Once a Land Girl

by Angela Huth

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

The war is over but life goes on for Land Girls Prue, Stella and Ag. While two of the girls are married, Prue, the incorrigible flirt, is engaged in a quest for a man to provide her with security. A year after the girls leave Hallows Farm, Prue finds just such a man and a marriage that protects her from post-war hardships. The lives of her two old friends, Stella and Ag, have moved on; neither her visits to them nor her newly wedded state supply the answers she seeks. Yet, in the puzzling world beyond the fields, Prue remains buoyant, optimistic and quite sure that the life she imagines is just round yet another corner.

Release date: February 18, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

Angela Huth has written eleven novels, four collections of short stories as well as plays for radio, TV and the stage. Land Girls was made into a 1998 feature
film starring Rachel Weisz and Anna Friel. She is also a well-known freelance journalist, critic and broadcaster. Angela is married to an Oxford don, lives in Warwickshire and has two
daughters.

Also by Angela Huth

FICTION

Nowhere Girl

Virginia Fly is Drowning

Sun Child

South of the Lights

Monday Lunch in Fairyland and other stories

Wanting

Such Visitors and other stories

Invitation to the Married Life

Another Kind of Cinderella and other stories

Land Girls

Wives of the Fisherman

Easy Silence

Of Love and Slaughter

The Collected Stories of Angela Huth

NON-FICTION

The English Woman’s Wardrobe

Well Remembered Friends, an anthology (ed.)

FOR CHILDREN

Eugenie in Cloud Cuckoo Land

Island of the Children (ed.)

Casting a Spell (ed.)

PLAYS

The Understanding

The Trouble with Old Lovers

Angela Huth

Constable · London

Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2010

Copyright © Angela Huth, 2010

The right of Angela Huth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication data is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-84901-275-1

Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon
Printed and bound in the EU

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

For Sally and John

‘How much longer do you want to be starting at an empty field?’ said a voice behind her. ‘Nothing to see, is there?’

Prue stood on the third rung of the gate, the gate she remembered for its soggy wood, which was gentle against her knees as it always used to be. She stared at Lower Pasture, empty now of
animals. No crops had been sown this year. Its hedges were no longer as trimmed to the neatness Mr Lawrence had always required. The long grass bent carelessly in the wind. In the far corner she
could see the haystack in flames, the petrified cows leaping away from its heat, so strong that the air quivered like a mirage. She could hear the cows screaming and the smaller voices of Stella
and Ag, sticks in hand, trying to urge them into the clover field across the lane. She could feel again the piercing sweat beneath her arms as she ran on clumsy legs to join them.

‘Come along. We’d best be getting back.’

Prue did not move. She needed a moment longer. The hedge that ran along the west side of Lower Pasture was now so overgrown it would have been impossible to see what she had seen that day
– Stella in Joe’s arms, their two bodies sagging with relief that the fire was finally under control, but tense with the thrill of their first embrace. They had left the scene of
devastation a few moments before she and Ag had linked arms, swiped at their tears, and taken a last look at the sickening remains of Nancy, the one cow that had taken a direct hit from a bomb: the
one cow Mr Lawrence had agreed not to sell. Once in the clover field, Prue remembered, the rest of the herd still roared their fear – oddly high-pitched squeals from such hefty animals. They
still bucked and reared, their black and white jagged skins making a mad pattern that snagged Prue’s streaming eyes. The incendiary flames had been colours of terrifying beauty, but the smoke
they left behind was a vast black rock in the sky. It showed no sign of evaporating. Its vile smell was in Prue’s nostrils – even now, today, four years after some German had dropped
the bomb on his way home.

‘I said, come on. We’ve been here long enough. Beats me what you’re staring at.’

Prue climbed down from the gate, ignoring her husband’s offered hand. Even though he had heard something of her days as a land girl, he did not seem to understand that she was able to get
off a gate without help. He knew nothing of the country. Rural life was of no interest to him though he professed he was proud that his wife had served her country as a land girl. On their
honeymoon he had made a promise that one day he would drive her back to Hallows Farm, take a look at the place if it would give her pleasure. Four years later, here he was, carrying out his
promise, and a god-awful day, in his opinion, it had been too, manoeuvring the Humber along narrow lanes, mud and worse splashing its pristine paint. He hoped this visit would be a once and for
all: he didn’t fancy any more such journeys down these rotten little memory lanes. The only blessing was that he’d decided to bring the Humber rather than the Daimler: God knew what the
country would have done to the Daimler.

