Part of the Furniture by Mary Wesley Read Free Book Online Page B

exactly felt it so and now, thanks to the coat, she was warm and must keep warm until Thursday. She would go to the cinema, it was cheap and would be heated. They were showing Laurel and Hardy; she had seen the film, sitting between Jonty and Francis. They had laughed a lot but not as hysterically as at the Marx brothers, who were their favourites. She bought the cheapest ticket and went in. The film was halfway through; she watched it to the end and then watched the News, which showed the bomb damage in London and the king and queen walking about in the rubble, being caring and at the same time not stopping people getting on with their jobs. They obviously had the right touch, as had the man who had stood behind her in the queue.
    ‘I bet he gets a passage before Thursday,’ she shouted out loud.
    Several people said, ‘Shush,’ and the woman next to her said, ‘Shut up,’ but Juno felt a bit better and sufficiently relaxed to sleep through Laurel and Hardy when they came round again, and on through the News for the second time. She was still asleep when they played ‘God Save the King’ and the cinema emptied. An attendant woke her and she found herself back in the street.
    She returned to the station where she ate a horrible but filling bun in the buffet and drank some wishy-washy tea, which was so hot it burned her mouth. Then, finding an empty seat at a table, she sat down to watch people come and go.
    There seemed to be an awful lot of hanging about and humping of luggage. When a train came in, people rushed to get seats before those who were getting out had a chance to reach the platform. The windows of the buffet steamed up, but she rubbed a space free to look through. By this time the passengers were mostly soldiers, sailors and airmen carrying sausage-shaped kitbags so tightly packed they looked about to burst. Juno kept her small suitcase by her feet, even though she knew it would be more sensible to leave it in the left-luggage office.
    The buffet was relatively warm. It reeked of humanity, buns and tobacco; from time to time she went out onto the platform to gulp fresh air and read the notices, which said, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, and, more humorously, ‘Be Like Dad, Keep Mum’. In the freezing air she congratulated herself on the acquisition of the coat, which was snug and intimate. It did not smell of Francis’s and Jonty’s mothers; if it had, she would have torn it off and cast it under the wheels of an oncoming train. Instead, as it warmed to her body, it let off comforting whiffs of lanolin and leather.
    Back in the buffet she dozed fitfully through the night, waking once to find a group of soldiers sitting round her playing cards while they waited for their transport. Seeing her blink, one of them invited her to join in. She won three shillings, which they insisted she keep. She felt quite sad when they left to clamber onto their train, ‘Gotta get back to fucking camp, love, bye.’
    Later their places were taken by blue-jackets, who were partially drunk and made remarks she did not understand or respond to, which irritated them so that they pressed her harder and took offence as she withdrew into the folds of her coat. One of them was raising his voice and had become quite threatening, when the buffet doors opened and a pair of military policemen looked in. Their eyes swivelled from right to left, then left to right. The sailors got up and went onto the platform, muttering, ‘Bloody Pongos.’ Juno was glad to see them board the next train and dozed off again from exhaustion.
    When she woke next, there was a young woman sitting opposite her with a baby on her lap. With one hand she drank tea from a thick railway cup and with the other she both joggled the baby and pushed a bottle of feed into its mouth. Juno wished there was a third hand to wipe the baby’s nose, which exuded snot like a slug creeping down its lip to join the milk in the aperture which would some day become a human