A Place for Us by Harriet Evans Read Free Book Online Page B

were quince yellow. Her uncle Bill with the wastepaper basket on his head, trying to find his way from one end of the sitting room to the other. Sitting up in bed in her cozy, sunny room on summer mornings peering out of the window at the peach, violet, turquoise sunrise creeping over the hills behind the house. The patchwork cushion Gran had made her, her name in blue hexagons, and Lucy’s rage that she didn’t get one. “She lives here, she has everything!” she’d shouted. She was three years younger than Cat. It had seemed such a big gap sometimes; now it would be nothing at all, she supposed.
    All these things she didn’t know. What was Lucy like, still the same? Cat often wondered. She was going to be a famous writer and live in a turret, that was always her aim. Was Southpaw’s leg still bad, and did Gran still sing all day, giving you that quick, catlike smile if you corrected her lyrics? And was the patchwork cushion still there? Resting on the old wicker chair, waiting for her to come back?
    Yet it was all so clear to her. She remembered every creaking stair, every mark on every wooden pillar, every old, battered book on the shelf opposite the chair: Ballet Shoes next to Harriet the Spy and The Story of Tracy Beaker , a much-too-young birthday present from her father.
    She had cut them all off, and now she couldn’t go back. Years and years of feeling like this had changed her personality, she knew. She wasa different Cat now, the one she had always secretly feared becoming. When a door banged these days, she jumped.
    •   •   •
    “How’s Luke?” she asked finally, when Madame Poulain was more settled.
    “Asleep. Curled up in the warmth. You spoil him. Like they always say, the English spoil their pets and ignore their children. He’s your pet, hmm?”
    Since Madame Poulain seemed to feed Luke on nothing but biscuits while Cat was at work, this was not something Cat felt equal to tackling at that moment. She could not risk an argument, any shift in the status quo. She was, as ever now the day was drawing to a close, so tired she felt she might slide onto the floor. She rubbed her face; it was a little sunburned, and suddenly she longed for winter. For crisp cool days, for cozy evenings inside, not this dried-out, strung-along warmth.
    “I’m just going to go and check on him,” she said, getting up. “Then I’ll make you an omelet, yes?”
    “Well . . .” To Madame Poulain, any display of concern for another living thing was a waste of cigarette-smoking time. “Go, then. And—oh, before that—your grandmother rang.”
    Cat turned round. Her heart started to thump, hard, in her chest. “Gran rang, here? Did she say why?”
    “She wants to know why you have not replied to the invitation.”
    Cat cleared her throat. “I . . . what invitation?”
    “I said that too. The French post. This man will break the country. I do not—”
    “Madame Poulain, please”—Cat’s desperation, just this once, nearly broke through—“has there been an invitation?”
    “The strangest thing, today there it was. As I told your grandmother when she rang. And I said that I would pass it along to you, the moment you arrived home.” Madame Poulain slid one bony hand down the side of the chair, like a child sitting on secrets. “They don’t know, hmm? They don’t know your little lie to them, do they?” She handed the creamy card to Cat, who held it between her fingers as though it were something magical.
    “Not a lie . . .” she said in a faint voice. The address, in Martha’s familiar elegant hand. It wasn’t a lie when you simply hadn’t told them, was it?
    That writing: Cat knew it better than anyone’s. Who else had written her those endless stories, dotted with jewellike, tiny illustrations? Who had stuffed notes into her lunchbox for Cat to find, sitting by herself underneath the scratched and slimy benches in the playground, chin resting on her scabbed knees?
    Gran used to