The parked Humber blocked the lane.

‘Lucky no tractors wanting to come down this way.’

Barry took off an orange pigskin glove, holes punched on its knuckles, and stroked the bonnet of his car. He then gave a more cursory pat to his wife’s shoulder. He opened the passenger
door for her with the flourish of one who has observed many a hotel doorman. By now Prue had become used to travelling in this huge, comfortable vehicle with its fabric seats and mahogany
dashboard. Barry, so proud of his car, urged her to observe its finer details on almost every occasion they travelled together. Prue climbed in, wriggled her back against the seat. She had hoped
that Barry would show some interest in the country round Hallows Farm, but the comfort of the car eased her disappointment. She wound down the window to try to reduce the permanent smell of cigar
smoke.

‘I should close that,’ said Barry, pressing the starter button with the kind of reverence that Mr Lawrence, the farmer she had worked for during the war, had never shown to his old
Wolseley. ‘Don’t want to let your country smells into a car like this.’

Prue wound up the window. Whatever Barry asked of her, today, she would do without argument. Nothing mattered to her. She was in another time, another place – startled, shaken once again
by the remembrance of it all.

‘So, what now? Do you want us to drive up to the farmhouse?’ Barry glanced at his watch.

Prue knew they were in no hurry, but she had no desire to go to the house, the yard, the barn, in the company of someone whose impatience was almost tangible. This whole outing, she could see,
was not Barry’s idea of fun. Besides, unknown to him, this was not the first time she had returned to the farm. Just a few weeks ago, sick of waiting for his invitation, she had come here on
another visit which she thought prudent not to mention. ‘I don’t think we’ll bother,’ she said. ‘It’ll be dark soon. We’d better be getting
back.’

Such generosity of understanding spurred Barry’s particular kind of benignity. ‘There’s my girl. We’ll stop somewhere for a drink. Treat ourselves to something bubbly.
How about that?’

‘Fine.’ Prue didn’t care where they stopped or what they drank. She wanted desperately to take a further look at the outside of the farmhouse, the bleak yard, the barn. But she
wanted to go on her own, or with Stella and Ag. Not with Barry.

The car moved slowly forward. Barry was unused to the hazards of lanes and he had no intention of further soiling the immaculate Humber. They passed the cottage where Ratty, the single labourer
on the farm, used to live with his sometimes mad wife Edith. It had clearly been improved by new owners: window frames painted, front door a garish green that clashed with the garden. No lights in
the windows. Prue wondered if the new inhabitants, despite their renovations, could sense a shadow of the misery that had soured the place when Ratty and Edith lived there.

‘Must be hard for you,’ Barry said, ‘coming back. Myself, I wouldn’t want to return to a place that had meant . . . whatever all this meant to you.’

Prue shrugged. ‘Curiosity,’ she said.

They passed the wood where she and Joe had so often made love. After Joe, Prue and Barry One had gone there for the same reason. It was a hidden place, safe. The moss had been beneath them.
Birdsong, from birds they were too busy to notice, was the only sound. With Barry One, as Prue recognized at the time, it was real love in the undergrowth. When he was killed and his friend Jamie
had come to console her, she had eventually agreed to sessions in the same place – out of habit, she supposed. But it hadn’t been the same with Jamie.

Barry tightened his grip on the huge steering-wheel and accelerated gently. Prue was revolted by the pigskin gloves, which meant so much to him. They made her think of Sly, the Lawrences’
querulous old sow who had endeared herself to all three land girls. The idea of Sly or any pig turned into gloves was so horrible that—

‘Tell you what,’ Barry was saying, ‘I’ll run you up one of my special salmon-paste sandwiches when we get home. Lots of paste, a sprinkling of cress. How about
that?’

‘Lovely.’

It was dark by now so Barry could not see the tears that ran down her cheeks. She wanted to scream at him, ‘Stop! It’s left here. Mrs Lawrence will be waiting for us with a huge stew
and turnips and a suet pudding.’ But in the confusion of past and present she dared not speak a word lest she broke down, and Barry’s moment of kindness would turn to impatience.

