My lunch sandwich with the dripping that Mrs Mags had given me had been squashed into a blob like a dumpling. I ate it anyway; I was starving. Mavis’s shoe was still there too, rammed in the other pocket, but I couldn’t bear to touch it and sat instead at the upstairs window of the bus looking out over the devastation that used to be Clydebank.
Work gangs of men crowded round houses with walls missing or bomb craters, reminding me of flies swarming on old rubbish tips. Even their lorries piled with stone looked small and useless beside the wilderness of mess and the insides of people’s homes that were on the outside now. Streets like my street stretched off up the Kilbowie Road hill and more of them off Dumbarton Road, black and crumbled and dusty, and when we got to Partick (or Depot I suppose) they put everyone off the bus so we could get a tram like always into Glasgow. Even the tramlines were damaged in Clydebank.
I half-expected to find Mr Tait once I was on the Carbeth bus. Instead I found a woman with a chicken in a box. She was wearing several layers of clothing although it wasn’t that cold, and she smelled funny, or maybe that was the chicken. I sat as far away from her as I could at the back of the bus.
By now it was late afternoon, late in March and I was alone on a bus, which under normal circumstances would have been very exciting, but I didn’t want to be alone that day, not even on a bus heading towards Carbeth and my mum and Mr Tait and Mrs Mags. I didn’t want to be on my own because I needed someone to talk to so that I wouldn’t have to think about our house with no floors and no roof, and the little brown birds fluttering around in it without a care in the world. I didn’t want to think about the rats and the mice and the rotten stench that clung to your nose no matter what you did, and I didn’t want to think about all the things sticking out from under the rubble in the street. I didn’t want to wonder about the names I’d run my finger down in the Deceased book, names I’d seen without seeing and which came back to me now, names which I might have known but wasn’t sure, next to addresses that seemed familiar. All these things floated about uninvited in my head, like the bees buzzing inside my jam jar last year.
But worst of all, I hadn’t found Mavis. I sank down into the seat, like my heart sank into the pit of my tummy. ‘Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run,’ I sang under my breath, and I peered over the window’s edge for rabbits hiding in the hedgerows or the fields. There was a farmer ploughing amidst a cloud of seagulls, and a cart like Mr Tulloch’s at a gate, the horse snorting white puffs into the air. There were snowdrops under the hedges and sheep dotted across the field behind the school which was up ahead. Miss Read was in her garden digging, still in her violet jumper, and the sun spread out over the turnip field on the other side of the road. And in the trees above the field behind the school I saw a deep-red hat with a rim of orange hair bouncing through the dark branches of the trees: orange-haired, red-hatted Mr Tulloch number two.
And I remembered the bivouacs.
‘Stop the bus!’ I shouted. ‘Stop! Stop the bus! I’ve got to get off!’ I threw myself down the aisle banging off the chair backs as I lurched to the front.
One last chance. It was still daylight. Mr Tulloch number two might be coming with news and if he wasn’t, I could walk back to the bivouacs with him.
‘Stop the bus!’ I shouted. We were past the school now, almost at the ruined house.
‘Alright, alright, keep your hair on!’ said the bus driver. It was the same driver who had been driving when my mum came to Carbeth.
‘Stop, stop, stop!’ I said, and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’ when he did.
‘Oh, it’s a pleasure, believe me,’ he said, making the door open. The chicken squawked in its box and the smelly lady muttered something I didn’t care about.
I had a long way to run back, at least a mile, maybe two. I couldn’t see him on the hill any more. There were too many trees in the way.
‘Mr Tulloch!’ I shouted. ‘Mavis!’ (Pant, pant.) ‘Rosie!’
My feet barely touched the ground and my heart worked like a steam engine. A family of little birds leapt out of the hedge as I passed and I just missed a fleeing fieldmouse.
‘Mr Tulloch!’ I shouted.
Miss Read lived in a house next door to the school. She had stopped digging and was standing by the gate to the path that Mr Tulloch was on, spade in hand.
‘Afternoon, Miss Read!’ I said, turning up the path.
‘Leonora!’ she said. ‘What are . . . ? Goodness, is everything alright?’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Mr Tulloch’s brother is coming over the hill with news.’
She followed me up. ‘Are you sure?’ she said.
‘Yes, yes, I’m sure!’ I said, although I wasn’t.
