Free Shadow Baby by Margaret Forster Page A

change.’
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    ‘She’ll have to change a damned sight more than she’s ever likely to if she’s going to turn out looking like Leah.’
    ‘You don’t know what Leah looked like at this age either, don’t let on you do because you don’t.’
    ‘I didn’t say as I did but I knew her at ten and ten’s not that much more than Evie is now, I knew her then, when they brought her from Carlisle. I can see her still, pretty as a picture, the hair on her. Now look at this one’s hair and tell me she’s Leah’s.’
    ‘Her hair hasn’t been looked after.’
    ‘Wouldn’t make that much difference, it isn’t hair like Leah’s that I can see.’
    ‘You don’t see much. When it’s washed regular and brushed regular and braided up it’ll improve a treat.’
    ‘You’re going to do it, are you, all this messing about with her hair? That’s what this is about, is it? That’s why you wanted her?’
    ‘It wasn’t a case of wanting. I don’t know how you dare say it was, it was a case of duty, and your duty too, you know it was.’
    ‘Duty? It was a case of training up an extra pair of hands to be useful in the pub, that’s what it was, that’s what it is, lass. Never mind her hair, there’s a pub to run and never enough hands. She’ll have to earn her keep pretty soon.’
    ‘She’ll have to go to school first, she’ll have to learn to read and write and add up.’
    ‘She won’t be at school all the time, there’s plenty she can be trained to do before school and after school, and on a weekend and in the holidays, or anyways I did when I was her age and so did you, and if you’d had bairns that’s what we would have had them doing, so I don’t want any soft talk, right?’
    There was silence, broken only by the clattering of dishes and the noisy slurping as the man drank his tea. Evie heard a chair pulled back and Ernest saying, ‘I’m off.’ She had finished her porridge. She decided to wash the bowl in the stone scullery sink but the moment she turned the tap on the woman shouted through at her, ‘Don’t waste water! There’s water standing here, bring it through, you can wash it with the other dishes, now jump to it.’
    Evie jumped.
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Chapter Four
    WHEN SHONA was eight, the Mclndoes moved to St Andrews, a move which pleased them all. Shona was much happier. She still had a beach to run on, a wider and longer beach, but now she went to a school which satisfied her more. There were twenty-five girls in a class, all her own age and many of them as lively and energetic as herself as well as equally clever. She had real friends, Kirsty and lona, for the first time and though she tried to dominate them, as she tried to dominate everyone, she did not always succeed. Kirsty and lona were equally bossy and the three of them had to learn to give way occasionally to each other. It relieved Catriona to see this happening and she encouraged the friendship. They all lived near enough for the girls to walk to and from school together and visit each other’s houses without needing either transport or supervision. Shona gained a new kind of independence and thrived on it.
    Of the two houses she preferred lona’s, though Kirsty’s was bigger and grander. lona lived in the Old Town in a narrow close near the ruins of the cathedral. It was quite a small town house, its door opening directly on to the street, and it had no garden, but it had a pretty cobbled yard at the back with an open staircase going up to the door and a pantiled roof and dormer windows, and Shone thought it looked like an illustration from a book of fairy tales she had. She liked Jean, lona’s mother, who was young and attractive and smiled all the time whatever anyone did. She looked exactly like lona, or rather lona looked like her, the mirror image as people said, both of them with fine, sleek dark brown hair and large hazel eyes and delicate features.
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    ‘lona’s mammy is beautiful,’ she said to her own mother, ‘and