Free Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn

room. Before she knew it he had twisted her around and pressed his mouth against hers; the smell of meat and alcohol warm on his breath made her recoil with nausea. She could not remember exactly what he said after she pulled away, but his tone suggested that she was being a spoilsport, and that all he was after was ‘a bit of fun’. She was not entirely in command of herself as her open hand swung wildly at his face and connected with a smack that actually spun him sideways. When he righted himself his expression was one of such stupefied incomprehension that she felt suddenly inclined to laugh. Instead, she snatched the bright handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped her mouth and threw it on the floor. ‘You will not do that to me again,’ she said quietly, and turned on her heel. She said nothing to anyone as she went downstairs to the staff cloakroom, retrieved her hat and coat and walked out of the shop.
    It was the bravest thing she had ever done, though once the giddy sense of righteousness had evaporated she wondered if it wasn’t also the stupidest. In her haste she had not even collected the previous week’s money. The rent at the boarding house in Camden was cheap enough, but it still had to be paid. She would not go back to Chertsey, where she had lived on and off with her aunt since the age of twelve. It was not that Aunt Beryl had been unkind – merely unmaternal. Aside from arranging for her to attend the convent school and ensuring that she had regular meals and clean clothes, she seemed barely to know what to do with her niece. Beryl liked to go shopping, do crosswords, eat violet creams and hold bridge evenings with her WI friends. It was only in her late teens that Madeleine realised that children as a species bored her aunt into fits. So she had left Chertsey for London two years ago, without regret on either side.
    She had thought, naively, that it would be simple to get another job, but employers demanded references, and of course she had none from Diprose’s. She knew not a single person she might call upon in London. She wasn’t sure if her shyness was to blame, or whether circumstances had conspired in her failure to form friendships. An only child, she had a faint memory of her father, a lawyer’s clerk in Dorchester who had been killed at Ypres in the autumn of 1917. She had been loved devotedly by her mother, a pale, beautiful and neurasthenic woman who was in and out of hospitals for most of Madeleine’s short life. She had died of complications from pneumonia in 1926. If her aunt, living a distance from neighbours, had made little effort to bring out the gregarious instincts within her, convent school actively repressed them.
    On her first or second day there she had formed a bond with the one child who looked lonelier than she did, a fourteen-year-old girl named Veronica whose skin was caramel-coloured from a childhood spent in India, where her father was a colonel in the army. Some girls laughed at the sing-song accent Veronica had acquired and called her a ‘darkie’; Madeleine, however, was entranced by her extraordinarily pretty eyes and slim wrists. For weeks they were as inseparable as honeymooners, oblivious to all, until one of the nuns, Sister Ignatius, summoned the girls to her office for separate interviews. Madeleine could not imagine what she had done wrong, though Sister’s tone as she spoke became metallic with admonition. Did she know that Veronica was actually a year older than her? Yes, she did, they knew each other’s birthdays, it was one of the first things they had talked about. And what else did they talk about? Having never known an adult to express such interest in her, she responded with an earnest inventory of topics – dogs, music, parents, illness, food and (what was inexhaustible) the fascination of Veronica’s life in India. The nun let a silence hang before she asked if there was not something