Suddenly there were rabbits everywhere scurrying into the bracken by the burn, and now that we were in the open field, there were only sheep and no red-haired Mr Tulloch on the path, never mind Mavis or Rosie.
‘Mr Tulloch!’ I shouted, scanning the field which seemed to curve away from me in all directions as if I was standing on a gigantic ball. The path rose up before me, familiar now because it was only that morning I’d climbed it. A pair of magpies cackled at me, gossiping about things that didn’t matter, and the burn gurgled round the stones.
‘Maybe he stopped by the tree,’ I said. ‘Maybe he dropped something and had to go back. Maybe if I just go a bit higher. I think it’s harder to see from here than it is from the road. He might be lost.’
‘Leonora, Mr Tulloch walks over here all the time,’ said Miss Read. She was panting too. ‘Are you sure it was him?’
‘Yes, it was him, I know it was,’ I said. ‘I’m going up.’ I left her there with her spade. The spring grass soaked my shoes. Up, up I went until I was dizzy with the effort and dizzy with the height, looking down on the roof of the school, the treetops at the back of it, the outhouses, the farm overby, back along the road. But there was no-one at the big beech tree and no-one on the path which stretched off into the distance, only a woman with a donkey.
‘Mavis!’ I whispered, not understanding. ‘Where did you go?’ I sat down on the same root I had sat on to eat Mr Tait’s sandwiches, and let tears of frustration flow down my cheeks, out there on the hillside where the wind was straight, penetrating and impossible to hide from, even behind that tree.
Miss Read caught up with me. Her shadow joined the shadow of the beech and stretched long and cold across the field warning me the light would be going soon. ‘Stop it, Mavis!’ I whispered. ‘You have to come back to me.’
‘There’s nobody here except that woman,’ said Miss Read.
‘They might be at the tents,’ I said. ‘Mr Tulloch said he’d ask his wife.’ I stood up. ‘I’m going to go and ask her myself.’ I took a deep breath and gazed across at the dark hill where I thought their farm would be, but there was only hill and more hill, no farmhouse or tents.
‘I don’t think so Leonora,’ said Miss Read.
‘If I go back to the flat rock I can find it from there,’ I said, but I knew I couldn’t. I must have walked a hundred miles already that day and everything hurt. I plumped back down onto the tree root and Miss Read came down beside me.
‘Come back tomorrow,’ she said, ‘and you can go over there in the morning instead of school.’
So we sat there a little longer until I found the strength to go back down the hill with her. She gave me a bowl of hot soup in her kitchen and a chunk of chocolate, and went back to her digging while I started for home.
I sucked the corner of the chocolate to make it last longer and to stop the sobs that were threatening to burst out, and because I was shaking so badly my mouth wouldn’t work properly. I had no way of stopping the thoughts that ached like bee stings so I walked slowly, thwacking my feet off the tarmac like the day I’d met Mr Tulloch number one and his cart.
‘Mum. And. Mav. Is,’ I said. ‘Mum. And. Mav. Is,’ and I pulled her shoe out and bumped it against my leg in time. And then I sang, ‘The wind, the wind, the wind blows HIGH, Out pops Mavis from the SKY!’
After a short while I was disturbed by the sound of hooves behind me on the road, and I thought I’d better sing inside my head instead.
‘She is handsome, she is pretty.’
Although I was tired, I didn’t want to meet anyone, not even Mr Tulloch who had been so kind before and might have given me another lift to Carbeth. I thought if I saw another kind person I might dissolve into jelly again, so I went as fast as I could. But quite soon the noise of the cart was so loud it seemed like he’d catch me up if I didn’t get out of the way. So I stepped onto the verge and disappeared behind a bush. Mr Tulloch and his cart came clattering round the corner, the horse’s hooves hitting the road hard. Clearly Mr Tulloch was in a hurry. But his hurry seemed to leave him and he began to slow down.
‘Woah!’ he said, and he pulled back on the enormous reins, just like I’d seen him do before, and the horse and cart came thundering and clattering and snorting to a stop a few yards up in front of me. He was talking to someone I couldn’t see who was sitting at the front, hidden by the milk churns.
Suddenly he started to shout.
‘Lenny, Lenny!’ he shouted. ‘Where are you?’
‘Bother!’ I muttered to myself, he’d seen me, but I stayed where I was, even though there was rain-water dripping down my neck from the bush.
