Free Untimely Graves by Marjorie Eccles

end-of-term production – or to be more accurate, wondering why she’d ever allowed herself to be roped in to help with the costumes. Making her own clothes was one thing, this was something else.
    Roger Barmforth was an amiable idiot and nothing he did should have surprised her, but the choice of this bawdy entertainment for a school production, with its endless possibilities for innuendo and sniggers, was asking for trouble, when even the author’s name, John Gay, caused the adolescent cast to fall about. Nor had it been the world’s best idea to invite the sixth-form girls from the Princess Mary High School to participate. Though it had to be said that Rosie Deventer made a splendid Polly Peachum, hardly needing to act at all – and it was better than encouraging some of the boys to dress up, certainly better
than Douthwaite with his blond baby face in the part. There was no need for false boobs where Rosie was concerned.
    Right choice or wrong, things had advanced too far to go back now. Hannah leaned back and closed her eyes. Subconsciously, she fingered the gauzy scarf around her throat, very aware of the letter in her pocket and the warm rush of feeling whenever she thought of it, though it had hardly been what she would have expected, or hoped for.
    ‘Our Polly is a sad slut! nor heeds what we have taught her. I wonder any man alive will ever rear a daughter!’ sang Polly Peachum’s father, to accompanying cat-calls from the wings and a compliant flounce, a rolling of eyes and various other body parts from Polly on the stage.
    Hannah had never expected to see Sam Leadbetter again, had fully expected they’d be gone from Lavenstock before his stint in the Antarctic was finished. She felt quite dizzy at the thought of seeing him again, and overwhelmed by what it would inevitably mean. Had all the anguish of these last years been for nothing?
    What would Sam think of her, now? Once she’d glowed with health, love had lent her warmth and vitality but now she felt herself a spent thing, who’d lost too much weight and was too pale. She often had a bruised look under her eyes, which she’d once thought echoed those other bruises … in her heart … Immediately the thought was formed, she’d scorned herself for such sentimental twaddle, but it was too late: she’d already thought it. And it was in any case exactly what she felt.
    But it was an uncomfortable analogy which she skittered away from. She looked sometimes at the album containing her wedding photograph, like probing a sore tooth, and couldn’t believe what she’d once been: slight, even then, with big brown eyes and soft brown hair falling to her shoulders, but glowing and vibrant in a cream silk frock and her grandmother’s lace veil, standing on the steps of Our Lady’s Roman Catholic church – glowing with what she’d then thought was love. Adoring love for Charles, the tall, good-looking man beside her. Looking at the photo with hindsight, she could see that even then he was complacent, though she had never noticed it through the haze of her infatuation.
    They had met when he was standing as the prospective candidate
for the Surrey constituency where she lived, and where she’d drifted in as a helper. She was eighteen, messing around after leaving school with nothing to fill in her time, not knowing what she wanted to do – a condition, had she but known it then, that was fatally endemic to her character. Here she was, still messing around at forty, still being roped in to lend a hand whenever there was no one else to do it, not knowing what she wanted to do with her life – except that, quite passionately, she wanted to live it without Charles, wrong though her religion said that was.
    Her mother had never wanted her to marry him, and within two years would have been able to say, ‘I told you so,’ had she not been dead by then of a secondary cancer.
    After Charles left school, his father had found him a job in a City bank, but though