Free Park Lane by Frances Osborne

however many decisions you make, at some point you find yourself again being swept along by events? Thank God she’s not here alone; if she could, she’d stitch her coat to Celeste’s, which is drifting in and out of reach. On they are pushed, right along the terrace to the corner, and back down the hill, where the weight of the crowd descending behind her becomes worryingly heavy. Then they stop. She and Celeste have reached a wall of bodies so densely packed that they cannot be pushed any further.
    Below them spread the darkened curves and corners of ladies’ hats and gentlemen’s bowlers, nearly all pointing in the direction of a single lit window on the first floor of a house near the bottom. Celeste starts to pick her way down towards it, moving into gaps ahead of her invisible to Bea. Instead Bea moves sideways down the hill, ‘sorry’ by ‘sorry’, and sharp-elbowed hiss by hiss. She stumbles, they’re bloody well sticking their feet out, maybe Mother is right that they are lunatics. Bea is losing Celeste and fluttering a little, the light is jolly poor and the crowd is heaving and pushing and she’s struggling to keep upright. Celeste, unhampered by manners, is moving far faster. Bea tries to track what she thinks is her aunt’s hat through the jostling ahead but the wall of bodies tightens. That’s it, no further, she’s done rather well, though Celeste’s ‘third tree’ is still twenty yards out of reach. For the first time in her life, Bea is alone at night and in a crowd of strangers, her heart is racing and she feels breathless with the excited fear of riding towards a high hedge with a complete lack of control. She tries to push again, caring less about whom she knocks on her way – the lesser evil to being seen, or even being, on her own – but the shoulders in front respond by rising more firmly against her. This at last fires some push into Bea herself. Well, damn them, she’s jolly well going to get through.
    ‘Not a chance,’ says an overly cut-glass female voice behind her. ‘You won’t get any closer. But you can see the house from here.Well, some of it. Don’t I know you? I’m sure I do.’ Bea stiffens. Good God, who is it, one of Mother’s friends? But one of Mother’s friends would not be here, and it is a voice that means well. Right now that is worth the risk of being discovered. Bea can always say she is engaged in some kind of espionage, just here to find out what the other side is up to. The woman behind this voice might be able to help her. Besides, there’s a limit to how long you can stand practically in somebody’s arms and ignore them.
    So Bea turns, or rather twists her head until she feels she has the neck of a giraffe. The woman is using her umbrella to steady herself as she stands on tiptoe – she is wearing make-up, and a little too much of it. What a relief; not a chance that Bea knows a woman like that.
    ‘No, I don’t think so.’
    ‘First time?’
    ‘No,’ lies Bea. She doesn’t want this stranger to latch on to her in sympathy.
    ‘A thousand here, I should say,’ the woman continues, nodding back up the hill. ‘Hours ago, some of us came. It’s so pleasing to have a good position, isn’t it?’
    Bea does not feel as though she has a good position. She has failed to reach the tree, and she has lost Celeste, which makes her position, if anything, precarious. She has a sudden dread that this is going to be one of those evenings when the police come rushing out. That would be more that Bea bargained for, she’s heard about what can happen then; now nervous, she starts to count the number of walking sticks she has seen. But surely, surely, nothing bad can happen to her on her first time.
    ‘Are the police here?’ she asks.
    ‘Oh, I couldn’t be sure. I haven’t seen any uniforms. Maybe they’ve popped into the bushes. What a lark!’ The woman lowers her voice and leans over to whisper into Bea’s ear. ‘But of course as long as she’s