They turned into the wider road that led from the farmhouse to the village. For a moment Prue fancied the shadows from the overhanging trees were the flock of bumbling sheep that she had so
often driven down this road, and felt herself smile. Then she saw that her mind was playing tricks. There were no sheep. ‘Stupid,’ she said to herself.

‘I was thinking,’ said Barry, ‘that what we should go for next is a Sunbeam Talbot. How does that strike you? Lovely red machine, leather seats. Turn heads, a Sunbeam Talbot
would.’

‘Why not?’ said Prue. She was trying to remember how many times she and Joe had shagged in the wood, and if it was more than she and Jamie had, and if they were added together they
would come to more than the occasions with Barry One, whom she had loved more than either of them.

At the end of the war, while her fellow land girls Stella and Ag went off to get married, Prue had gone back to live in Manchester with her mother in whose hairdressing shop
they both worked. It was not a happy arrangement. Before the war Prue had enjoyed it, and at Hallows Farm she had kept up her skills on Stella and Ag, often surprising them with her experimental
cutting and bleaching. But her years as a land girl seemed to have destroyed her enthusiasm for working all day in a small shop that smelt of shampoo and peroxide, and clumps of hair mistakenly
burnt by curling tongs. She never managed to accomplish a permanent wave to her mother’s satisfaction, and now she didn’t care if she never became a skilled hairdresser, let alone
under-manager in the business, which once had been her ambition.

She spent the days dreaming of a husband who could take her away from this narrow life and provide her with money, luxury. Even though Stella and Ag had teased her over her desire for gold taps,
she still hankered for them. But there were few signs of available young men, let alone those seeking matrimony. Some of the boys she had known as a child had been killed. Others had returned
wounded. She would go to the pub by herself most nights, survey the gathering of old men, and return to her mother’s claustrophobic little house in a state of acute dejection.

One day after work mother and daughter walked to the bus stop in a downpour. At the best of times buses were infrequent and when it rained they seemed to give up altogether. They stood there for
half an hour, drenched. Then a large car pulled up, sloshing water from the gutter onto their feet. Mrs Lumley gave a long and noisy sigh against the rain. ‘A Daimler!’ she cooed.
‘A wedding car. Whatever can it want?’

A man leant across the empty passenger seat and wound down the window. ‘You look like drowned rats,’ he said. ‘Can I give you a lift somewhere?’

‘You certainly can. Much more of this and we’ll melt.’ Mrs Lumley was breathless with the wonder of such a car pulling up beside them, its driver proposing to rescue them from
the rain.

‘Mum, do you think we should?’ Prue, between clients, kept abreast of stories of post-war rape and murder in the Daily Mirror.

‘Don’t be daft, child. Two of us could beat an attacker any day. Get in quick.’ Mrs Lumley scrambled into the front seat without giving her daughter a glance.

Prue opened the back door and fell into a seat that seemed to her more like the softest sofa.

The man turned to her. ‘You all right?’

‘Fine, thanks.’ She could just see very wide-apart dark eyes above a certain pudginess of cheek.

‘Where to?’

‘Twenty-five Wimberly Road, if you don’t mind.’

Prue was certain the question had been to her, but her mother’s swift reply made her realize that Mrs Lumley’s excitement at the possibility of adventure was even greater than her
own.

‘Delighted. It’s on my way.’

The Daimler swooshed forward, parting the deep water on the street.

‘I’m afraid we’ll be making wet marks on your seats,’ said Mrs Lumley.

‘That’s no matter. Easily taken care of

Prue sat back, closed her eyes. Despite the discomfort of her soaking clothes this, she realized, was as near to bliss as a girl could come when she was not lying beneath a wonderful lover.

‘I’m Barry Morton,’ said the man, suddenly, breaking a fraction of silence.

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Morton. I’m Elsie Lumley. In the back it’s my daughter Prudence – Prue, we call her.’

‘Very nice.’

‘So . . . how come you have such a lovely car?’

‘I’m in cars. Buying and selling. Ten years from now there’ll be a very big demand for cars, all sorts. The market will explode. Mark my words.’

‘I see. Very interesting.’

‘And what line of business are you in yourself?’

‘I have my own hair salon: Elsie’s Bond Street Hair Salon, it’s called. Prue helps out.’

‘I often pass it. I’ve noticed it several times.’ He knew how to flatter, thought Prue, though it was just possible he spoke the truth.

