Free Under the Jeweled Sky by Alison McQueen Page B

potato, the coil complete. Sophie picked up another and began again.
    â€œ Sunday? Why on earth didn’t you say anything?”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œCrikey, Sophie! I don’t know!”
    â€œI think it took four days to sink in.”
    â€œI wish you’d told me.” Margie sat down, cheeks high with color. “I can’t believe it. You’ve only known him since…” She thought for a while.
    â€œFive months.”
    â€œYou’re not…”
    â€œNo!” Sophie smiled. “Of course not.”
    Margie sat back and exhaled, the two of them allowing their thoughts to percolate for a while. They had met a handful of years earlier when Sophie first arrived in London, sent off by her father, who had insisted she should strike out and see something of the world rather than fussing over him and hiding from life in an untidy house perched amid the Nilgiri Hills in India’s far south. A blessed sanctuary it had been, for both of them, and she would have stayed quite happily. There was no lovelier place on earth. Sophie had turned twenty-four that year, just as the winter fogs were beginning to lift from the forest-bound peaks, and her father had become restless, closing himself off in his study where she could see him from the gardens, leaning back in the big leather chair behind his desk, hands poised against his chest, fingertips pressed together while he stared at the ceiling for hours. He had not discussed what was on his mind, but Sophie had sensed it from his manner, the way he seemed to be distancing himself from her. There had been no arguing with him, and part of her had known that the time had come for her to go. She had lived with him for five years, and now she had lived with Margie for four. It had not escaped Sophie’s notice, this habit she made of clinging on, as though afraid to let go.
    It had been such a wrench, her sense of loneliness at times so profound that there were days when it was almost too much to bear, rainy afternoons spent alone in the cinema, trying to appear easy in her own company. There was no lonelier place than a crowded city. You could die in your bed and no one would miss you. You might just as well be a ghost; but for your remains, there would be nothing to say that you had been here once, to live a life overlooked.
    Sophie had taken a room at Mrs. Stanton’s guest house off Queensway in Bayswater, a ladies-only establishment where the doors were locked tight shut at ten-thirty sharp and no male visitors were permitted one step further than the residents’ sitting room, and even then only for the briefest of stops, usually to collect or deposit a guest, some of whom had been there for years. The rooms were clean and functional and the women pleasant enough, although the older ones tended to keep to themselves, sharing tales of having had their lives turned upside down by the war. After doing their bit for king and country, they had then been expected to give up their jobs and return to the kitchen the moment their menfolk came home. For some, it was too much to ask, that they should rinse away any notions of liberation and go back to the old ways. Marriages had disintegrated, swelling the numbers of women who now lived by their own fates, whether by choice or through widowhood.
    It was at Mrs. Stanton’s that Sophie met Margie Stock, a rosy-faced Yorkshire girl, some years younger than her, fresh out of secretarial school. Margie taught Sophie the basic rudiments of Pitman’s shorthand and insisted that she really must take evening classes and obtain the required certificate, otherwise the best that she could hope for would be to end up in a windowless typing pool bashing away at a machine all day. It was a week before Sophie plucked up the courage to admit that that was exactly what she was doing. After a month or two, seeing as they got on so well, it was only natural that they should move on from Mrs.