Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page

Author:Kathy Page
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2018-07-30T18:41:32+00:00

So Good

The walk to the surgery: down the avenue to the few shops at the green, right up the main road (unless she caught the bus, but they never came on time), and then left through the residential streets on the edge of the town, would take about half an hour at a brisk pace. It was probably a waste of time, since that feeling she sometimes had was very likely nothing. Still, it was pleasant enough to be out on a bright November day, and everything was going well, apart from Valerie and the lipstick, and the damned news, because if the Russians weren’t throwing their people into camps or pretending to have turned a new leaf, then they were hurling a dog into space, putting down the Poles or the Hungarians, or exploding nuclear bombs, making everyone else follow suit, so that it would never be possible to relax and feel safe. Already those poor people in the Lake District had radioactive milk. But those ban-the-bombers, geniuses supposedly, were lunatics. You could not give way to threats.

And perhaps Harry was right that she shouldn’t listen to the radio since it upset her so much. “Try not to dwell on it,” he had said, lying behind her in bed and kneading the tight muscles at the back of her neck. “We survived the war, after all.”

“I couldn’t bear another one.”

“I’m afraid it’s the way of things that there will always be another one,” he’d said, his hands falling still for a few moments before resuming the massage, “but I also think we’ll be lucky and miss it. Don’t let the thought of it spoil things. There’s not much we can do about it. Just look at what we have.”

Hardly comforting.

Though it was true that the garden had matured beautifully and the air in the suburbs was very fresh; the shops were bursting with whatever you could imagine, and, despite the Russians, they had, as Macmillan rather crudely put it, never had it so good. Best to look at it that way. And then yesterday’s school visit: what a pleasure to sit in the study by Mrs Phillips’ desk, smiling and nodding as they were told You should be very pleased with your girls. Both of them are University Material. An odd phrase, she and Harry had agreed afterwards, proud of course, though Evelyn was uncertain she liked the idea that the girls would be cut up and made into something, curtains or dresses or whatever. “That’s what happens,” Harry told her.

“How do you feel about your daughters undertaking a university education, Mr and Mrs Miles?” No one in the family had done such a thing. Most of them on both sides had left school at fourteen. Her studies in the matriculation class at the grammar school and Harry’s scholarship made them exceptions.

It would be up to the girls, Evelyn said, though of course she and her husband knew that education was generally a very good thing, and that was why they had encouraged them to sit for the school’s scholarship exam.

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