‘Linny!’ I heard, and ‘Lenny!’ and ‘Linny, Lenny, Leonora!’
‘Leonora?’ said Mr Tulloch, who hadn’t known my real name, then ‘Leonooora!’ His voice sang out across that beautiful sheltered valley, clear as a bell.
‘Liiinny!’
‘Leeenny!’
‘Leonooora!’
I tiptoed out from my hiding place.
‘Mavis?’ I whispered.
The cart was shoogling about all over the place now and the churns were clanking against each other as if they were excited too.
‘Mavis?’ I said, louder, a bomb jumping up into my throat and making my eyes hot.
‘Linny!’
A head appeared above the milk churns, and then another one. They had identical hair except one had no fringe and when I got closer I saw that one had blue eyes and one had brown, and one had her thumb in her mouth, when she wasn’t shouting ‘Linny!’ and the other was rubbing her earlobe as if it might come off.
‘Mavis!’ I shouted, ‘Rosie!’ and I ran to the cart and climbed up onto it as if it wasn’t there at all and I hugged and hugged them both, and then I stopped and looked at Mavis to make sure it really was her, my very own Mavis, two eyes, a nose and a mouth.
‘Hello, Linny!’ she said. ‘Why are you crying?’ She looked worried and scared and leant back against the seat of the cart but I grabbed her little hand and pulled her back to me.
‘I’m not crying,’ I said, wiping the last of my tears away. ‘Don’t use that silly baby voice. It’s Lenny, not Linny.’
‘Linny,’ she said, trying very hard.
‘No, Lenny,’ I said.
‘Li-nny,’ she said.
‘No, Le-nny,’ I said.
‘No Le-nny,’ she said.
‘That’s better,’ I said.
She shifted away from me and stared, her little eyes darting about my face.
‘I look funny, don’t I?’ I said. ‘But it’s still me inside.’ Her gaze stopped at the tufts of hair on top of my head.
‘Mum’s over there in amongst those trees,’ I said, and I pointed across the valley to where the huts were hiding in the bushes. ‘But she’s not the same . . . .’
Mavis squinted over the valley. Then she coughed as if she was very thirsty.
‘Why didn’t you tell them at the town hall where you were?’ I said. ‘We’ve been looking and looking.’ She stared up at me, worry wrinkling across her brow.
‘She was in a tent on my brother’s farm,’ said Mr Tulloch. ‘She was with a neighbour from Clydebank, I think.’
‘I stayed in a tent too,’ said Rosie. ‘Miss Weatherbeaten forgot to take me with her.’
‘Tents?’ I said, ignoring Miss Weatherbeaten for the time being. ‘Lucky you!’
‘Did my mum come yet?’ said Rosie, her eyes lit up with hope.
‘No, Rosie, your mum isn’t coming, but Miss Weatherbeaten is. I’m just not sure when, but she will. You wait and see.’
Mavis frowned.
‘She’s not scary,’ I said. Mavis knew I wasn’t keen on Miss Weatherbeaten. ‘She just makes mistakes.’
Rosie was considering this and nodding sagely.
‘And Mr Tait’s not scary either although he does have a stick.’
‘Mr Tait?’ said Mavis.
‘He lives in a tent too and he gave me an orange,’ I said, sidestepping the fact that she knew him as the scary man with the big stick for naughty kids like us.
‘An orange?’ she said.
‘Yes, an orange,’ I said. ‘Imagine that! A whole orange just for me, except I gave some to . . . .’ Oh, dear, the bad boys by the canal.
Mavis twisted a strand of hair round her finger and stuck it into the corner of her mouth along with her thumb.
‘I don’t know if he has any more.’
‘Lenny,’ said Mr Tulloch, ‘If you sit down, if we all shift along a bit, then we can get moving. It’s cold and the light’s going.’
The horse was shifting on its feet, the churns were singing behind us, and my heart was soaring again right up into the sky. I slipped in between Mavis and Rosie and put an arm round each of them.
‘Goan,’ said Mr Tulloch.
‘Goan,’ I said too, and the big horse with the steaming sides lurched forwards making us all scream and laugh.
The sun had slipped behind the hill again and Mr Tulloch started to sing.
‘My eyes are dim I cannot see!’
And Rosie and I joined in. Mavis kept her thumb in her mouth and gazed at me as if I was from the moon.
