My Husband's Wife(20)

Carla had been ready with her idea. ‘The lady who took me to hospital, remember, from number 3. She said she would help any time.’

As she spoke, she remembered Charlie. Supposing Lily with the golden hair told Mamma that Charlie the caterpillar was not a present after all?

Too late. Mamma had already written a note and slid it under Lily’s door. All Saturday night, Carla tossed and turned and worried in her little narrow bed with the simple cross above, made of wood from the Holy Land. Poor Charlie was scared too. I do not want to leave you, he said.

In the morning, Carla woke to find Mamma’s eyes sparkling over her. ‘The nice lady and her husband are going to take you for the day. You must be good. Yes!’

Charlie’s heart was beating as they walked down the corridor. Hers too.

Please don’t let them be found out.

‘I will be back as soon as I can,’ Mamma was saying to Lily. ‘You are so kind. I must thank you too for the present you bought her.’

There was a silence. So loud that everyone had to hear it. Slowly Carla looked up and met Lily’s eyes. She was wearing trousers that made her hips look very wide, and she did not have lipstick on. Instinctively, Carla knew this was not the kind of woman who would lie.

‘Present?’ Lily said slowly.

‘The caterpillar pencil case.’ Carla’s voice trembled as she fixed her eyes on Lily’s while crossing her fingers behind her back. ‘You bought it for me after the hospital to make me feel better. Remember?’

Another long silence. Carla’s fingers fell over themselves in her attempt to squeeze them even tighter. Then Lily nodded. ‘Of course. Now, why don’t you come in. I thought we might make a cake together. Do you like baking?’

Mamma’s voice sang out in relief. Carla’s too. ‘She loves cooking!’ ‘I do. I do!’

No school now, Carla told herself as she skipped inside. Instead it was a wonderful day! She and Lily got flour all over the floor when they weighed the cake ingredients. But her new friend did not get cross like Mamma. Nor did she have to have ‘a little rest’ with her husband, a tall man called Ed who sat in the corner of the room doing something on a pad of paper. At first she was scared of him because he looked like a film star in one of the magazines that Larry brought Mamma. His hair reminded her a bit of Robert Redford, one of Mamma’s heroes.

She was also a little alarmed because Ed asked Lily why she’d moved his paints ‘again’ in a fed-up voice, just like Larry’s when he came over and found that she was still up.

But then Ed asked if he could draw her, and his face seemed to change. He looked much happier.

‘You have such wonderful hair,’ he said as his eyes darted from the paper to her head and then back again.

‘Mamma brushes it every night! One hundred times. Cento!’

‘Chento?’ said Ed hesitantly, as if he was tasting a strange food for the first time, and she giggled at his accent.

No one minded when Lily suggested lunch, even though Carla said she did not like chicken because Mamma had had a pet hen in Italy whose neck had been wrung by Mamma’s father on her eighth birthday.

Instead, Carla taught Lily and Ed how to make proper pasta instead of the hard sticks they had in the cupboard. It took a long time, but how they giggled when she showed them how to stretch it from the clothes rack that hung above the cooker.

‘Stop!’ commanded Ed, his hand raised. ‘I have to sketch the two of you, just like that! Go on, Carla. Put your arm through Lily’s again.’

‘Charlie has to be in the picture too.’

As soon as she said the words, Carla knew she should have kept quiet.

Lily’s face grew still as if someone had waved a magic wand over it. ‘How did you really get your toy, Carla?’

‘He is not a toy.’ Carla hugged Charlie protectively. ‘He is real.’

‘But how did you get him?’

‘It is a secret.’

‘A bad secret?’

Carla thought of the other children in the class who had fathers and didn’t have to rely on men in hats and shiny cars. Did that not give her a right to take what they had?

She shook her head slowly.

‘You stole him, didn’t you?’

Something told Carla there was no point in disagreeing. Instead, she silently nodded.

‘Why?’

‘Everyone else has one. I didn’t want to be different.’

‘Ah.’ The frown on Lily’s face ironed itself out. ‘I see.’

Carla gripped her hand. ‘Please don’t tell.’

There was a silence. Ed didn’t notice, his head glancing from them to the paper and back to them again.

Lily’s sharp breathing was so loud that it sent little prickles down the skin of Carla’s arm. ‘Very well. But you must not steal again. Promise?’

A balloon of hope rose out of that heavy grey puddle in her chest. ‘Promise.’ Then she held Charlie up so Ed could get a better view. ‘Charlie says thank you.’

When Mamma came to knock on the door, Carla didn’t want to go. ‘Can’t I stay a bit longer?’ she pleaded.

But Ed was smiling and had his hand around Lily’s waist. Perhaps they wanted to dance. ‘Here,’ he said, pushing a piece of paper into her hands. ‘You may have this.’