A Family Affair by Janet Tanner Page A

time Julia did not argue.
    The car – an Austin Seven – was the only one still parked in the Island. He unlocked the doors and Julia tumbled into the back seat whilst Heather got into the front. Looking over her shoulder she saw that the fight had started up again in the very spot where they had been standing minutes before.
    â€˜You’d better tell me where you live,’ he said, starting the engine.
    â€˜Hillsbridge,’ Heather said, and sank back against the battered leather seat shivering with relief – and something else. Though she didn’t have the time or the inclination to analyse it yet, it felt rather like excitement.
    She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She couldn’t remember when she had last felt this way – well, actually yes, she could remember, but it was so long ago it seemed as if it had happened to a different person, not to her at all. To wake in the mornings with a sense of anticipation bubbling inside, to go to sleep at night picturing his face, hearing that heavily accented voice speaking in her head, and feeling a glow that began in the area around her heart and spread little shivers of warmth into her veins.
    She knew his name now – Steven Okonski – and she knew that he was Polish. That much she had learned from David by questioning him discreetly. But that was all she knew. Since Steven was a miner and David worked in the carpenters’shop there was no real point of contact. Each day after lunch she set off eagerly down the hill, hoping to see him there squatting under the wall opposite the colliery waiting for his coach, and each day she was disappointed. He must be on a different shift, she supposed. And what good would it do her if he was there? He was hardly likely to say anything to her in front of the other men. She just wanted to see him. For the moment, with the thrill of attraction new and exciting, that would have been enough.
    On the night of the dance he had dropped off first Julia and then her. He had been pleasant and polite but that had been the end of it. In the slight pause when she got out of the car – he had come around and opened the door for her – she had thought – hoped! – he might ask to see her again. But he hadn’t.
    That, perhaps, was part of the attraction. Used as she was to being chased and propositioned, the fact that he showed no sign of interest posed a challenge. And yet she had the unmistakable feeling that, contrary to the evidence, he was interested. There was a spark in the air between them, a frisson that she was sure wasn’t all one-sided.
    Well, there was nothing she could do about it except perhaps try to be in the places where he might be too. But she didn’t think he was much of a one for the social whirl of the young and unattached in Hillsbridge and the surrounding villages. She couldn’t remember ever having seen him at the weekly dance at the Palais – and if he’d been there she felt sure she would have noticed him. No, he was definitely different, and the difference and the slight air of mystery that surrounded him helped to make him a romantic figure, the stuff that dreams were made of.
    After a week or so of savouring her new-found emotions, impatience and a nagging feeling of helpless impotence began to set in. If it had been summer she would have gone for walks in the general direction of Purldown, but it wasn’t summer. It was November, and no-one in their right mind would be going for walks in the cold and the dark unless they had a good reason. Heather didn’t want to be so obvious and, in any case, the chances of bumping into Steven in those circumstances were practically nil.
    By the night of the carnival she was close to despair. She was going with a crowd of others, a big loose group who ‘got around together’as Carrie called it. Some of them met up in the centre of Hillsbridge, on the corner outside the Rectory, and gathered