Read Online All Fall Down by Jenny Oldfield - Free Book Online Page B

women, you’re all the same. You’re only ever after a bloke’s money.’
    She smiled. ‘Anyhow you should take your mask.’ She went to the filing cabinet to fetch it for him. He ducked sideways as she tried to sling it around his neck.
    There was something about her that knocked him off balance; not physically, though he pretended to stagger across the room. Well, yes, it was physical; her slim figure and wavy golden hair sent him reeling in earnest. He felt again that one of these days he would let this reaction slip, when he should do his best to conceal it. They could all do without that sort of complication in their lives.
    â€˜Righto then, it’s your neck you’re risking.’ She hung the mask from the door hook and went bade to work at her desk, totting up hours for Lorna Bennett who’d recently stepped into Dorothy’s shoes behind the furnishing fabric counter. Tommy’s wife now refused to serve in the shop; she preferred to spend her days dolling herself up ready for her nights out.
    â€˜If I’m not back in an hour send out reinforcements,’ Tommy joked. He set his hat at an angle, one foot on the bottom step of the basement office. ‘
If you want a sack of flour send out three and fourpence
.’
    â€˜Come again?’ She glanced up, trying not to laugh. It only encouraged him.
    â€˜Chinese whispers.’
    â€˜I’ll whisper you,’ she warned.
    â€˜Is that a threat or a promise?’ He’d pushed his luck. He saw her blush and pointedly ignore him, so he took the stairs two at a time, whistling his way past Lorna, who arched her alreadyarched and pencilled eyebrows and wriggled her skirt smooth over her hips.
    â€˜Remember my bonus, Mister O’Hagan,’ she called out over the head of Dolly Ogden, in to price up net curtain material for Charlie’s room. Lorna had all the cheek Edie lacked.
    â€˜What bonus is that, Lorna?’
    â€˜Danger money, for staying open like the Windmill Theatre. You know, “We never close!” ’ She’d taken to ignoring the warning sirens, like many of her friends. And now she resented all the business with identity and ration cards. It made everything so drab. She was even having to consider using curtain fabric from the shop to make herself a new dress.
    â€˜Pigs might fly.’ Tommy sniffed and went out. His trip to the bank might take in the market at the back of the cathedral, where he would see what he could pick up on the sly. He didn’t mind doing his best for the girls who worked for him; they, at least, would appreciate his efforts.
    He came back with the wages and a pair of nylon stockings each for Lorna and Edie.
    â€˜You’ll never guess what I heard,’ he told Jimmie, just come into the shop from his job serving petrol outside Powells. His kid brother hung around luscious Lorna like a bee round a honeypot. ‘They say in the market that the whole of the cathedral crypt is stacked high with empty coffins, just in case. You can’t move for the bleeding things, thousands of them, horrible boxes made of plywood.’
    â€˜Cheerful, ain’t we?’ Lorna took her nylons and stuffed them into her bag.
    â€˜No point hiding your head in the sand, that’s what I say.’
    â€˜Well they got it wrong, ain’t they?’ She tilted her head defiantly. ‘Might as well chop them all up for firewood, all the use they’re gonna be.’
    â€˜Touch wood.’ Jimmie tapped the counter. ‘See, wood – coffins – touch wood. See?’
    â€˜Yeah, yeah.’ Lorna screwed up her red mouth and told him toshove off. Meanwhile Tommy went down to deliver the wages to Edie.
    He caught her off-guard, reading a letter which she hastily pushed into a drawer as he came in.
    â€˜Gotcha!’ He flung his hat onto the filing cabinet and dumped the wages bag on her desk. ‘You heard from Bill, I take