For a full week after emergency drill Kay couldn’t stop herself starting and blushing every time she saw a darkly handsome man who even vaguely resembled her pilot. She was angry with herself but she seemed to have no control over her emotions. Then something happened which took her mind off romance, if only for a short while.
She was coming through Cabin Stores one day when she bumped into Florrie Belton, the girl who the previous October had been so dramatically carried into the airport interviews in her father’s arms. The blonde girl was tagging along after her crew when her eyes met Kay’s over a stack of bar containers and she smiled the limpid smile Kay remembered so well.
Kay warmly returned the smile, then stood gazing after her. She felt a great gladness that Florrie had got into Celtic Airways after all but was annoyed with herself for not speaking to her. A few days later she got her chance when Florrie was the supernumerary hostess on her Bristol flight. On turnaround, the two girls soon got chatting over coffee.
I don’t know what you must have thought that day,’ Florrie began hesitantly, ‘but once Daddy gets an idea there’s no stopping him. Not that I wasn’t glad afterwards of course,’ she grinned.
‘I would have died myself,’ Kay admitted.
‘That’s the strange thing. It was like it was all happening to someone else,’ Florrie told her. ‘For ages after the accident everything was kind of dreamlike. Delayed shock, Daddy says.’
Kay correctly divined that in Florrie’s world, Daddy was the oracle.
‘I suppose I was lucky it wasn’t worse,’ Florrie went on, ‘Dickie... he’s my boyfriend... or was then... broke his ribs and was concussed for days. Oh he’s all right now but he was sick for ages. Much longer than me.’
Kay saw that the hair under the hostess beret was still on the short side, emphasising Florrie’s elfin features but otherwise the girl seemed fully recovered from her accident. Since the start of training, she was lodging with a distant elderly cousin of her father’s, Millicent Muldoon.
‘Oh Kay, if you only saw her,’ Florrie moaned, a comic expression in her blue eyes.’She’s a terrible scourge and keeps tabs on me like a gaoler. Every night she has the bolts on the door by nine o’clock and I have to wait till she’s asleep to smuggle in boyfriends. Otherwise I’d never get a court out of any of them.’
‘Poor Florrie!’ Kay couldn’t help smiling.
‘Ah, you don’t know the half of it,’ Florrie confessed. ‘Wait till you hear. She caught me with one of them the other night. I thought she was asleep but down she came - at the wrong moment.’ Florrie gave her wan smile. ‘She’s writing to Daddy. He’ll probably come up on the next train and make me go into a hostel. Daddy’s such a worrier, that’s the trouble. He doesn’t trust me to look after myself.’
At least in her aunt’s house, Kay thought, no one cared what you did.
‘I’d give anything for somewhere decent to stay,’ Florrie sighed wistfully as their crewcall crackled and they got to their feet. ‘Anywhere to get away from that terrible Millicent.’
It was a coincidence that a week later Miss Curran suffered her second collapse in a fortnight and was taken off yet again by ambulance. Like most of the old ladies who occupied Molly’s small front room she had eked out her small pension on a diet of tea and bread and now once more she had sailed too close to the shores of malnutrition.
When Kay mentioned that Florrie was looking for somewhere to stay, Molly cried enthusiastically, ‘ Why wouldn’t she come here? From all you say, the poor child is in sore need of a homely atmosphere.’
Kay repressed a grin, aware that not everyone coming from a rural background like Florrie’s, as well as an over-protective father, might be keen to embrace so soon the very quality of homeliness just escaped. But the more she thought about having Florrie in the house, the more she liked the idea. When she put it to her, Florrie greeted the proposal as rapturously as Molly.
‘You’ve saved my life, Kay. When can I move in?’
Three days later, after a stormy retreat from the civil servant’s house and her crabby prediction that Florrie would go straight to the gutter, the fair-haired girl arrived by taxi and with Kay’s help, carried her things into the house. Two suitcases, four hat-boxes and a new stereo and speakers were transported up the path past Ginny Halpin who was posted as usual, like some moulting look-out bird at the fence.
‘Mind she doesn’t swipe your feller,’ was Ginny’s ribald screech, men as always uppermost in her mind.
‘Jerusalem! Where did that come from?’ Florrie gasped when she saw Miss Curran’s life-size crucifixion picture on the bedroom wall. Although suffering a peripheral tidy-up at Peg’s hands, the room was still littered with reminders of the elderly lodger’s presence. The poster was just one of the items Bill had neglected to include when packing her few belongings into plastic bags, so huge he had overlooked it.
‘Poor Miss Curran has gone to live nearer home,’ Molly explained diplomatically, having insisted on accompanying the girls upstairs, despite her rheumatic knee. Superstitiously, Kay crossed her fingers, afraid that even now the ambulance with the anorexic Miss Curran on board might come screeching up from town.
