Free Secrets to Keep by Lynda Page

acquired from a charitable organisation for a few coppers by her mother, but both of them looked smart and tidy, and a credit to the mother who had done her very best for them.
    Aidy then cast a glance at ten-year-old George, his usually unruly brown hair parted down the middle and flattened down with help from Arch’s Erasmic hair cream. The slogan on the label boasted it would keep every hair in place, but it was failing to do so as strands of George’s were sticking up already on his crown, like a peacock’s tail fanning out. To outsiders he came across as a hard nut who was not afraid to use his fists in defence of family, friends or himself, but to his family George was a sensitive, thoughtful and honest boy, fiercely protective of them all.
    Aidy knew he felt uncomfortable wearing the borrowed suit very kindly offered to them for the day by a neighbour, Miriam Liberman, who was well aware George wouldn’t possess one. The suit had been made for her son for his Bar Mitzvah lastyear by a kindly uncle on her husband’s side, himself a tailor with a shop on Cheapside in the market place. The son was shorter than George by a couple of inches and not as broad, so the jacket was tight and the trouser legs finished above his ankles, but regardless Aidy felt his mother would have been proud of how handsome he looked. His face was mask-like, however, and Aidy knew that it was taking him all his strength not to break down in front of the rest of the congregation. Men didn’t cry in public. In George’s opinion he was a man, so he didn’t cry either.
    Next to George stood Bertha, Arch’s arm hooked through hers for support. Despite the heat she was dressed in her best black woollen coat and twill dress underneath, thick black woollen stockings and sturdy black lace-up shoes. Her best black felt hat was on her head, the bunch of plastic cherries that had decorated it removed for this sober occasion.
    Arch, as always, looked striking in the only suit he possessed. He’d last worn it for their own wedding five years ago, totally unaware that the next time he’d put it on it would be for such a sad event.
    The sudden death of his mother-in-law had come as such a shock to Arch that he hadn’t given a thought to how Aidy’s grandmother and her siblings were going to continue without her. Aidy had outlined her own plan to him at her first opportunity the nextday. Like herself, she knew it wouldn’t be easy for Arch, abandoning the home they had worked so hard to make nice, hoping eventually to raise their own family in it when Arch finally got his promotion at work. But in the circumstances there was nothing else they could do. He had put his arms around her and assured her that he would support her as best he could in anything she undertook. Family was family. She had never loved him as much as she had done then.
    Having recovered sufficiently from the ‘help’ Bertha had given her for her supposed bout of constipation, Pat Nelson stood next to her son, black dress pulling tightly over her huge bulk. It was not yet apparent whether she was put out by the fact that only one of the suggestions – or, in truth, instructions – she had issued for the funeral had been taken up, that of Arch being chief pall-bearer, but Aidy knew she would certainly let them know if she was displeased, at the first opportunity. She appeared to be grief stricken but Aidy knew she had been jealous of Jessie on many counts: her still youthful looks, her likeable disposition, and because Jessie lived in a bigger house in what the locals perceived to be a better part of the area. So in truth, Jessie’s death was no real loss to Pat, and knowing her greediness as she did, Aidy knew her mother-in-law would be desperate for the service to end and the wake to startso she could take her fill of the food that was on offer. Arch’s work-shy father hadn’t come, but then Aidy had known that he wouldn’t as the time of the funeral overlapped with the