Free Rosemary Aitken by Flowers for Miss Pengelly Page B

where they went; talking to Effie was a pleasure in itself. She was so different from the other girls he knew: she had a freshness and a frank good-heartedness which was lacking in the well-bred daughters of his parents’ friends, to whom his mother seemed peculiarly intent on introducing him on the rare occasions when he dined at home. These young women were always perfectly polite and tried to talk about the weather and the world, but they had nothing much to say and seemed much more concerned with how they looked and what they wore. Effie was pretty, but too artless to be vain.
    He would not have minded if she’d met him every week, however cold it was – in fact he had proposed it several times – but Effie remained quite adamant that she dared do no more. He tried again today.
    ‘Couldn’t we meet more often? Now that I have got my duty roster for the next six weeks and can rely on Thursday afternoons to spend with you? It wasn’t easy to arrange you know, and it might not work out so well another time.’ He spoke with feeling there – no-one asked a junior policeman what shifts he would prefer. He’d managed to wangle it, three six-weekly rosters in row, by offering to work a regular late-evening shift that day.
    Manning the police-station at night was not a favourite with his peers – a senior man stayed on duty and awake while the junior tried to snatch what sleep he could on a lumpy mattress on the back-office floor, ready to be called on if required. Most of his colleagues hated it, but Alex volunteered – in order to earn himself the precious afternoon – and there had been an unexpected bonus too. On the quarterly appraisal, for the powers-that-be, Sergeant Vigo had written ‘Constable Dawes (Police No. 663) has shown ability and should be particularly commended for his willingness to take on extra and demanding duties.’ Policeman No. 663 found himself smiling at the recollection even now.
    ‘Pity to waste the opportunity, when I’ve arranged it all,’ he said now to Effie. ‘Might not be so lucky next time round. Besides, think of all the lovely days like this we’d have to miss!’ He spoke as if the day was bright and warm, but in fact it was a chilly afternoon, with a stiff little April breeze in off the sea. They were walking on the country lanes round the back of Gulval, where the high stone hedges gave them shelter from the wind but kept the thin spring sunshine from really reaching them, though it gave a special lustre to the new leaves on the trees. ‘Couldn’t we make it every fortnight, perhaps?’
    Effie had taken a fancy for picking violets and had brought a basket with her so she could take some home – doubtless to give herself a visible excuse for wandering down lanes if ever Mrs Thatchell got to hear of it. She turned away from him on the pretence of plucking another fragile bloom from a tiny crevice in the wall. ‘Alex, I can’t – I keep on telling you. If Mrs Thatchell gave me any other afternoon – like she did the first time that we met – of course I’d jump at it. But she doesn’t usually have meetings with the bank, so it has to be a Thursday and they expect me home, and even as it is I often miss my only opportunity of seeing Pa. Besides, if we met more often,’ she turned slightly pink, ‘I’d never hear the last of it from Uncle Joe, he’s always asking questions as it is, wanting to know where I went and what I did.’
    ‘And what do you tell him?’
    ‘The truth – that I have been out walking with a friend, although,’ she giggled, ‘I let them think that it’s a girl. That’s bad enough, to hear my Uncle Joe go on, grumbling that I haven’t brought my money home that week.’
    She didn’t say so, but he was fairly sure that her aunt and uncle scolded her to death every time she ‘wasted’ an afternoon like this. She did make a contribution to the family purse, he knew – and no doubt they were concerned if that was late.
    ‘Why don’t