Sometimes when Dr Heaslip was summoned on a call that involved a journey in his car he would invite the girls to accompany him, but he was insistent that they should make themselves as inconspicuous as possible on the back seat in case their presence should be regarded as a misuse of his petrol allowance. When they arrived at whatever house it was that required his skill he relaxed this severity and permitted them to emerge. ‘Go and look at the chickens and cows,’ he’d urge. ‘Show Laura what a chicken is, Margaretta.’ If the day was fine and the farmhouse not too far from the town, they’d ask if they might walk home. Later he would pass them on the road and would blow his horn, slowing down to give them a lift if they wanted one. But they usually walked on and no one particularly minded when they were late for whatever meal it was. Their plates of meat and vegetables would be taken from the oven and they’d eat at the kitchen table, gravy dried away to nothing, mashed potatoes brown. Or tea, at teatime, would have gone black almost, keeping hot on the range.
Headstrong and impetuous, Dr Heaslip described his daughter as. ‘Not like yourself, Laura. You’re the wise virgin of the two.’ He repeated this comparison often, asking Mrs Heaslip and sometimes Katie or Eileen, even Mattie Devlin, if they agreed. Margaretta ignored it, Laura politely smiled. Nothing much upset the Heaslip household and nothing hurried it. Mrs Heaslip’s only complaints were the manner in which her daughter spoke and Mattie Devlin’s ways with vegetables.
‘The Rains Came,’ Margaretta said. ‘All about India, y’know.’
They went to it, as they did to all the films at the De Luxe Picture House, which hadn’t yet acquired Western Electric Sound, so that the voices were sometimes difficult to hear. Dr Heaslip and Mrs Heaslip attended the De Luxe almost as regularly as Margaretta and Laura, who went three times a week, every time there was a change of programme. At breakfast the next day the girls reported on what they’d seen; Dr and Mrs Heaslip then made up their minds. Mr Deeds Goes to Town had for years been Mrs Heaslip’s favourite and The House of Rothschild her husband’s. Margaretta thought The House of Rothschild the most enormously boring picture she’d ever seen in her life, worse even than The Hunchback of Notre Dame. For her, and for Laura, the highlights of that first summer were Fast and Loose, Dodge City, His Butler’s Sister and Naughty Marietta; and best of all, they easily agreed, was The Rains Came. On Saturdays there was a serial called Flaming Frontiers, and there were travelogues and the news, and shorts with Charlie Chase or Leon Errol. ‘Don’t you love the smell of the De Luxe?’ Margaretta used to say after they’d dwelt at length on a performance by Franchot Tone or Deanna Durbin, exhausting the subject and yet unwilling to leave it. ‘Hot celluloid, I think it is, and cigarette-butts.’
The war ended in May 1945 and Laura brought back to England these memories of the family and the town, of the school she had attended with Margaretta, of the people and the shops. Margaretta wrote from time to time, a huge sprawling hand, words grotesquely misspelt: Mrs Hearne had called her latest baby Liam Pius, after the Pope; Cry Havoc was on at the De Luxe, The Way to the Stars was coming.
Laura wrote neatly, with nothing to say because Margaretta couldn’t be expected to be interested in all the talk about building things up again and descriptions of utility clothes. Margaretta had become her best friend and she Margaretta’s. They had decided it the night before she’d returned. They’d shared Margaretta’s bed, talking in whispers from ten o’clock until the Donald Duck clock said it was twenty past two. ‘We’d better go to sleep, y’know,’ Margaretta had said, but Laura had wanted to continue talking, to make the time go slowly. After Margaretta put the light out she lay in the darkness thinking she’d never had a friend like Margaretta before, someone who found the same things as boring as you did, someone you didn’t have to be careful with. A wash of moonlight for a moment lightened the gloom, catching the untidy mass of Margaretta’s hair on the pillow. She was breathing heavily, already asleep, smiling a little as if from some amusing dream. Then a cloud slipped over the moon again and the room abruptly darkened.
It was that night that Laura afterwards remembered most. ‘You can’t find friends in a town the like of this,’ Margaretta had said. ‘Well, I mean you can, y’know. Only it’s different.’ And she mentioned the girls she knew in the town, whom Laura knew also. None of them would have been, fascinated, as they were, by the way Mrs Eldon of the sweetshop made her lips seem larger with the outline of her lipstick. None of them would have wondered how it was that Mr Hearne always had the same amount of stubble on his face. ‘One day’s growth,’ Dr Heaslip had said when they’d asked him. How could a man, every day, have one day’s stubble? ‘They want to be nuns and things,’ Margaretta said. These girls went to the De Luxe also, but they didn’t take much interest in the performances, nor in the trademarks of the films, the roaring lion, the searchlights, the statue with the torch, the snow-capped mountain, the radio aerial with electricity escaping from it. The girls of the town didn’t go in for finding things funny. Sometimes Laura and Margaretta found a remark a shopkeeper had made so funny that they had to lean against some other shopkeeper’s window, laughing so much it gave them a stitch. Sometimes the very sight of people made them laugh. Entranced, Margaretta listened when Laura had told her how her Uncle Gilbert had taken her on to his bony knee on her sixth birthday and softly spanked her for no reason whatsoever. Afterwards he’d given her a sweet and said it was their secret. ‘Keep well away from that fellow,’ Margaretta had sharply advised, and both of them had giggled, not quite knowing what they were giggling at. It was something Laura had never told anyone else.
It is so drab, Laura wrote. As you would say, enormously drab. Everyone said at first, you know, that the war would be over by Christmas. I remember people saying Hitler was a knut and didn’t know what he was doing. But now everything’s so drab after Ireland that you’d think he had won the thing. I haven’t had an egg for months.
And so, for nourishment only, since safety wasn’t in question any more, Laura’s mother sent her to stay again with the Heaslips. Mrs Heaslip had pressed for this, had pressed that Laura’s mother should accompany her.
‘They can’t spare her,’ Laura explained when she arrived, reiterating what her mother had written. ‘She’d really have loved to come.’ The drab austerity was as confining as the war there had been.