Polmena Cove by Mary Lide

Author:Mary Lide
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0 00 647636 8
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 1994-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

The evening of the meeting was wet, a first blow. Many of the Club ladies would never venture out through rain. Then, although Michael had arrived early as promised, he seated himself at one side of the room, burying his head in a newspaper, ignoring the other speakers (middle-aged females, slightly eccentric), in such sulky silence it didn’t take imagination to guess he wasn’t about to give the touch of class or liveliness the discussion desperately needed.

The meeting was held in one of the Club’s new rooms, another potential source of trouble. The walls still smelt of fresh wood and paint and the chairs were upholstered in black leather reeking like a butcher’s shop. Iris had appropriated it from its strictly male possession without real permission and in the hall outside a few men loitered, a group of what Iris’s set called the ‘Home Guard’. The arriving audience had to run the gamut of their uneasy patrolling, the war veterans morosely discontented at being displaced from an area they considered theirs.

As things turned out, despite the weather, despite that unwelcoming honour guard, attendance was more than adequate, mostly Iris’s set, escorted by men who had nothing better to do, leavened by a sprinkling of older matrons who liked the prospect of an evening out within the safe confines of their little conclave. When Lily arrived there was still room for her to slip into a back corner, almost unnoticed. But Iris noticed her. How dowdy she is, Iris thought, as she waved gaily, like a fisherwoman in her old-fashioned hat. She patted the frill of her own short skirt complacently, knowing it was the height of fashion even if not yet paid for. I should have known Lily was there for some purpose, afterwards Iris admitted with something of a shudder, I should have known she boded no good.

Lily could not have seen Michael behind his newspaper, and Michael himself apparently did not see Lily. Only at the last moment, having folded his paper away, did Michael join Iris and the other speakers, positioning himself at the far end of the table and keeping his gaze fixed glumly on his boots. Nor did Iris point out Michael’s sister to him, serve him right if there’s trouble, she thought. She meant trouble in the future, in the privacy of their farmstead, the last thing she envisaged was a public family squabble—again in retrospect she shuddered.

The opening hour had come. The newly installed gaslights were dimmed. The audience grew silent, prepared to be amused. As Iris began her introductions, there was a commotion, a swelling noise beyond the doors which a Club servant was endeavouring to close. They burst open. Lights came on again, heads swivelled. Members of the ‘Home Guard’ were seen pushing their way in, tiptoeing exaggeratedly with a great scraping of chairs and loud apologies as they found themselves seats and displaced original occupants. Squashed against a wall, Lily watched them; like a herd of bullocks, she thought,

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