The Women in Black by Madeleine St John Read Free Book Online

final.’
    By the end of the following week, he had agreed to give his signature to the form on the understanding that if his daughter were by some extreme chance actually to gain the scholarship, there would nonetheless be no question whatever of her taking it up.
    ‘It’s for the school, really,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘They want her to do it at the school. It’s good for their record.’
    ‘Yes, well,’ said E. Miles, compositor. ‘I didn’t want her going to that school anyway. A lot of stuck-up snobs.’
    Here he was animadverting to the fact that the academy in question, a state high school, admitted only children of a certain intelligence: Mrs Miles’s delight when her Lesley had at the age of eleven found herself among their number had been one of many joys of parenthood which she had been unable, alas, to share with her co-author. She had had five years, now, of silent lamplit evenings, Lesley sitting doing her increasingly time-consuming homework at the kitchen table, her mother sitting on the cane chair, knitting or sewing or looking at The Women’s Weekly , invisibly glowing with pride. Her girl: a scholar.

8
    By the end of her first week as a Sales Assistant (Temporary) at Goode’s, Lisa’s appearance was more remarkably fragile than ever, and her black frock seemed to be nearer two sizes too large than one. Goodness me, thought Miss Cartright as she passed by Ladies’ Cocktail, that child looks positively starved: it’s hardly decent.
    ‘Have you had your lunch hour yet?’ she asked her later in the day.
    ‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ replied the child.
    ‘Mind you eat a proper lunch then,’ said Miss Cartright sternly.
    ‘You need plenty of food to keep going here. That’s why we subsidise the Staff Canteen you know, to see that you’re all well fed. So mind you eat a proper lunch every day, Lisa.’
    ‘Oh yes, of course,’ replied she.
    ‘Lesley,’ said her mother, ‘I don’t want you eating that canteen food more than you can help. I’m sure it isn’t good for you: you don’t know where it’s been, or who’s been handling it. And it can’t be fresh. I’ll make you some nice sandwiches to take.’
    Her daughter didn’t argue, for in fact although she had been pleased by the canteen’s multi-coloured salads and trembling jellies with their tiny rosettes of whipped cream, she found the canteen itself and its clientele melancholy, and that not poetically so. By the end of her first week she had established a routine whereby, rushing up the fire stairs to the Staff Locker Room and changing back into her own clothes and fetching her sandwiches and a book, she was able, having rushed down the same stairs to the street below and up Market Street and then across Elizabeth Street—barring cars, taxis and trams—to Hyde Park, to enjoy forty-five minutes in the embrace of its amorous green.
    The weather was now abominably, relentlessly, hot, and she discovered that by sitting to one side or another, depending on the prevailing breeze, on the rim of the Archibald Fountain, she could enjoy its cooling spray as it was blown against her. Sitting thus, her stomach full of the hearty meat or cheese-filled sandwiches cut by her loving mother, her mind full of the anguish of the tale of A. Karenina which she was now very near finishing, she ascended into a state of wondering blissfulness which was induced to a large degree by the sheer novelty of being and acting quite alone: the exquisite experience of happy solitude.
    It was while she was sitting thus on the Friday of that first week, her blouse now damp from the spray of the fountain and with but a few minutes remaining to her before she must rush back the way she had come and rehabilitate herself in her black frock, that Magda passed by and, having previously eyed Lisa from the portentous entrance to Model Gowns, hailed her.
    ‘Ah, Lisa, I think, is it not? My name is Magda—you will have seen me without doubt presiding over our Model Gowns at