Free Brother and Sister by Joanna Trollope Page A

bloody cafe," he'd said. "You can do all your nonsense upstairs, Evie. Do it where the customers can't see."
    So she had painted her sitting room lilac with white woodwork and furnished it with a sofa upholstered in cream leather which
     had been in a clearance sale at a furnishing store. The store had also provided the nest of brass-legged occasional tables
     and the imitation onyx lamps with pleated shades. Ray never sat on the sofa: he said it was impossible to stay on. Instead
     he used an easy chair inherited from Evie's father, which she kept covered with a piece of tapestry-woven fabric because all
     Ray's clothes smelled of beer and frying.
    "You be thankful," he said every so often, "that I'm not a bloody fishmonger."
    The sitting room was a small haven for Evie. On the rare occasions when she wasn't required in the kitchen or behind the bar,
     she would settle—with difficulty—onto her leather sofa and watch old movies on the television, luxuriously conscious of not
     being part of the noise and activity and smells of the pub below. Sometimes, during longueurs in the movies, she thought about
     how life would be in two years' time, when Ray retired, and they bought the bungalow in Ferndown they'd always talked about,
     and Ray had no official occupation. Quite where she could go then to escape the heavy, demanding seductiveness of his presence,
     she couldn't think. Her daughter, Verena, Steve's older sister, who lived on the Isle of Man and only came down to Westerham
     once a year, said that she should get a job herself when Ray retired.
    "Just a little job, Mum. Just something to get you out a bit. Dad'll drive you crazy, otherwise."
    Evie didn't think Ray would like her to have a job, even a little one. He would be affronted by it, insulted. Working for
     him in the Royal Oak was one thing—for Ray, after all, a publican like his father, the Royal Oak was almost a vocation—but
     slipping out to earn money from another source was quite another. It would be seen as a disloyalty. She could possibly do
     some voluntary work in a local hospital, or a library, or an old people's home, but she didn't think a paid job would be possible.
     It was all very well for Verena, married to a man of a completely different generation from Ray's, a man who almost expected his wife to have a life of her own, just as it was all very well for Evie's daughter-in-law, Nathalie. Steve had always been
     so good to Nathalie. Steve saw Nathalie as a person in her own right in a way Evie knew Ray could never do, a way which he
     would regard as unmanly. Evie had never said to Steve—or, indeed, to a living soul—"I wish your dad was more like you," but
     sometimes, sitting on her leather sofa with her feet up on its matching ottoman, she wanted it so badly she almost cried.
    She loved it when Steve brought Polly round. Polly was a source of delight and fascination to both her grandparents at the
     Royal Oak—she was the one person in the world Ray Ross would stop whatever he was doing for—and the recipient of endless presents.
     Evie knew Steve didn't like the kind of things she bought Polly, but Polly loved them. Polly and her grandmother shared an
     excited appetite for the excessively feminine, for glitter and flowers and Hello Kitty handbags. Evie kept the things she
     bought for Polly in a velvet-padded chest—it was really a dressing-table stool—behind the cream sofa. Polly called it her
     treasure box. She also understood that most of the items in the treasure box belonged at the Royal Oak in a way that could
     not be translated to Steve and Nathalie's flat, thus constituting a small conspiracy with her grandmother that Evie relished.
     Only over a few items, such as the Barbie bicycle that had been her fourth birthday present, did she fight so remorselessly
     to be allowed to take them home that Steve felt it would have been both unkind and excessively priggish not to let her. Some
     afternoons, before evening opening