Free To Perish in Penzance by Jeanne M. Dams Page A

thing to another, but she never caused me any worry over the rent. She never brought boyfriends back to the flat, either, though she had plenty of them, I knew. Sometimes she tried to arrange dates for me, but they never seemed to work out. She played about with drugs a bit, too, I knew, but not much, and again, never at the flat. She knew I wanted nothing to do with that sort of thing.
    â€œYou might think I’d have been jealous, or disapproving, or whatever, but I never was.”
    I had been thinking that very thing. I looked at Mrs. Crosby closely, but she seemed to be telling the truth. “You would have had reason, it seems to me. How did you avoid those feelings?”
    â€œPartly, I suppose, because she never flaunted her success with men. She took it for granted. She was very pretty. Well, you’ve seen Lexa. Betty wasn’t quite as beautiful, but if you could see her now, you’d take the two for sisters, they’re that much alike. Betty’s hair was nicer than Lexa’s really, so blond it was almost white, and ironed smooth as satin, the way girls used to do then.
    â€œThere was another reason why I got along so well with Betty, though. She was always so gay—I mean in the old sense—that she brought sunshine into the place. You might say I was one of those people who was born middle-aged, but she was gay and giddy and carefree, and fun, at least on the surface. Underneath, though, there was something else. It was as though she was running from one job to another, one boy to another, trying to find something and never able to. There was a sadness, a kind of longing—no, I can’t put a name to it, but it was there, and it made me put up with her when she was annoying. Maybe it was because she had no mother. I was almost a mother to her, though I wasn’t all that much older. We were very close.”
    She dabbed at her eyes and coughed. I poured a glass of water from the bottle of Evian that stood on the bedside table, and Mrs. Crosby took a sip.
    â€œNow, I don’t want you getting funny ideas. We weren’t lovers. Betty was definitely a man’s girl, and I was, too, or would have been if there’d been any men about that I could fancy. We were friends, and more than friends, almost sisters, or mother and daughter, as I said.
    â€œThen Betty got pregnant.”
    Mrs. Crosby paused. “It happened in June. She’d been to Penzance for a few days with some friends, just having a good time, and a few weeks later she realized.
    â€œIt could have been a disaster. In those days that sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen, and it could have sent her into a tailspin, but it had just the opposite effect. It steadied her, seemed to give her a purpose in life. She cut out all the drugs the moment she suspected, stopped smoking and drinking, got a better job, started saving her money. We began to buy baby things, get the flat ready. She’d offered to find another place, but I told her I’d love having a baby about.
    â€œIt was the truth, too. When Alexis came, she was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I’d more or less given up hope of ever marrying and having babies of my own, and here I was with the most beautiful baby there ever was and caring for her almost as if she were mine.
    â€œBetty left her job for a few weeks to look after Lexa, but of course she had to start working again soon, and then things were harder. Good care for the baby was expensive, and Betty was very choosy. She wasn’t going to let just anyone mind her child. I thought she was quite right, too, but once she’d paid that bill, there wasn’t enough money left over to pay her share of the expenses. It began to be a worry. We thought about finding a smaller flat, or getting someone else in to share, but neither alternative was very attractive.”
    Mrs. Crosby stopped talking, coughed, drank some more water.
    â€œStop if you’re