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see, no matter which pair of glasses she had on, so she normally listened to the radio at full blast – it was company – and read her magazines and wrote in her notebook with her elderly Parker and tried to ignore the aching in her hip until it was a reasonable hour to retire to bed and not think about how she was going to get through another day tomorrow.
    But tonight was different, of course. Tonight the girl was coming. She’d always had a soft spot for little Angie, her brother’s kid. She’d been so blonde and funny and spunky and full of life, and had ended up pregnant barely out of her teens, two babies, dad long gone, and she had rolled up her sleeves and got on with it. The two women had exchanged letters (Lilian always sent sweets) for years, and it was a sadness to both of them that Lilian hadn’t managed to get to know Angie’s children. She herself had never married, but itwas hard to leave the shop, and she’d never learned to drive, and was quite frankly frightened of London, and between the kids being at school and Angie working and all of them trying to keep their heads above water, the dreams they’d had of Hopkins holidays up in the beautiful Derbyshire countryside had never quite materialised. And they grew up so fast.
    So to meet Rosie again after all this time … Well, she wasn’t quite sure what to expect. A bit of a slacker, she suspected. Angie had said she was nursing-trained, so maybe she could help her out with everything. Since the operation … well, there was no getting around it, she was finding life very difficult. Anyway, she wasn’t sure this Rosie could help. She didn’t seem to be making much of a go of her own life. Perhaps she was a bit of a party brat. She hoped Rosie wasn’t expecting too much. After all the bright lights and noise of London, she was going to find Lipton very quiet indeed. She couldn’t think of a single thing to do with her, or even what you said to a young person. It had been a while. She looked at the clock. Another five minutes till the bus got in. She would say her hellos. And then perhaps this girl wouldn’t mind helping her to bed.
    You would have had to torture Lilian before she would let you know she’d been sleeping every night in her chair.

    1942
    If it hadn’t been for Ida Delia Fontayne, it seemed unlikely that Lilian would ever have given Henry a second thought. Although he had lingered … A young man, even an infuriating one, asking her to a dance wasn’t something that happened every day. Lilian was too thin for the current fashion; too pointy of nose and elbows and knees to be considered one of the village beauties, like Ida Delia Fontayne, whose thick blonde hair and round blue eyes and soft high bosoms drew the eyes of every man in the village up to Lord Lipton himself, it was rumoured; and didn’t Ida know it. Mind you, she’d been a general showbox since Miss Millet’s schoolyard, always in charge of the games, elbowing out shy, caustic, wiry-haired Lilian; fluttering her eyelashes at teachers, the vicar or anyone even passingly likely to show favour. They’d been best friends when they were little; Lilian’s father thought she was adorable and would let her have an extra piece or two of fudge, and Ida Delia caught on to the wisdom of this arrangement and started inviting Lilian to her birthday parties, or to play dominoes, or to summer hangouts round the swimming hole .
    At first scrawny Lilian, with no mother and three big brothers and no knowledge of fashion or Hollywood film stars or lipstick, felt out of place and awkward. But as they grew older, Ida Delia took to Lilian’s sharp, funny tongue and clever ways with homework (handy for copying) and for a time they were close. Then adolescence had begun in earnest, like a winnowing of who the boys liked and who wasn’t going to quite make the grade. Lilian could tell, as Ida Delia announced loudly how embarrassing it was being measured up for a brassiere then getting