‘Very kind of you to say so.’

Prue wished the journey would never end. This was no ordinary car: this was a moving cloud, a velvet box, a jewel. Its engine made no sound. There was sheepskin carpet at her feet, tickling her
wet ankles. And there, bugger it, far too soon, was their road.

Barry Morton drew to a stop very slowly. Neither of his passengers moved. Mrs Lumley pushed back a strand of wet hair that clung to her cheek – Prue knew her mother was wishing she’d
put on more lipstick before they left the shop, but she couldn’t have known that an ordinary journey home was to be transformed by a millionaire rescuer – for presumably he was a
millionaire.

Mrs Lumley turned to him, puckering her lips in the way she did when fondling a cat, or catching sight of some man across the street whose looks she fancied. ‘Well here we are, Mr Morton.
I can only thank you for your true kindness.’

‘Do call me Barry.’

Why call him Barry when he was about to drive off and they would never see him again? Prue wondered. She still did not move. She wanted to remember the touch of the seat against her shoulders.
She wanted to remember it when she was on the bus, or walking towards another dreary day.

‘Ba-rry’, said Mrs Lumley, after a pause to contemplate just how she should graft the name of this remarkable stranger on her tongue. She leant very slightly towards him, put a brief
finger on his shoulder. ‘We mustn’t detain you,’ she said sadly.

‘My pleasure,’ said Barry. Prue could not work out the logic of his reply, but sensed he was enjoying her mother’s appreciation. ‘Let me open the door for you.’

It would have been foolish to get out in such heavy rain when all he had to do was lean across his passenger. Prue could understand that. She watched, fascinated, as Barry leant as discreetly as
a bulky man can across a strange woman and opened the door. A shaft of rain flung into the car. Prue managed to open the back door on her own, helped only by an encouraging smile from the
millionaire driver. ‘You’d better hurry,’ he said.

‘Can’t make much difference, we’re so wet already.’

Barry’s remark had been addressed to Prue this time, but Mrs Lumley’s quick response showed that she was now happily in charge of any remaining fragments of conversation. She gave
the sort of laugh that Prue remembered had come so often to her mother before the war.

They hurried up the concrete path, heads bowed against the wind, eyes blurred with rain. In the small kitchen Prue lit the gas fire and Mrs Lumley put on the kettle. The white walls blazed in
the light of the forty-watt bulb that hung beneath a raffia shade from the centre of the ceiling. Prue remembered how she used to think this was how the perfect kitchen should be, and at first had
been shocked and repelled by the kitchen at Hallows Farm, with its peeling dun walls and a rabbit waiting in the sink to be skinned. Now she thought that the perfect kitchen. Her mother’s
neatness and brightness, the china plates and Bakelite mugs with matching poppies, jarred her senses in a way she found puzzling.

‘Well I never,’ Mrs Lumley was saying. ‘Talk about the unexpected. But there again, surprises do turn up once in a while. It was nice he – Ba-rry – noticed the
shop.’ She went to her pile of souvenir biscuit tins and chose the top one which housed a precious store of gingernuts, only brought out on special occasions. There was lightness in her step.
Prue recognized a flame of hope. The pathos in her mother’s small toss of her head was alarming.

‘You never know,’ Mrs Lumley went on, dithering among the biscuits. ‘He knows the salon. He might drop in one day.’

A week later there was still no sign of Barry Morton. Mrs Lumley never mentioned him after the night they had met, which Prue guessed was an act of considerable self-will. She knew her mother
could think of little else. In silence as she stirred tinned soup in a saucepan, her lips would move into the familiar provocative pout and she would run a hand through her thin, decorous hair. She
had started to paint her nails scarlet, a new colour by Peggy Sage.

One evening she turned from the saucepan to Prue. ‘I shouldn’t really be saying this to you, Prue,’ she began, ‘but sometimes I don’t half fancy lying back and
thinking of England again under some nice fella.’

‘Oh Mum. Something will happen.’ Prue had no wish to be party to her mother’s private yearnings. She put an arm round her shoulders, felt the bone of the blades through the
skin.

‘I hope so.’

The next afternoon there was no one booked into the salon. Prue and her mother sat on the two chairs placed in front of mirrors, contemplating their own faces. They waited patiently for a
surprise appointment. Occasionally someone one would drop in on a whim, attracted perhaps by the photographs of Margaret Lockwood and her Drene-brilliant hair in the window.

