Birmingham Friends Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    ‘Olivia?’ Daddy’s voice cut across the chatter of the guests. ‘Have you seen my girl? Where are you, Livy?’
    I loved him so much I wanted to run into his arms, do anything I could to please him. My daddy, my handsome, adoring father. I was all to him, his kitten, his princess. He wanted to show me off in front of his friends. The piano. I felt my stomach lunge and buckle.
    ‘Olivia?’ Kate cried in alarm. I stood retching in the darkness behind the blossoms of buddleia, its drugging scent all around me. The guests couldn’t have noticed.
    Wiping a spot of my mess from my shiny black shoe on to the grass, I walked from behind the leaves, standing up very straight.
    Kate was big-eyed. ‘Here, drink this.’ She handed me her glass of ginger beer.
    ‘Been over-eating, Olivia?’ Daddy teased softly. He loomed over us both, immaculate in his evening dress. Kate beamed up at him. ‘Come on now, they want to hear you play.’
    The piano was my passion. I knew I was good, brilliant perhaps. It was something I was sure of, deep in me. But my music was precious, intimate. I liked playing for myself, and for Kate, not for strangers. But I had to do it to make him happy.
    A semi-circle of them were sitting, polite and expectant, in the drawing room, skirts carefully arranged, on chairs and on the sofa, some of the men standing and smoking, wafting the smell of it round the room. As I walked in and the talk lowered I could hear the ladies exclaiming to each other how pretty I looked, what a darling child.
    I tried to pretend they weren’t there. I walked to the piano and sat down, closing my eyes for a second. But when I opened them I saw Kate had slipped into the room and was standing blushing by the door. I remember feeling aggravated by that. They weren’t looking at her, so why was she all tomato red?
    ‘Tell us what you’re going to play, Olivia,’ Daddy prompted me.
    I looked up. They were all smiling. Lipstick lips, moustaches, rows of teeth. I knew I looked sweet and pretty and small. I was too short to reach the pedals.
    ‘M-Mozart,’ I said. The stammer was deliberate of course.
    I chose something easy and rattled it off, badly. Three sonatas played perfunctorily. I kept my face down, my heart pounding. The music did nothing for me. I wasn’t lost in it. I was outside it and hating those people. Hating them all.
    Of course they all clapped. They had to. I boiled inside. Clapping something bad. Hypocrites.
    ‘Bravo!’ a voice boomed.
    ‘What a lovely child.’
    ‘Credit to you, Alec!’
    My feet took me across the cream Persian rug and out of there, running up the stairs to my room and my sleeping birds. Kate followed me. Moments later I was sobbing, held in her round, comforting arms.

Chapter 3
    Devon, July 1935

    ‘Livy? I love you.’
    ‘You shouldn’t say that.’ Olivia sat up abruptly in her bed across the room. ‘Girls aren’t supposed to love girls. Not like that.’
    ‘Not like anything,’ I protested. ‘Why d’you have to twist things? I just love you. You’re my best friend.’
    Olivia relented and rolled sleepily across the bed again, grinning through strands of hair. ‘Funny old thing. I love you too.’
    I lay back on the firm pillow. I was so happy. On holiday with the Kemps – in a hotel! I stretched and wiggled my toes, the dry grains of sand scratchy between them. The cotton sheet felt delicious against my bare legs. I couldn’t see anything clearly because my specs lay on the chair next to the bed. The light in the room was a blurry green, filtered through curtains which wafted by the open window, through which we could hear the waves.
    Our first full day there and everything about it felt right. The sun was shining and only tiny puffs of cloud shifted slowly across the sky. We had swum and climbed on the rocks all morning while Elizabeth Kemp lay back in a chair on the sand and Alec had taken a boat out. We were now resting to let our lunch go down before