Florrie soon settled in and became a firm favourite with them all.
By this time February was half over. In the hostess section, wind-swayed daffodils planted at the same time as the prefabs in the hopes of bringing a little beauty where so much ugliness prevailed, sprang in clumps where the dirt track ended and the grass began. On the crowded noticeboard space was continually being made to accommodate more and more of the gaily coloured postcards arriving each day from holidaying hostesses, their brief scrawled messages acting like the sirens’ song on all who gazed on them. It would be March before Kay’s group were eligible for travel concessions and then they were planning to go somewhere hot - very hot. They were unanimous about that.
In the meantime Kay’s young cousin made his Confirmation. Winifred rang inviting them to the ceremony and the lunch after it which she was holding in her house. Even Peg was included - to help with the washing-up, Kay unkindly suspected.
To her amazement when Molly asked Dave to drive them there, he agreed at once.
‘It’ll be an awful bore,’ Kay felt she must warn him. ‘I mean Sam’s fine ... he’s lovely but Winifred and Cahal... Are you sure you really want to come?’ she demanded.
‘How can I refuse,’ Dave retorted with a grin. ‘You make it sound so entrancing.’
Kay shrugged and said no more seeing that he was obviously reconciled to a day of excruciating boredom.
At the last minute Dave’s new Volkswagen developed gear trouble and rather than let them down, he borrowed a van from a friend. It was a battered old wreck, once white in colour, its number plate almost completely obliterated by miles of mud and dirt. On one side someone had written, ‘Wash me, you shit,’ and on the other with a flash of wit, ‘Comes also in white.’
When Kay saw it, she stared in horror. But if it was bad on the outside it was even worse inside. There were no seats in the rear and room for only one beside the driver (which a claustrophobic Peg insisted on having), so that Kay and Molly had to sit in armchairs in the back.
There had been hard frost on the ground that morning and the weather forecast predicted sleety conditions turning to snow later in the day. They rattled up the countryside huddled in rugs against the icy draughts and every time they stopped at traffic lights the engine had a habit of cutting out so that it was all hours by the time they reached Kilshaughlin.
‘Didn’t leave on time, I suppose,’ Winifred said acidly when they congregated in the churchyard after the ceremony. She stared in snobbish disbelief at the van, then pointedly ignored Dave. Not surprisingly when he dropped them at the Hynes’ house, he declined to come in for a drink - he had not been invited to lunch - and roared away without too many false starts to sample the town’s pint.
It was a dull lunch but would have been a lot duller without the wine Kay had brought. Afterwards, she allowed Sam take a tiny sip from her glass while Winifred was seeing off her in-laws.
‘Sam’s been drinking Auntie Kay’s wine.’ As soon as her mother returned, Mary, the sneak, told on her.
At once, Winifred launched into a bitter diatribe on the evils of drink, accusing Kay of corrupting her son. The atmosphere became positively lethal and Kay was only too glad when Dave arrived to take them home.
By the time they started back the roads had frozen solid. Molly had caught a chill, which steadily worsened in the sub-zero temperature. Kay was worried sick as her aunt coughed and shivered beneath the inadequate rug, and was convinced that if the drive didn’t kill her, the cold would.
Up front, Dave feared they would have to stop and put up somewhere for the night. Don’t brake, he kept telling himself, remembering all he had ever read about driving in icy conditions. Grimly he coasted over the treacherous surface, patiently tackling each new hazard as it was presented. He was never so glad of anything in his life when he turned the van into Carrick Road and slid to a stop.
Dazed and stiff, they staggered out on the pavement. Powdery snow covered the grass, caked the gate pillars. Dave and Bill, their footsteps churning the recently fallen snow, carried the armchairs back into the house. Kay, with her arm about Molly, followed slowly.
Considering his lack of driving experience, Dave had handled the van very well, Kay thought. It was to his credit that he had got them back safely. She would have liked him to come in and have a drink with them but when she asked, he said he was flying to London on business next day and had to be up early.
‘Goodnight, Katie,’ he sighed, his face pale and strained. As he began muttering something about an audit at work and more exams coming up, Kay quickly forestalled him.
‘Got a few overnights coming up myself,’ she told him and smartly put the gate between them. ‘So don’t expect to see me.’
Dave glanced at her quizzically and then crunched away over the ridged snow.
In the house Kay found Molly hunched over the electric fire, a steaming glass of punch in her hand.
‘Have some yourself, love,’ Molly urged.
Feeling chilled, Kay gladly obeyed. She carried her drink to the window, where she stood tiredly sipping it, as she stared out at the snowy-mantled garden.