Lilac Bus Read Online Free PDF

put her face around the door on a Friday night to join them and whoever else in the club bar. Her father would get her a toasted sandwich and put his arm around her shoulder if she stood beside him at the bar counter. Her mother would smile over from the table. They were so delighted to have Dee home again. Sometimes her stomach rose and fell at their innocence and their kind welcome. What did people do when they didn’t have the Burkes to go back to, Dee wondered? Went mad maybe? Went to discos? Got sense? Pulled themselves together? Oh, who knew what other people did? Who cared?
    Tom Fitzgerald was quite handsome; she had never thought of it until tonight when he was laughing at her for flinging her own bag up on the roof rack. He had a lovely grin. He was an odd fellow – you could never get a straight answer out of him on anything. She knew nothing about him, nothing at all, and she had grown up fifty yards from him and his brothers.She didn’t even know what he did for a living. She had asked her mother once.
    ‘Don’t you travel across the country sitting beside him? Why don’t you ask him yourself?’ her mother had said, not unreasonably.
    ‘Oh, he’s not the kind you could ask,’ Dee had said.
    ‘Well then, you’ll have to remain ignorant,’ her mother had laughed.
    ‘At this stage of my life I’m not going to go into the drapery and ask personal questions to the Fitzgeralds about what occupation their son follows.’
    Nancy Morris was sitting in the bus, first as usual. She looked different somehow. Was it a new blouse or her hair? Dee wasn’t sure – she wouldn’t ask in case Nancy would start bewailing the cost of everything as she usually did. And yet she was getting a fine big salary, so Sam had told her. Far more than any of the receptionists or clerks were getting in the solicitors’ office. Maybe I won’t sit beside her tonight, Dee resolved, but she knew she would. Who else knew Sam, who else could tell her about Sam Barry and his daily life except Nancy? Imagine being able to travel home with Sam’s receptionist every weekend. It was like having a bit of Sam with her. It took a lot of the loneliness away just to be able to talk about him. Even very indirectly, even if it meant talking about Mr Boring White and Mr Boring Charles as well. Because Nancy must never, never know that it was only Mr Sam Barry that she was interested in.
    Nancy would talk for ever: she explained the routine and the kind of problems the consultants had, not being able to get beds quickly enough in the hospital, and all the complications of the Voluntary Health Insurance and the forms and people not understanding them. But she knew nothing about their lives outside the hospital. Nothing except what they told her and what the nurses told her, and that was little.
    ‘Do their wives ever ring them at work?’ Dee asked. It was like probing a sore tooth; she knew she shouldn’t ask.
    ‘Oh yes, sometimes they do.’ Nancy was maddening.
    ‘And what do they say?’
    ‘They’re all very nice, they call me by my name.’
    That surprised Dee: Nancy was so unforthcoming and businesslike, you couldn’t imagine anyone chatting to her.
    ‘Oh yes, “Hallo Miss Morris,” they say. All of them: Mrs White, Mrs Charles, Mrs Barry.’
    So that’s what she meant by calling her by her name!
    ‘And has Mrs Barry much of a Canadian accent?’
    ‘Gosh, Dee, you do have a great memory for them all. No wonder you’re so brainy and going to be a solicitor. Imagine you remembering she was a Canadian. No, not much of an accent, but you’d know she was from over there. American sounding.’
    Imagine my remembering she was Canadian? Imagine my being able to forget it! She doesn’t know many people here; she’s far from home; it’s not as if she grew up here and has her own circle of friends; she needs time to make a life for herself; we have to wait until things settle down.
    Dee could never understand the logic of that. If