‘I wonder, Mum,’ said Prue, who was so bored that even the act of wondering tired her, ‘if anyone actually thinks Margaret Lockwood gets her hair done here?’

‘Must do. Else they wouldn’t come in, would they?’

Mrs Lumley, exhausted by hope, moved her eyes from her own reflection to the door of the shop. Thus she was the first to see the delivery man knock, not in reality but in the mirror image. He
held a large bunch of flowers. Then Prue saw his reflection in her mirror. As Mrs Lumley leapt up, knocking hairbrushes, combs and tongs to the ground, Prue kept her seat. This was her
mother’s moment: she had no intention of detracting from it.

At the door Mrs Lumley gave the delivery man the sort of smile she had not exercised for a week. ‘Those’ll be for me,’ she said. ‘Thank you, dear.’ She signed a
receipt with a shaking hand, returned to her seat. Then everything went into slow motion. She pulled at a red bow of pre-war satin ribbon, let the tissue paper fall in a cloud onto the floor. She
buried her head in a bunch of pink roses, searching for scent that did not exist, but the surprise caused her to cry out with joy.

‘Who can they be from, Mum?’ Prue asked, knowing how much her mother would enjoy the answer.

‘Who do you think, silly?’

‘Where’s the card?’

‘The card? Oh yes. Silly me, this time.’ She bent down, ruffled through the tissue paper, noting in the still practical part of her mind that there was a lot of hair on the floor
that Prue should have swept up. She found the small envelope. ‘Here, take these while I open it.’ She handed the roses to Prue.

Mrs Lumley slit open the envelope with her best cutting scissors. To Prue, impatient to know what Barry Morton had said, her mother’s every movement was maddeningly slow.

The card was pulled from its miniature envelope by two scarlet nails – chipped, now, sign of fading hope. Then there was a pause while Mrs Lumley found her glasses in the pocket of her
apron. Finally she held up the card so slowly it might have been a great weight, and turned it towards the grey light in the window. Prue watched, horrified, as her mother’s slow eyes trudged
back and forth over some short message, and the skin round her rouged cheeks turned a deadly white.

‘They’re for you. They’re not for me.’ She handed Prue the card.

‘Oh, Mum. There must be some mistake.’

‘No. Read it.’

Prue scanned Barry’s politely phrased invitation to a ‘proper ride’ in the Daimler and a drink on Friday evening. He added that he would be honoured, should she accept.
‘It could still be a mistake,’ she said. ‘He may have meant Mrs.’

‘No. The handwriting’s quite clear.’

Prue could see her mother was beginning to disintegrate. Her feet were shuffling on the floor among the unswept hair. She kept licking her lips.

‘Well I won’t go,’ said Prue. ‘Of course I won’t go. Who’d want to go for a drink with a strange man just because he has a bloody great car?’

Mrs Lumley looked her daughter in the eye, suddenly fierce. ‘You will, my girl,’ she said. ‘You certainly will. I want to know what game Mr Barry Morton’s playing.
You’ll go.’

‘If you say so,’ said Prue. Concerned by her mother’s disappointment, she was in no state to anticipate what the date with Barry Morton might bring.

Mrs Lumley watched Barry’s arrival from her bedroom window. She had been waiting behind the net curtain for twenty minutes and was surprised when the Daimler drew up at
precisely six thirty for she had begun to think he might be a cad rather than a punctual man of honour. After all, he had been so friendly to her that rainy night, scarcely exchanging a word with
Prue in the back seat. He couldn’t have caught more than a glimpse of her.

As Barry strode down the front path she could see that he was a man of means: camel-hair coat, carnation in his buttonhole, box of Black Magic in hand – well, obviously a man who could
pull strings even in these days of sweet rationing. She could also judge better, in daylight, his age: definitely a touch older than she had supposed. If things had turned out for her and Barry she
would have been accused of cradle-snatching. If possible romance came to fruition (she had found the phrase in a romantic novel and it had stuck in her mind) for Prue and him, it would be said her
daughter was associating with (marrying?) an older man.

