The Facts of Life Read Free

sometimes needs to be transplanted a little way off from the parent tree if it is to grow to its full potential. Would you rather I saw less of you?’
    ‘No!’ Sally exclaimed. ‘Of course not,’ and the heat of her denial made her accept that whatever changes Dr Pertwee had wrought within her were as irreversible as if the perfumed tea and cucumber sandwiches had been the tools of bewitchment.
    Sally had not quite qualified as a doctor when war broke out, but staff shortages were acute. She served her houseman years in the Red Cross. First in London amid the horrible thrill of the Blitz, then on the hospital ship in the Mediterranean, then in a military hospital in Kent. From there she was transferred to the old isolation hospital on the East Anglian coast at Wenborough, a few miles’ motorbike ride from her childhood home.
    Her mother had spent the war working at a munitions factory on the other side of Rexbridge. The pay had been far better than her wages at the canning plant and, Sally guessed, her social life had improved commensurately. Evacuated from Hackney, her sister-in-law had moved in, with children, for the duration, and had been happy to keep Sally’s father company. Her mother stayed in digs with her new ‘girlfriends’ and used petrol rationing as the perfect excuse to cadge a lift home with a gentleman friend only every third weekend. This she did with a headful of new songs and a suitcase crammed with black market trophies. Now she was back at home to an unsatisfactory husband, who could never take her dancing, and a tedious, poorly-paid job packing sugar beet. The advent of peace saw mother and daughter picking up the pieces in a domestic game whose rules no longer suited them.
    Edward Pepper asked Sally out to a concert in Rexbridge chapel just four days after the hospital had discharged him. He telephoned her at work. They had talked inconsequentially enough several times since their first encounter, but she had discounted his promise to take her out as mere politeness. Standing in a corner of the crowded staff room, she blushed at his proposition. She accepted quickly, almost curtly.
    ‘If I come on my bike, I can get in at about quarter to,’ she said. ‘Shall I meet you at the concert or somewhere else?’
    ‘Neither,’ he laughed. ‘I’ll pick you up. I’m borrowing a friend’s car. What’s your address?’
    As she told him, she felt afresh the difference in their ages.
    ‘What are you all tarted up for?’ her mother asked her over tea.
    ‘I’m going to a concert. A friend’s taking me.’
    ‘Which friend?’ her mother asked. ‘One of the nurses, is it?’
    ‘What kind of concert?’ added her father and was silenced with a slap on his arm from his wife, who reiterated, ‘Which friend?’
    ‘Edward. Edward Pepper. You don’t know him. I met him at the hospital.’
    ‘Oh. Is he another doctor, then?’
    ‘No, he’s … erm … Well. I’m not sure what he does, really. He writes music’ Feeling a little light-headed, Sally took a slice of stale dripping cake.
    ‘So he’s a patient, then,’ her mother perceived.
    ‘Was. He’s one of the lucky ones.’
    ‘Eh, Sal, he didn’t have TB, did he?’ her father asked.
    ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ her mother added, frowning.
    ‘Of
course
I know what I’m doing.’ Sally dropped the last piece of cake on her plate with a clunk. Her mother was staring at her, eyebrows raised. ‘I’m a grown woman, Mum.’
    ‘I was wondering when you’d notice.’
    ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
    ‘You’re not getting any younger, that’s what. How old’s this man of yours?’
    ‘He’s not a “man of mine”. Mum, for pity’s sake, we’re just going to a concert together.’
    Her father snorted, whether at her naïveté or poor taste in entertainment it was hard to say. Her mother merely kept her eyebrows raised and took another, deliberate, sip of tea.
    ‘I bought him some notebooks for his music and I