Free Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans

NOEL. HE IS SETTLING HERE AND AT SCHOOL VERY NICELY. DON’T WORRY ABOUT VISITING BECAUSE I THINK IT WOULD UNSETTLE HIM AT THE MOMENT SO NO NEED TO COME ALL THIS WAY. MAYBE NEARER XMAS. HE SENDS YOU HIS LOVE AND HOPES YOU ARE WELL.
    HOPING THIS FINDS YOU WELL AS IT LEAVES ME
MRS V SEDGE
    He posted it on the way to meet Vee, using a stamp that he found in the kitchen drawer. As it disappeared into the postbox he heard himself laugh. It was an odd sound, unpractised and staccato.
    By the time Vee finished at Mrs Pilcher’s (‘Just one more little job, Mrs Sedge, it won’t take a moment’) it was twenty past one. She found Noel waiting exactly where she’d asked him to wait, on a bench at the south side of the abbey, beside the memorial to the Great War. He didn’t move or speak as she approached, only watched her with that flat, judgemental gaze. Thou God, seest me , she thought; it had been the text on the wall in the outside lav when she was a girl, and it always made her think of carbolic, and drains.
    â€˜Did you wake Donald up?’ she asked, and he nodded.
    â€˜And did he say where he was going?’ she asked. He shook his head. The fingermark on his cheek had faded to a shapeless blotch.
    She took a ginger snap out of her bag and held it out to him. ‘Mrs Pilcher baked these, you can have one. Only you need to limp,’ she said. Noel stared at her, open-mouthed. ‘Because of your bad leg,’ she added. ‘And if I talk to anyone you’re not to say anything at all. Understand?’ He nodded, and inserted the biscuit without thanks.
    â€˜Come along, then,’ she said.
    He limped steadily. On the Watford platform at Abbey station, they bumped into Mrs Farrell, the butcher’s wife, and Vee was able to say, as planned, ‘I’m just taking my little evacuee to his hospital appointment to have a leg iron fitted. Have to look after their health, don’t we?’ and Mrs Farrell had acknowledged Vee with a tiny, icy nod, which was at least better than her usual habit of cutting her dead.
    â€˜I have to do something in Watford,’ Vee said to Noel, as they stood together in the train corridor. The carriages were full of soldiers, as usual. ‘Business. Door to door.’
    Watford was big enough, she’d decided. There’d be no danger of meeting anyone she knew. She was wearing her good slate-grey coat and a hat that nearly matched, and a gilt pin she’d found on the pavement outside chapel one Sunday morning. It had a dot of red enamel in the centre, and looked vaguely official if you didn’t peer too closely.
    Noel didn’t ask any questions, and when they got off the train, twenty minutes later, he hobbled after her without reminder.
    It was as they walked out of the station that she began to get nervous. Ideas fluttered through her head. She thought about trying the row of houses opposite the entrance, and then decided that they were too public. She thought about taking a bus to the bigger houses in the suburbs. She walked past a rowof shops, turned into the first street she came to, caught the eye of an old lady who was washing her windows, hesitated, started to search around in her bag for the collecting box and then lost her nerve and did a quick about-turn, treading on Noel’s foot in the process.
    â€˜Out of the way ,’ she said, and then ‘sorry’. Her heart was stuttering like a road-drill. She stopped by a draper’s to catch her breath, and eyed the display of silk-effect blouses in the window. The pink one was the colour of calamine lotion. She could feel Noel looking at her and she began to wish she hadn’t brought him; the intensity of his stare was giving her the jitters. Until she knew what she was doing, until she’d got the hang of it, she’d rather not have a witness.
    At the corner of the next street, she pointed to a low wall.
    â€˜Sit there till I come back.’ He sat,