Read Online We Five by Mark Dunn - Free Book Online

don’t want her to know about?”
    â€œOnly that I shouldn’t wish to make her worry,” replied Ruth. “She’s a nervous bundle of nerves after the recent raids. She gets so flurried sometimes when she thinks of the Luftwaffe dropping a bomb on our factory. I fancy she thinks she’s my mother sometimes, or at the very least a doting gran or aunt. As it so happens, I’ve always been asked to call her ‘aunt.’”
    â€œHave you met with some trouble, Ruth?”
    â€œIt depends on how you define ‘trouble.’ I have nothing better to do. I’ll come and tell you about it, and free up this instrument for those wishing to burden Mr. Mobry with matters of faith and conscience.”
    â€œDo I detect a bit of cheek in that statement?”
    â€œNone at all. I owe everything to Mr. Mobry and his sister. It is only a small inconvenience that they still consider me the same woebegone waif who arrived on their doorstep with little more than the clothes on her back.”
    Jane laughed. “They’d sing a different song if they ever clapped eyes on you working in the main shed. Dressed to the nines in your mob cap and your greasy brown overall!”
    â€œWould that we could wear those shapeless overalls outside the factory. It might solve that little problem at the bus kiosk.”
    â€œWhat little problem?”
    â€œI’ll see you shortly.”
    Ruth left the house at that moment. A scant five minutes later she was standing next to her friend Jane in the showroom of Higgins’ Emporium in Balham High Road. The name was Jane’s father’s idea; he thought it would entice a better breed of clientele for the junk shop (to little avail). The two young women were studying Jane’s sleeping brother in the casual and detached manner of two visitors to the zoo observing a slumbering gorilla.
    â€œSometimes he’ll be out like this for hours,” said Jane with indifference. (This wasn’t the first time she and Ruth had stood over Lyle, watching him sleep when the rest of London was up and about and being industrious and productive. And lately he’d been even more slumberous than usual, using the nightly air raids that kept him ‘up for all hours’ as convenient justification for dozing the entire day away. As if no one but Lyle Higgins was so terribly incommoded by the Blitz.)
    Ruth shook her head slowly and evenly—a demonstration of both disgust and empathy: disgust for Jane’s brother and empathy for Jane, whose burden it was to contend with such a sibling. “I don’t see why you continue to live here. They’ll soon be finished with the dormitories near the factory. You really should apply. Since you’re a charge-hand now, I’m sure they’ll put you at the top of the list.”
    â€œAnd then what? Move to the dormitory and have the death of this human sloth, what also happens to be my brother, on my conscience for the rest of my days? I’m not lying to you, Ruth, when I say that Lyle shouldn’t even eat if it wasn’t for me sliding the plate of food in front of him and then nudging him a few times out of his usual fog.”
    The two friends sat down at a little table close to the large plate-glass window, purposefully out of sight of Jane’s snoring brother. The window, crisscrossed with sticky brown tape, had remained intact after several nearby bombings. (It was kept un -blacked out because from sundown to sunup lights in the showroom were never turned on.) Ruth was inspired on a previous visit to recite, with the obvious nod to Rudyard Kipling, “If you can keep your glass when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on the Nazis, then you’ll be one lucky bloke of a shopkeeper, my son—um— daughter. ”
    â€œShould I put on a pot of tea?” asked Jane. “I haven’t any biscuits. All the ones I like have disappeared from the