But Ivy tossed her head and swirled the dregs of her tea.
‘Perhaps we’d better change the subject,’ she said. ‘Heard from your Reg lately? And how’s Sid getting on?’
September was usually one of Lily’s favourite months with its gentle warmth, but not this year. She was still delightedly pinching herself at the thought of having a young man of her own, but he was hardly ever there. They managed an occasional walk or night at the pictures around work and ARP and fire-watching but it wasn’t the same. He wasn’t the same. It seemed to take all his time in Hinton for Jim to unwind and for Lily to draw him back to her after his weekends with his parents, and just when she had, it was time for him to head off again.
She knew it must be grim, his father uncomplaining but his mother finding fault with everyone and everything. Alice had been as proud a housekeeper and as good a cook as Dora, so every slapdash dish, every non-dusted surface, every grimy window she must see as a reproach. And as Lily had predicted, trying to do things herself, with or without help, only meant that she got more frustrated and cross. There was no improvement in her mobility. If anything, Jim reported glumly, her arm seemed weaker.
He was preoccupied at work, too. He’d talked Cedric Marlow into a monthly staff newsletter, The Marlow’s Messenger, and had produced it in his spare time. Except now he didn’t have any.
‘Hand it over to someone else,’ Lily urged him. She wouldn’t have minded having a go herself, but Jim was as stubborn as his mother, she was discovering.
‘Not likely!’ he said, though he did let her choose the ‘Suggestion of the Month’ (every employee to get a day off for their birthday – controversial stuff) and to write up the triumphant rounders match between Marlow’s and Timothy Whites in which Lily had scored four rounders.
Then he was back to poring over plans of the store, deciding where best to site the escalators he was hoping for once the war was over, and wondering if he could use the Timothy Whites match to revive his campaign to shunt Marlow’s into the twentieth century by dropping the apostrophe from the name.
Every Monday evening, though, Lily pinned on her brightest smile as she left the store in case Jim should have come back early and be waiting for her. She knew how important it was to present a cheerful face to your young man whatever you might be feeling – that’s what Beryl’s Woman’s Own kept telling her, anyway. Jim tried just as hard, but how could he be cheerful when the situation at home was so gloomy?
Then one Monday, there was a boy with a big grin waving to her when she emerged from the staff entrance. Lily waved back automatically – but it wasn’t Jim.
It was Frank Bryant.
‘What are you doing here?’ she gasped as Frank took her elbow and steered her to one side so that the departing swell of Marlow’s staff could get by.
‘This is my patch, remember?’
‘Yes, but … Miss Frobisher didn’t say you’d been in today.’
The reps never came to the sales floor. They saw the buyers in the management offices or, if there was a problem, in the stockroom.
‘Very good, Miss Marple!’ Frank wagged his finger at her. ‘I’ve been in Birmingham, at Rackhams and Lewis’s, if you must know. I’ll be calling on Miss Frobisher tomorrow.’
‘Oh! Right. Do you want me to give her a message?’
Frank shook his head, laughing.
‘No! Of course not! I want you to come and have something to eat with me.’
‘What?’
‘It’s no good pretending. I know you eat. Someone had been at those ginger nuts in Mr Ward’s office. It can’t have been him because he’s got sugar diabetes and he’s not allowed. And Miss Fro doesn’t look the type to smudge her lipstick. So, call me Sherlock, but I conclude, Miss Lily Collins, that it was you.’
He had some nerve. And talk about the gift of the gab!
‘I can’t just go off with you!’ she protested. ‘I don’t know you!’
‘So let’s get to know each other over a nice cup of tea and … hmm, I could rather fancy a Welsh rarebit. At Lyons. See? All perfectly harmless and innocent. Not some backstreet dive, not a pub – where’s the harm?’
Lily frowned. There was no harm, of course. The reality was that Jim wouldn’t be back till midnight at the earliest, because he never was. Monday was Mrs Dawkins’s day off, so he cooked the evening meal for his parents, ate with them and, though it was highly embarrassing for both of them, helped his mother into bed. Only then could he begin the long trek back to Hinton.
‘Oh, come on,’ wheedled Frank. ‘Take pity on me. A new boy in town … all on my lonesome, you’re not going to consign me to a miserable supper and a lonely evening reading a penny dreadful in my digs, are you?’
Lily relented.
‘All right then. A cup of tea. A quick one.’
‘Don’t do me any favours, will you?’ said Frank, but he was grinning. ‘Good girl. Come on.’
Lyons wasn’t one of Lily’s regular haunts. She and Gladys favoured Peg’s Pantry, which was cheaper – if nothing like as swish. As they queued for a table, Lily looked around – in part for the atmosphere, but mostly checking for anyone from Marlow’s – she didn’t particularly want to be seen with a stranger. Thankfully, there was no one she recognised. Then Frank spotted a couple leaving a table for two by the side wall and pointed it out to the hostess, which meant they could leapfrog two groups of four ahead of them.
‘Got to have your eye to the main chance,’ he said as they sat down. The waitress was still laying the new top cloth. Frank smoothed it and helped her to reposition the cruet and the little vase.
‘While you’re here,’ he said to her, ‘you may as well take our order. Save your legs, eh? Tea and Welsh rarebit for two, please.’
The elderly waitress gave him a ‘Get on with you!’ look but was clearly charmed as she scribbled the order on her pad. Lily was dumbfounded.
‘When exactly did I say I was going to eat with you?’ she demanded as the waitress walked away.
‘Oh, don’t start all that again,’ said Frank, leaning forwards with his elbows on the table and chin on his hands. ‘Tell me something interesting about yourself. I’m sure there’s lots.’
‘I’m not in the least interesting,’ said Lily. ‘Like everyone else, I get up, I go to work, I go home to my mum …’
‘Right,’ said Frank. ‘Tell me about that, then.’
Exasperated but amused, Lily told him about Dora and Sid and Reg, and how long she’d been at Marlow’s, and how she loved it.
‘I can see you do.’ Frank sat back, pulled down his cuffs and adjusted his cufflinks. They were oval with a blood-red stone. ‘You’re a bit in love with Miss Fro as well, aren’t you? Still, Mr Ward thinks a lot of her, so as a role model, you could do far worse.’
‘She’s taught me a lot,’ said Lily frostily, annoyed at being so transparent. ‘And I’ve got lots more to learn yet. But what about you?’ she probed. ‘Why are you repping? Are you filling in time till you’re called up?’
‘That’s a sore point,’ said Frank. ‘I tried to join up. Last year, the minute I could. But they didn’t want me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Promise