Victoria Line, Central Line Read Online Free PDF Page A

have learned something at the school because she had managed to escape with some ‘O’ levels. And during those two years she must have formed the habit of visiting Miss Andrews once a week, some hundred calls must have been made to the quiet apartment with its piano, its dried flowers, its cabinets of china and its purring Persian cat.
    As an apprenticeship it must have worked, but it was blotted out. By the time Vera had finished, she could type, she could take shorthand, she could spell. Miss Andrews had taught her to smile and to speak nicely. Not in actual lessons, but by example. Vera’s voice was less shrill, her vowels less extreme, her reactions less speedy – so much so that her mother was totally unprepared for her flight from the tenement. It was done without fuss, without argument and without heed to the pleas.
    ‘You’ll come back often to see us, you’ll come home every weekend,’ begged her mother.
    ‘Of course,’ said Vera, and never did.
    She sent her mother an envelope with a card and a pound in it three times a year, Christmas, birthday,and mother’s day. No details of how she was or where she was. No plans about coming back for a visit. No enquiries about the rest of the family. They had no way of telling her, when Margaret died. And no way of appealing to her when Colin was lifted by the police. And when the pound had reduced to a fifth of its value she still sent it. Crisp and green, attached by a paper clip to a noncommittal card of good wishes. Once her mother tore it up and threw it into the fire. But Vera was never to know that.
    Miss Andrews had been too genteel, too ladylike to reveal to Vera what she later discovered to be a major truth in life – that money was the solution to almost every problem. If Miss Andrews had known this she hadn’t thought of passing it on, and after Vera had cut her ties with the family she also stopped seeing Miss Andrews. To the teacher she sent more thoughtful cards, and sometimes a lace handkerchief or a little sachet for her drawer. She never said what she was doing or where she was, and soon, or at some time anyway, the lonely teacher put Vera out of her mind. There was a finality about her three-line notes . . . they said goodbye.
    Throughout her first five years of freedom, which also meant five jobs and five different bed-sitters, Vera still regarded herself as in apprenticeship. There was no time for dalliances like every other girl she worked with seemed to have. There was no money to waste on silly things – the cinema, yes, sometimes, ifit was the kind of film that might teach her something, about style, clothes, manners. Mainly British films, American style was too foreign, it might be outrageous, it might not even
be
style. Lunch hours spent in fashion stores, or in bookshops, reading but not buying the magazines; money, after the rent was paid, spent on evening classes in everything from Beginner’s French to Grooming.
    Suddenly she was twenty-three, and nicely spoken and well informed and living in an attractive bed-sitter. She had collected some pretty ornaments, not unlike those that Miss Andrews had in her glass-fronted cabinet. She knew extremely important things about not mixing styles in her decor. She had learned as if by rote some rules of elegant living and if she had ever given herself the opportunity to entertain anyone she was absolutely confident about how the table should be set and what wines to serve with each course.
    She had never relaxed about her background, and was amazed that other girls, the kind she met at work, would talk so freely about the uncouth habits of their parents . . . and joke about the vulgarity of their backgrounds. Vera would never be drawn. Once or twice when people did press she said that it hurt her to talk about the past.
    And people assumed that there had been some tragedy or some unpleasantness and left it at that.
    Because of her interest in china she got a jobrunning the gift shop of a smart