Birmingham Friends Read Online Free Page B

stuck my tongue out at them.

    Dear Kate. She was so overwhelmed by it all. So impressed. Her family were restrained and colourless. She was always wide-eyed and in love with us, her round face pink at a word from Daddy. He charmed her as if with a magic pipe and she lay squirming at his feet. She was so sweet. Of course she was plump and she had to wear those dreadful glasses, but she was a darling behind all that gruff self-protectiveness. Win Munro never gave her an ounce of self-esteem. She had no idea how to say anything warm or caressing. It was my parents who did that for her. And Daddy was so fond of Kate back then, giving attention in a way that he never normally did to women who weren’t beautiful. But you couldn’t not like Kate. She was full of innocence and fortitude. She’d go to the ends of the earth for you in her tight cotton frocks and buckled sandals.
    ‘Gosh, Livy, it’s beautiful!’ she cried, looking round the garden with her mouth open. The wisteria was hanging in flower and there were garlands of lilies round the entrance to the marquee. The servants were on the run, Dawson and O’Callaghan heaving a huge side of cooked meat on a platter.
    ‘My feet are killing me already,’ O’Callaghan moaned. I hadn’t got the measure of O’Callaghan yet, she was a new one. The maids were always coming and going. Except Dawson. Dawson was a very sensible woman. She’d learned: she lived out and had a small child and no husband. She hung on to her job with us.
    It was already nearly dusk when the guests arrived. Lanterns glowed between the leaves in the garden. Mummy had dressed me in a white bridal frock like Betty McNamee wore for her First Communion. Kate’s dress was pale green and as frumpy as ever, poor thing, but I could never lend her one of mine because she couldn’t fit into them.
    ‘It’s gorgeous, Livy,’ she said wistfully to me. She wasn’t jealous. That wasn’t Kate. She just admired. Her heart was so whole. She didn’t see bad things and I didn’t want to make her. I needed her to believe in us, in our fairy tale, so we could have her wonder, her adoration.
    We stayed at the edge of the crowd, darting to the table to fill our plates. Kate ate, I picked at the food, the meats and sweet tomatoes and eggs and prawns trapped in aspic. I gave my most angelic smiles to those who stopped me and spoke.
    ‘You’re not eating much,’ Katie said, as we sat in our spot near the shrubbery and watched.
    I was sick with nerves. ‘Oh, I’ve seen the food going past under my nose all day,’ I said. ‘Dawson and O’Callaghan gave me some bits to eat. I’ve no space left.’
    We gazed up at the shadowy figures around us, the men in their dark suits and the shimmering, coloured silks of the ladies’ long dresses which swished across the grass as they walked. I pointed to a tall, lean man talking earnestly near us. ‘Neville Chamberlain,’ I told Kate. ‘Look, there’s his wife over there.’
    ‘She’s gorgeous,’ Kate breathed, peering over at Annie Chamberlain, swathed in pale violet silk. ‘Look at that dress.’
    We took in fragments of conversation. There was much talk of the election and the downfall of Socialism, and of riots breaking up meetings of the New Party. Labour’s darling MP for Smethwick, carried on shoulders through the street after the 1929 election, dark and dashing with a red rosette, had soon fallen foul of the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. Oswald Mosley’s meetings in the Bull Ring were now broken up by hecklers, bottles and chairs flung into the crowd by irate members of the Labour Party.
    ‘Quite extraordinary, Mosley’s lot seem to be,’ a voice said. ‘Bunch of thugs. Fearful tribe.’
    Oswald Mosley had become the bête noire , but of course the Tories weren’t complaining. I was fascinated by Mosley. He was so attractive. There was something diamond hard about him, and everything dark: his hair, clothes, heart, black and dangerous as a