But while we were singing the ‘Quartermaster’s stores’ I looked down at her and checked that she had both her feet, which she did, and both her shoes, which she did, and I very nearly chucked the shoe in my pocket over the side of the cart, but thought better of it.
‘There were kids, kids, wearing dustbin lids, in the store, in the store!’ I sang, and I nudged Mavis in the ribs but only Rosie sang it too.
And then I just sat and held onto their little four-year-old bodies, poking my fingers into their sides and stroking their necks while we sang about fleas with hairy knees, and gravy, enough to float the Navy. If I’d been a cat I’d have been purring.
Just before the Halfway House pub, Mr Tulloch stopped the cart.
‘It’s back here, isn’t it?’ he said, and I had to tell him that it was really along there, next to the pub. I think he knew that already.
He jumped down at the bottom of the path that led up to the huts, his big boots scratching on the gravel, and he helped Mavis down. Mavis had both her arms, all her fingers, all her hair, and both her eyebrows, but she had bruises on her dirty little legs and scabs everywhere including on her face, some of which she’d picked open so they were red and dirty. She stared up at me, standing there under the eaves of the pub where my mum had demanded to be taken up the hill again, and I gazed back at her.
‘It’s me, Lenny,’ I said. But she only stared, so I got down close beside her and whispered. ‘The wind, the wind, the wind blew high. Out popped Mavis from the sky.’
And I slid my arms around her and we stood quietly waiting for Rosie.
‘You shouldn’t have run off,’ I told Mavis.
She was quiet.
‘Don’t ever go anywhere again without telling me first,’ I said.
Not a word.
‘Not even the cludgie,’ I said. ‘We all do that here, tell each other, I mean.’
And she looked up at me, in surprise.
‘Yes, even the grown-ups,’ I said. ‘Even Miss Weatherbeaten.’
Rosie came and leant against us, which was a nuisance, but poor little Rosie didn’t have a big sister any more. She didn’t have a wee sister either, so I put my arm around her too.
Mr Tulloch left us there, promising to visit us the next day so he could tell my mum how he came to have Mavis and Rosie on his cart. We thanked him and waved him a cheery goodbye. I could hear him whistling in the dark but I couldn’t make out the tune.
It was a long heave up the hill but there were plenty of people to tell on the way.
‘Rosie’s back!’ I called, like the town crier. ‘This is my sister! This is Mavis! Look everyone, it’s my sister!’
‘Well done, Lenny,’ said a lady near the bottom.
‘Mum!’ I shouted. ‘Look, it’s Mavis! Mrs Mags! Sandy! Look! Mr Tait! Look everyone. I found my sister!’
I did a cartwheel UP the hill and nearly broke my neck, and Rosie did somersaults that misfired and turned into backwards ones that took her halfway back down to the road.
‘I want my mum!’ she shrieked in joy and delight, springing back onto her feet, and taking the wind out of me.
‘Mum!’ squeaked Mavis, breathless, puffing up the hill beside me, her hand firmly in mine.
Rosie and I collapsed onto the wet grass, puffing and laughing at the sky and waiting for the grown-ups to find us. But Mavis just stood there looking all around her at the huts and the trees and the yellowy green grass, like I had when I first arrived.
‘Where’s Mum?’ she said. Her voice was soft as if she had a frog in her throat, then she put her thumb back in her mouth and looked at me.
‘She’s here,’ I said. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I told you she was here, but . . . I didn’t want to tell you, in case you didn’t notice, but . . . she lost a foot.’ I waited for this to sink in. Mavis’s big brown eyes didn’t leave mine, except briefly when she glanced down at my own feet. ‘She can’t walk properly. She has to use crutches, like the man we saw last year . . . the soldier? No, you wouldn’t remember that. Wooden things to hold herself up with.’
‘I think my mum has those too,’ said Rosie.
‘No, Rosie,’ I started. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Yes, she does,’ she said.
‘No, Rosie . . . .’
Rosie stood up suddenly and stuck her nose in the air, as if she didn’t care to have anything to do with someone who didn’t believe her about her mum.
But Mavis was still staring at me. She had smears of dirt down her cheeks and a storm brewing on her brow. I shouldn’t have told her about the leg and a little bomb went off in my tummy because of it. I was worried too because she’d been so quiet, hardly saying a word and all the time her big brown eyes shifting about watching everything in a way I’d never seen her do before.
