Meanwhile, she tried not to breathe too deeply and snuggled up against Fliss’s shoulder.
“Here!” As if reading her thoughts, Fliss passed her the handkerchief she had sprinkled with Chanel. “Have a whiff of this.”
Edie smiled as the rich, musky scent of the perfume filled her nostrils. She’d felt so cross with Fliss earlier, for not hurrying while the siren sounded and forgetting to make tea – the sort of practical things that everybody else’s mothers always seemed to do – but now she couldn’t think of anything better than having a squirt of exotic French perfume to sniff.
“Trust you to think of it!” she whispered as Fliss stroked her hair.
None of the other girls at school had mothers anything at all like Fliss. Even though she was at least ten years older than most of them, she seemed far more glamorous. They smelt of sickly-sweet lily-of-the-valley scent or plain carbolic soap – not expensive French perfume.
“My mother doesn’t approve of French perfume,” Edie’s form captain, Olive Paterson, had said once. “Nor red lipstick.”
“Oh!” Edie had just nodded. But inside she felt as if she’d been punched. She knew that what Olive was really saying was that her mother did not approve of Fliss.
Fliss wasn’t married. She never had been. Not even when Edie was born. She had always raised her alone, just the two of them.
And if Edie ever tried to find out anything about her father, all Fliss would ever say was that he had been “no good”. “He fled like the wind as soon as I told him I was expecting his baby. If he’s foolish enough not to want to be part of our lives, my darling, then we don’t need him! We’re Fliss and Edie – just fine by ourselves.”
And they were fine … mostly. But, as fine and happy as they were, Edie would still have liked to know more about her disappearing father. She wished there was a photograph at least, so she could see his face and imagine him sometimes. Or a name. She didn’t even have that. No one knew who he was – except Fliss of course. And maybe Aunt Roberta.
Once, a year or so ago – before the war – when she’d thought Olive Paterson was going to be her best friend at school, Edie had tried to explain. “I don’t have a father, you see. Not really,” she began.
But Olive had laughed so hard she nearly fell off her chair.
“Of course you’ve got a father, Edie,” Olive sneered. “Everyone has a father, otherwise you wouldn’t have been born.”
“I know that,” blundered Edie. “It’s just that mine is… ” She searched her mind, trying to come up with the right thing to say. “Mine has been mislaid!” Edie beamed, delighted to have thought of such a grown-up way of putting it.
“Mislaid?” Olive laughed louder than ever. “You make him sound like a tatty old umbrella that’s been left on a train. Why don’t you go to the lost property office at Waterloo Station and see if somebody’s handed him in there?” Then she ran out into the playground screaming with laughter. For weeks after that, Olive and most of the rest of her form referred to Edie as Edith Umbrella.
Yet, if the girls in her class were bad, their mothers were far worse. They were always looking down their noses at her, and Edie had even overheard two of them whispering about her at the school carol concert last year.
“That’s the little girl who was born out of wedlock,” said one, pointing at her from behind her hymn book. “She lives alone with her unmarried mother.”
“No better than a stray cat on the street,” hissed the other.
Edie’s eyes had stung with tears, but she wouldn’t let herself cry. It would have seemed unfair to Fliss somehow. She always tried her best to be a good mother, even if she was a little disorganized and never sewed Edie’s name tapes on and burnt the cakes she’d baked for harvest festival. But there were so many other things she was good at – like flying aeroplanes and telling stories and making Edie laugh.
It didn’t matter now, anyway. School was going to close after Easter because there weren’t enough girls to keep it going any more. Olive Paterson and her family had left London as soon as war broke out. They’d gone to live in their big manor house somewhere in Wiltshire.
Good riddance! thought Edie. She wouldn’t miss Olive or her snooty friends one little bit.
Lots of the other girls had gone away too, the rich ones to their own country houses or to boarding schools, far away from the bombs. A few had joined local evacuees being shipped off to farms and villages. But Fliss had promised she wouldn’t send Edie away. They would stay here together and muddle through somehow.
“Close your eyes,” Fliss whispered now, waving the scented hankie under Edie’s nose. “Smell this and imagine we are not in this horrid old Tube station after all … we’re in the Café de Paris.”
“Oh, I wish
