Crooked Heart Read Online Free PDF

stared out of the kitchen window as the children straggled past.
    â€˜Vaccies,’ she said. ‘Did I tell you, I saw them in town this morning? They were sending them into the Mason’s Hall and that councillor with all the yellow hair who was so bloody—so rude to me last week, he was standing by the door, patting their heads as they went up the steps. Anything to get his picture in the paper.’ And nits, with any luck.
    The children had been fresh off the train, then, excited andshrill; now only a very few were left unclaimed. Vee watched them trudge along the lane. One of them was yawning, another scowling, a third stopped mid-stride and sneezed messily. The Seven Dwarfs, she thought – there was even a jug-eared simpleton, limping along in the rear. Only the billeting officer, thirty years too old and a yard too wide for Snow White, spoiled the illusion.
    â€˜She’ll be trying Green End Cottages next,’ said Vee. ‘Irene Fletcher took three last year but they’ve all gone back to London. Not that I blame them – give me a choice between Irene Fletcher and a bomb and I know which I’d go for.’
    From behind her rose a hum of eerie sweetness, like a musical saw, and Vee turned to see her mother at the table, pen poised above a half-written letter, her face tilted towards the wireless. She was wearing headphones, the wire drooping at knee-height across the kitchen.
    â€˜Singing along, are you?’ asked Vee. ‘That’s nice.’
    She turned back to the sink, spirits only briefly buoyed by the sight of the old dear enjoying herself. She was feeling irritated, and she knew why.
    There were one or two people that Vee tried very hard not to think about: that blond councillor for a start, who’d been stopping people in the street, asking them to sign up for National Savings Week, and who had shouted out to Vee in front of everybody that she was being unpatriotic when she ran across Holywell Hill in order to avoid him. Savings . She could almost have laughed.
    And that foreman at the Ballito factory, who made her wince with rage and humiliation every time she pictured him. And her current landlord, Mr Croxton of Croxton Scrap Metals, with his nasty comments (‘Can you inform your lump of a son, Mrs Sedge, that the words “regular patrol of the premises” don’t mean “sit on your arse for ten hours”’). And Ezra Rigg, who called himself a rates collector but was just a bully boy, plain andsimple, and Vic Allerby and his ‘nice little jobs’ as if she might actually enjoy shredding her fingers on cut-price fancy work, and Mrs Pilcher, who’d told Vee the bare-faced lie that she only needed some ‘light cleaning’ four times a week, and Mr Farrell the butcher (‘I am not a charity, Mrs Sedge’), and that customer at the scarves counter of Harpenden Woolworth’s who just couldn’t bring herself to mind her own business, and of course Irene Fletcher at Green End cottages. And now Irene had spilled into her thoughts and was fizzing away like a pinch of liver salts.
    They’d bumped into each other on the platform at St Albans City station, the previous Thursday. ‘Ooh, fancy seeing you here again,’ Irene had said to her. ‘Back to visit your Uncle Clive in hospital, are you?’ Which was the excuse Vee had given when they’d met the week before, though she’d actually been on her way to Luton to see whether it might be the place to carry out a little money-spinning idea she’d had. ‘And don’t you look smart,’ Irene had added, fixing her with eyes like steel press-studs. ‘Lucky old Uncle Clive, that’s what I say. What did you tell me was wrong with him?’
    â€˜Ulcers.’
    â€˜Oh, not a bladder stone like last week then?’
    â€˜All sorts,’ Vee had said, rather wildly. When the train had arrived, she’d locked herself in the