‘Come on, Mavis, and I’ll show you.’ I said, and I took her by the hand.
Rosie lost her huff and came and took my other hand.
‘This is it,’ I said, outside Mrs Mags’s door.
Rosie pulled at her earlobe. Mavis slouched to one side with her thumb in her mouth. Her other hand held mine.
I knocked. No-one came. I turned the handle and peered inside. No-one was home. Rosie pushed past me but kept my hand.
‘Mrs Mags!’ she called. ‘Mum!’
‘They’re not here, Rosie,’ I said.
Mavis dropped my hand and took a step back.
‘Mavis!’ I said.
Her eyebrows shifted lower over her eyes. She stuck her free hand into her armpit and turned away from me.
‘Mavis!’
She got down on her haunches and started picking at the grass.
‘Alright then! Stay there!’ I said.
‘You’re lying!’ she said quietly as if she was talking to the ground.
‘I’m not lying!’
She turned further from me.
And Rosie chimed in too. ‘Yes, you are!’
‘I’m not lying. Let go of me!’
Rosie wouldn’t let go of my hand. I had to force her fingers off mine. They were white with holding on, and her face was red, her bottom lip trembling.
‘Stay there!’ I said as if I was biting the air, but of course Rosie couldn’t stay there and Mavis wouldn’t be left outside on her own. Rosie and I shuffled into Mrs Mags’s hut with Mavis close behind, only dimly aware of someone following us up the hill.
I was looking for my mum’s dress which she had been persuaded by Mrs Mags to swap for dungarees, the better to cover her leg and her foot that wasn’t there. In the pale light my hand found its well-rubbed cotton on the back of the bedroom door, hanging from a nail.
‘There you are. See!’ I said.
Mavis sniffed hard.
She had the sleeve of my coat tightly grasped. I took her hand, clenched tight just like Rosie’s had been so many times before, and I put it on my mum’s dress.
‘Oh!’ she said, and she leant into the jumble of coats and scarves that our mum’s dress was muddled up with.
Rosie wanted to touch it too.
I stroked its familiar material, strangely cold without the warmth of my mum’s body.
‘See?’ I whispered. ‘She’s here. I promise.’
I took Mavis’s hand again. It was sticky with sweat and bogies but softer. She had her thumb in her mouth and was resting her head on my mum’s dress, as if she’d fallen asleep.
‘She won’t be far,’ I said, and we stood there, all three of us, leaning against my mum’s dress, made soft by other people’s coats and scarves, huddling into it, even little Rosie who didn’t have a mum any more; and we stayed there for a minute or two, tired by our journeys and the hills and hope and longing.
We were still standing there when the boys arrived.
Mavis screamed and disappeared into the coats.
‘Go away stupid boys!’ said Rosie.
‘I found Mavis!’ I said, jumping away from the dress. ‘Look! I found my sister! And look, it’s Rosie!’
Sandy stood grinning and nodding, pleased and understanding. ‘Where is she then?’
There came a muffled snort from behind me.
Rosie stepped forward and shook her fist. ‘My dad’s going to get you!’ she said, mainly to bad George.
‘Your dad’s d . . . ,’ began George, but Dougie and Sandy kicked him and shoved him out the door.
‘Your mum sent us,’ said Sandy as he grappled with George. ‘We’re at Mr Tait’s. My mum’s time came when she wasn’t expecting it.’
‘Her time?’ I said. Was Mrs Mags dying? She wasn’t old enough to die. My heart was pounding now. No! I liked Mrs Mags. She was nice as long as she didn’t do a Miss Weatherbeaten.
I dragged Mavis and Rosie from behind the bedroom door. There was a ripping sound as the dress was torn from its hook.
‘Wait!’ I said. ‘What do you mean, your mum’s time has come. She’s not, you know, dying, is she?’
Sandy looked as if he’d never thought of that, as if I’d made him think about it for the first time. Bad George seemed to know a lot more about what was going on, so once he’d thrown Dougie and Sandy off the step he explained things to us, sitting grandly in his Auntie Mags’ chair with his legs apart like the men I’d seen in ‘our’ hut. We lined up in a row on the step with my mum’s dress across our laps.
