The Pearl Thief by Elizabeth Wein

Author:Elizabeth Wein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408866627
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-02-03T19:19:24+00:00

10

LYING ABOUT ONE’S AGE CAN BE A FORM OF ART

Three days after my outing with Ellen I acquired a DRIVING LICENCE. Quite illegally, as I was not yet seventeen (or even sixteen for another month), and it was all down to Mummy. Inspector Milne’s suspicious prying appeared to have awakened her inner Bolshevik, and so I discovered my own lady mother is not above quietly circumventing the law.

‘I wouldn’t do this for just anyone,’ she told me. ‘But Jean McEwen is a good woman and we’ll help her son in any way we can.’

Mummy had the driving examiner from Perth meet us at the Brig O’Fearn railway station. Then she waited on the station platform with Lisette Romilly’s latest novel (in French, of course) for half an hour while I took the examiner for a sedate tour of Brig O’Fearn village. I thought Mother was probably very happy to get a quiet half-hour alone with a book.

She knew I’d pass because she’d already tested me herself. Mother was very thorough. We spent the entire day on the road practising on Sunday; we drove all the way home to Craig Castle and back, had a lovely lunch with Father, and – hurrah! – collected my clothes. Not my trunk, obviously, as it couldn’t possibly go in the Magnette. But proper ordinary clothes that actually fit me. I had no excuse for being Davie Balfour any more.

Driving for twelve hours in a single day, or whatever it was in total, was shattering. I slept most soundly the night before my examination.

Thus, mirabile dictu, I now had documentary proof that I was ‘seventeen’ – apparently approaching my eighteenth birthday – in case Frank Dunbar ever had any serious doubts. I was grown up and comfortable all in an instant, a proper young lady, appropriately dressed, at the wheel of a racing car.

Sandy came up on the train that night. Mummy let me collect him from the railway station when he arrived on Tuesday morning.

He looked straight over my head as he tried to hail a taxi.

‘Sandy!’ I cried.

Surprised, my big brother looked down and found me sitting not ten steps away from him at the wheel of our mother’s motor car.

‘Julie! Great Scott! I didn’t see you!’

‘I’m not as insignificant as that!’ I parried.

‘I saw the car, but it wasn’t Mother driving it, so I thought it couldn’t be hers … Does she know you’ve taken it?’

‘She certainly does,’ I said with pride. ‘She even fibbed to the examiner himself when I got my licence yesterday. For the “Age” box on the form she told him, “Put seventeen – Julia will be seventeen in August”.’

Sandy burst out laughing. ‘That is not technically untrue.’ He bent to kiss me on top of my head. Even up close I don’t think he noticed my hair at all. He hopped irreverently over the side of the car without opening the door, a habit all my brothers share, and rode balancing his worn leather valise on his knees.

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