Kissed a sad goodbye - Deborah Crombie [3]
He lifted his hand to Mrs. Jenkins in the dry cleaner next door to the restaurant, then quickened his pace yet again. He was late this morning, on account of helping Mrs. Singh with her telly, and most likely he’d missed his mates who gathered for coffee at the ASDA supermarket. But it was only fair, wasn’t it, doing a good turn for a neighbor? Especially as good a neighbor as Mrs. Singh.
Smiling at the thought of what his daughters would say if they knew what he got up to with the widow next door, he turned the corner into Glenarnock. They thought he was past it, but he still had a bit of lead in his pencil. And it was hard to expect a man to go without after so many years of having it regular. He meant no disrespect to their mum’s memory, after all.
As they came into Stebondale Street, Sheba tugged against the lead, sensing the nearness of the park, but George slowed as they reached the terraced houses across from the entrance to the Rope Walk. They made him think of the program on the Blitz he’d heard on the radio the evening before. As he’d sat snug in his kitchen with his evening cup of tea, it had brought the memories flooding unexpectedly back—the sound the planes made as they came in for a bombing run, the sirens, the devastation afterwards.
Coming to a halt, he told Sheba to sit. He took the houses for granted now, passed them every day without a thought, but this one short block of half a dozen homes was all that had survived of Stebondale as he’d known it before the war. The rest had been destroyed, like so much of the Island, like the house he had grown up in.
He’d been too old to be sent to the country, so he’d seen the worst of the bombing in the autumn and winter of 1940. The corners of his mouth turned up as he remembered the relief he’d felt when he’d presented himself at the recruiting office on his seventeenth birthday. The real war, he’d been certain, would be better than just waiting for the bombs to fall.
A few months later those nights in the Anderson’s back garden shelter had seemed an impossibly safe haven. But he had come back, that was the important thing, and his time in Italy had taught him to let the future fend for itself.
Sheba’s yip of impatience ended his reverie. He moved on obligingly and soon she had her anticipated freedom, running full tilt off the lead. George followed after her at his own pace, along the Rope Walk between the Mudchute and Millwall Park, then huffed a bit as they climbed to the Mudchute plateau. There Sheba disappeared from view as she followed the rabbit trails though the thick grass, but he stayed to the narrow path that followed the boundaries of the park. The dog always seemed to know where he was even when she couldn’t see him, and she wouldn’t stray far.
When he reached the gate that led down to the ASDA supermarket, he glanced at his watch. Half past nine—his mates would most likely be gone. The sun had moved higher in the sky and he was sweating freely—the thought of a cuppa, even on his own, was tempting. But the longer he tarried, the hotter it would be going home.
Mopping his head with his handkerchief, he walked on. Here the brambles encroached on the path, catching at his trouser legs, and he stopped for a moment to unhook a particularly tenacious thorn from his trainer laces. As he knelt he heard Sheba whimper.
He frowned as he finished retying his shoelace. It seemed an odd sound for Sheba to make here, where her normal repertoire consisted of excited barks and yips—could she be hurt? Unease gripped him as he stood quickly and looked ahead. The sound had come from further down the path, he was sure of that.
“Sheba!” he called, and he heard the quaver of alarm in his voice.
This time the whimper was more clear, ahead and to the right. George hurried on, his heart pounding, and rounded a gentle curve.
The woman lay on her back in the tall grass to the right of the path. Her eyes were closed,