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There’d be people she knew wherever they went and at least it was supposed to be a good film.
    â€˜The Majestic it is then,’ he said and wondered whether they could sit in the back row. And that made him aware of how much he wanted to kiss her.
    â€˜Hassen you up then,’ she ordered. ‘Thass too cold to be standing about.’
    â€˜You’re such a bully!’ he laughed. ‘I’ll bet you bully the cat.’
    â€˜We hain’t got a cat,’ she said.
    â€˜But you would if you had. Look how you thumped that Victor feller.’
    As they strode off to the cinema, she wondered whether they would bump into that Victor feller and hoped they wouldn’t. It surprised her to realise how much she wanted privacy that afternoon.
    As it turned out, the cinemas had to do without Vic’s custom that day because his bit of a lie-in lasted until his father came bellowing home for Sunday dinner and by the time the meal had been eaten and he finally got to Rag’s Yard, the light was already fading and Barbara had been gone for over an hour.
    That was the trouble with that gang of hers. They were too quick off the mark. ‘Where’ve they gone?’ he asked Mrs Bosworth. ‘Did she say?’
    Becky Bosworth pushed a wisp of grey hair back inside her hairnet and gave him a quizzical look but she didn’t enlighten him. ‘No,’ she said.
    â€˜Who’d she go with, then?’ he insisted, scowling at her. With that foxy face and those boot-button eyes looking at him so sharply, she could be very off-putting. ‘Was it Mavis and Joan and that lot?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Who then?’
    â€˜A friend.’
    His heart sank so suddenly it was painful. She couldn’t have gone with a friend. All sorts of people asked her out but she always said No. It was never just
one
friend. If she wasn’t going out with him, she alwayswent round with her gang, hordes of them, giggling and horsing about. Safety in numbers, she said. The stupid old mawther was making a mistake, or making it up.
    â€˜What friend?’ he asked and his face was dark with suspicion.
    Becky didn’t know who it was except that it was a feller. That much was obvious. You only had to see the way she’d gone rushing off, in her best blouse an’ all. Not that she was going to tell Victor Castlemain
that.
‘’Ers,’ she said.
    A combination of hurt pride and monosyllabic answers drove Vic to insolence. ‘A
friend! Hers!’
he mocked. Some of these old women round here were so dumb, it was all you could do not to holler at them. ‘Which one? Hain’t she got a name?’ A girlfriend he could tolerate. But his head was spinning with remembered images and all of them wearing khaki. No, no, no, it
couldn’t
be a soldier. She was scathing about soldiers. It couldn’t be. Mustn’t be.
    Becky decided to give him the benefit of a sentence. ‘Git you off uv my doorstep, bor,’ she said. ‘You mek the ’ol place look untidy.’ If Barbara was going to annoy him by going out with someone else, let
her
deal with it when he hollered.
    So he had to leave her none the wiser. He stormed out of the alley dark with temper, his fists in his pockets. Dusk was already masking the debris in the yards and the sky was full of turbulent clouds. If he had any idea where she’d gone he could have followed her and seen for himself who she was with. But she could be anywhere.
    There was a squashed tin can lying in the runnel directly in front of his shoe. He kicked it viciously into the wall. Bloody war! Bloody army! Bloody Desert Rats! She
couldn’t
have gone out with a soldier. Not his Barbara. Not Spitfire Nelson. But where was she? And who
was
she with?
    *
    She was in the back row of the Majestic, blissfully warm and sharing Steve’s last cigarette. They were being terribly well-behaved. He hadn’t even put an arm round her