She heard voices downstairs but could not make out the words. Prue had begged her to be there to greet Barry, to ‘make things easier’. But Mrs Lumley had been insistent. She
certainly wasn’t up for making conversation with a man who had shown his colours so strongly, then changed his mind. All the same, when Prue and Barry, halfway down the path, stopped, turned
and waved up at her window, Mrs Lumley relented. She waved back, knowing the gesture would be unclear behind the net curtain. After that, she observed Barry put a hand under Prue’s elbow and
guide her to the car.

Several faces peered from neighbouring houses. This Mrs Lumley noted with satisfaction. Her sense of vicarious importance increased when several children ran up for a closer look at the car. One
stretched out a hand and touched its bonnet. That, too, was gratifying. Mrs Lumley had always been accused of bringing a touch of class to the neighbourhood – though the accusation was never
voiced, she was positive it existed. She had always been able to feel it. And now here was proof. Rich man, swanky car, pretty daughter taken out. Curiously soon, considering her dreadful week, Mrs
Lumley found that she was able to transfer her hopes for herself to hopes for Prue. She came downstairs, sat in the kitchen surrounded by her precious souvenir tins, and as she ate several of the
best biscuits – surely extravagance was permissible on such an occasion – she imagined the couple fox-trotting in some posh hotel in the city centre.

Barry Morton made no suggestion about fox-trotting, but drove instead to a large pub on the outskirts of the city. There, Prue felt overdressed. She had chosen –
encouraged by the mother – the dress she had worn at Buckingham Palace for the tea party the King and Queen had given for land girls. It had been perfect on that unforgettable day. Several of
the other girls, who had had to alter their mothers’ pre-war dresses or run something up from lace curtains and parachute silk, had congratulated her. An almost bluebell blue (not quite dark
enough to Prue’s keen eye for colour, but no one else noticed this imperfection) with a sweetheart neckline and a flirty skirt, the dress had, as she recounted back at the farm, dazzled their
Majesties.

In the smoke-filled bar, at the table Barry chose, furnished only with a tin ashtray advertising Colman’s mustard, she feared it was too much. On the way to the table she was conscious of
many turning heads – mostly of men, some in uniform. When she crossed her legs her knees were more exposed than she would have liked, but the shortage of even artificial silk meant the skirt
had to be short. Still, she was wearing her only pair of nylon stockings, which gave her legs a burnished sheen, a sight that Barry Morton was able to admire as he lit his cigar.

‘So, Prue,’ he said, ‘where do we begin?’

Several ideas skittered through Prue’s mind, rendering her silent. In truth she was aware of a clutch of disappointment in her stomach. She had imagined that a man with a Daimler would
head straight for the poshest hotel in the area, not this dreary pub. Perhaps, she thought, he was putting her through some kind of test.

‘Here’s to . . .’ he said, breaking the silence at last. He held up his glass of champagne, urging Prue to do the same with a nod. Their glasses clicked.

‘Here’s to what?’ asked Prue, with a smile.

‘Who knows?’ Barry smiled too. Somewhere towards the back of his mouth there was a very large gold tooth. So perhaps he had gold taps as well, thought Prue. He leant back in his
chair, allowing a spread of light from a corner lamp to illuminate his heavy but adequately proportioned features. Prue guessed he must be forty, or thereabouts. A touch young for her mum but, she
reckoned, if he gave her some sort of opening, she’d try to find out what he had made of her, though she had little hope for this plan. What mattered was that he had a nice face, kindly. The
wide-apart, frog-like eyes blinked slowly, taking her in so intensely she felt herself blush. She fixed her eyes on his maroon tie – not, she knew, artificial silk but the real thing. Then
they moved over the pin-stripe suit, stripes a little too wide for her taste but a fine bit of cloth. Pre-war, she supposed. Everything about Barry Morton, including a visible paunch, indicated
money.

‘What a lucky man I was,’ he said, ‘finding you like that the other night. I was only being a good Samaritan. The bonus was that you and your mum turned out to be a couple of
good-lookers. I thought, They’ve got something, those two. Took me a week to decide whether I should follow up our meeting. Then I decided, what the hell? Go for it, Barry. They can only say
no. When I say “they”, of course I meant you. Threesome’s aren’t much fun, and I’m a touch on the young side for your mum, lovely lady though she is.’

‘Yes.’ The idea of recommending her mother’s qualities was quickly blasted.

‘But I imagine what you’ll be wanting to know about is me.’

Prue nodded, hoping her expression was suitably enthusiastic. She finish