So it turns out Mrs Mags was having a baby right at that exact moment right in the middle of Monday afternoon teatime, except of course she wasn’t making the tea or she’d have been there in her hut. I wasn’t sure what ‘having it’ meant, and George didn’t know either, and no matter how hard I tried to understand what Mrs Mags having a baby might mean I couldn’t figure out whether I should be excited or worried. (I had heard sometimes people died when they were ‘having babies’ but usually people were pleased and excited.) George said he thought the baby was inside Mrs Mags but he couldn’t tell us how it was going to get out.
And if my mum was helping her ‘have’ her baby, I wondered how she could possibly do that when she couldn’t even go for a wee by herself. And I began to worry because, of course Mr Tait couldn’t help either of them with either of those two things, having babies or going for wees.
‘We have to go over there as quick as we can,’ I said, ‘right now.’
‘That’s what Mr Tait said,’ said Sandy, suddenly remembering, ‘and bring the . . . what was it?’
So we lit the hurricane lamp and collected towels, and bread and cups and disinfectant. Actually I didn’t do any of it. I couldn’t. Mavis and Rosie were so firmly attached to me as to make all movement impossible unless it was in a straight line down a hill, past the Halfway House pub, and past Jimmy Robertson’s bus. There was a candle burning inside his bus – I could see it through a crack in the curtain. He pulled back the curtain and I shouted, ‘I found my sister!’ I waved Mavis’s shoe at him and pointed to Mavis who was trying to get my waving hand back. ‘Hold the lamp over Mavis!’ I said, but Dougie was too intent on making ghosts of the bushes with it. ‘She’s here!’ I said, and Jimmy Robertson gave me the thumbs up and I gave him the thumbs up back and nearly dropped the shoe.
‘When Mavis came marching home again, hurrah, hurrah!’ we sang, and we sang it for Rosie too, and Peggy my mum and Mrs Mags (also known as Mum and Auntie Mags). It kept Dougie’s ghosts away, and it kept our feet moving through the dark. Then Rosie wanted to add some names of her own, names she’d never said before, Chrissie and Colin and Rhona, and I added the names of my friends at home that I might never see again. And we sang Miss Weatherbeaten. But Mavis didn’t sing anything at all. She just stayed close in beside me, as silent as the cold dark night.
And then the shadow of a ghost appeared in front of us and we all crouched together in the middle of the road and listened to it hobble down the road towards us.
‘Tap-tappety-ketap! Tap-tappety-ketap!’
‘Mr Tait!’ I shouted. ‘It’s Mr Tait! I found Mavis! Look, Mr Tait, I found Mavis! That’s Mr Tait, Mavis. He’s not a bad man with a big stick for naughty kids like us, honest Mavis, he’s not, he had oranges. Tell her, Rosie. Tell her he’s Mr Tait. He’s . . . look Mr Tait, isn’t she just so . . . so beautiful . . . so perfect! Oh, Mr Tait I found her! And I found Rosie too. I found them both!’
I fell into his arms and sobbed and sobbed as if I was going to be sick but I knew I wasn’t going to be sick. I was just going to sob and sob until all the sobs that I’d been storing up had sobbed themselves away. Mavis held onto my hand even though it was away round Mr Tait’s side. I could hear her starting to whimper to herself, saying my name with her baby voice, ‘Linny.’
‘Well done, Lenny! What a clever girl you are!’ he said as he stroked the back of my head. ‘Your mum is going to be so, so happy!’
I was so, so happy too because I wanted my mum to be as chuffed as I was to have Mavis back, Mavis who’d got a piece at somebody’s door, just like everyone said she would.
Rosie took Mavis’s hand in a helpful big sisterly sort of way and said, ‘Mavis, this is Mr Tait. He’s nice.’ But Mavis wasn’t so sure and shifted right up against me again.
‘Hello, Mavis,’ said Mr Tait in his soft quiet voice. ‘I didn’t mean to give you a fright and I’m afraid I don’t have any more oranges. I don’t even have any dinner, and I bet you’re all starving.’
We all hummed our agreement and bad George said they’d brought what he’d asked for and Mr Tait rubbed his hands and took one of their bags.
‘Hello, Rosie,’ he said. ‘How lovely to see you again! We were a bit worried about you.’
Rosie was sticking to her story that Miss Weatherbeaten had simply forgotten her, and it seemed to me, in a funny way, to be true.