorced. Your monkey business with that MaureenFromTheNAAFI tart is going to cost you, and I’m not thinking about money.

      ‘Our treasure is Holly, and as far as you are concerned she’s been thrown to the wolves by you, and there’s no return from that. I really hope that MaureenFromTheNAAFI gave you the very best time ever between the sheets, as if she didn’t, well, words fail me.’

      It was very unlike Peggy to veer onto such coarse territory, but she wanted oh so badly to shock Bill.

      ‘She didn’t, Peg, she were nothing like as good as—’ he said weakly.

      ‘Tough, Bill. Tough.’ Peggy’s tone was brutal as she cut him dead.

      She willed herself not to sob, but to avoid the risk she didn’t give Bill the opportunity to say anything else.

      As, surprisingly softly, she replaced the handset on the telephone, Peggy heard Bill’s last-ditch plaintive appeal sound increasingly tinny as she moved the handset from her ear and put it back in its place on the base of the telephone, his ‘But I love yo—’ being sliced off decisively.

      She stood head bowed and statue-still at first. But it wasn’t long before Peggy started to sway from side to side, and she had to grab hold of the edge of the desk to steady herself, as wave after wave of fresh emotion swept over her, and then washed back through what felt like every fibre of her very being.

      And then with a long clamped-down shriek of what felt like agony Peggy picked up the closest thing to her, which was the leather desk tidy in which Roger kept the pencils that he used to draft his sermons, and she hurled the whole lot with as much force as she could muster against the wall, the pencils cascading to the ground and then bouncing merrily around, with Roger’s carefully sharpened lead points shearing off the pencils as they smashed against the stone flags of the floor.

      The crash was a surprisingly loud noise that cut across the calm of Tall Trees and wrecked the peace.

      But Peggy couldn’t hear anything now, such was the rushing of blood in her ears. Keening desperately, she continued to rock both left and right.

      She picked up the pile of scrap paper on which Roger would write and she rent it this way and that, virtually growling with the effort of ripping it into tiny unusable squares, and then with a final shove of her elbow she cast the telephone and handset off the desk, the loud crash and the strange hawk of the telephone’s ring of surprise at such harsh treatment finally quelling Peggy’s temper.

      Exhausted, she sank down onto Roger’s desk chair, with the chaos of his desk settling askew on the floor around her, and bitter sobs shuddering her slim shoulders and setting her curls a-quiver as she leant forward on her folded arms and howled, wishing herself to be any place but where she was.

      Roger and Mabel, who had been inspecting the vegetable patches on their way back from church and had only just come through the kitchen door, came running, their faces panicked at the unusual sounds erupting from within the study.

      However, when Roger saw the state Peggy was in, he stayed on the other side of the door and stood aside to make way for his wife, as he beckoned Mabel forward in place of himself.

      He knew Mabel would be much better at the helm of this situation than he.

      As the older woman crouched down to clasp an exhausted Peggy to her breast without saying a word, Peggy gave into ugly, animal noises and a fresh avalanche of tears.

      A worry-faced Roger was left to creep into the office as silently as he could, stepping behind the women so that he could replace the receiver on the telephone as he always felt panicky at the thought of a parishioner in distress being unable to reach him, although he left the telephone on the floor, after which, without catching the eye of either woman, he hotfooted it to the kitchen in order to deal with baby Holly.

      She had been rudely woken by all the kerfuffle in the study and was keen to let everybody know this, bellowing with all the strength she could muster in her little lungs in tandem with the throaty blubs of her distraught mother just across the passageway.

Chapter Six

      Over at the train station Jessie and Angela remained outside with a bored-looking Milburn, while the other children headed onto the platform to wait for Larry.

      After Jessie had gently teased Angela that he and Connie thought that maybe Tommy had a bit of a soft spot for her, Angela went very pink, leaving Jessie to guess whether she might reciprocate these feelings.

      Angela noticed Jessie’s expression reveal all too clearly that he was pondering what she and Tommy thought about each other, and so as a distraction she quickly reminded Jessie again of lots of the things she had learnt in the library about ponies, which seemed to make much more sense now that they had Milburn standing in front of them

      When she had run out of useful titbits to share, she was relieved to see her tactic had worked, as Jessie said that he wondered if Milburn was well behaved when ridden, as he rather fancied a go.

      At this Milburn gave Jessie what seemed like such a look of disgust, followed by a shake of her head that jangled the metal bit in her СКАЧАТЬ