Coronation Wives by Lizzie Lane

men fighting suddenly hit her. She sat bolt upright. The papers she’d been reading fell from her hand.
    ‘Polish! They were speaking in Polish!’
    Eyes that had been lowered over files in the office she shared with six others turned in her direction.
    ‘Just thinking aloud,’ she explained with a casual smile and a shake of her head.
    ‘I do that,’ said the tea lady, her hair a busy frizz around her dumpling face. ‘Now is that with or without sugar?’ she asked again. Charlotte declined. ‘I knew a Pole during the war,’ said the tea lady, a far away look in her eyes as she hugged her oversized teapot close to her chest. ‘Drunken swine!’
    ‘Oh dear!’
    The tea lady moved on and Charlotte’s thoughts went back to the building site, the two men fighting, two others brutalizing them, and the other man wearing a double-breasted suit. The latter had watched, done nothing and saidnothing, but he’d struck a chord. Where had she seen him before?
    She stared at the dull cream walls as if the crazed pattern of cracking plaster was a map by which she could obtain answers to her questions. Much as she stared, it told her nothing.
    The canteen at Bristol Royal Infirmary always smelt of cottage pie even when it wasn’t on the menu.
    ‘It’s rissoles,’ Dorothea said to Janet as she poked her fork into one of the two crisp-coated items that sat on her plate.
    Janet swallowed a mouthful of cheese sandwich. ‘Of course it is. It’s Friday.’
    Dorothea gobbled away, eyed the greyish bread of Janet’s sandwich, and gulped before saying, ‘That doesn’t look very appetizing.’
    ‘The bread tastes like cardboard and the cheese tastes like soap.’
    ‘So why didn’t you have the rissoles?’ asked Dorothea as she began on her second.
    ‘I don’t like snakes.’
    Dorothea stopped chewing and looked puzzled. ‘Snakes?’
    Janet kept a straight face. ‘Mrs Grey’s sister works in the kitchen and she reckons that with things still in short supply, they put any old rubbish into things like rissoles and pies.’
    ‘Oh my God!’ Cutlery clattered onto the plate, chair legs scraped swiftly across the floor as Dorothea sprang to her feet. Janet caught a glimpse of her face, just enough to see that she was whitewash pale, before she scooted off towards the corridor, the lavatory, and a heaving of recently bolted lunch into the china bowl.
    Janet smiled to herself and murmured, ‘That’ll teach you to leave me to walk home on my own.’
    A while ago, Dorothea had made the mistake of disclosingher hatred of snakes. Never tell people your secrets, thought Janet as she pushed the sandwich and tea away and got up from the table. So far she had only told two people what had happened on the night she’d walked home alone from the Odeon. One was the unsympathetic policeman, a mistake she bitterly regretted. The other was Edna. Janet trusted her not to tell anyone else.
    On Saturday, at three in the afternoon, Janet entered the zoo and made her way to the monkey temple.
    Complete with domed roof and pillared exterior, it hinted at the Far East and dark jungles. It actually stood in the centre of a concrete compound viewed from steps round its perimeter and its occupants squatted in small groups over its roof, swung from its pillars or looked up the high walls with pleading eyes to the spectators looking back at them.
    Janet looked at her watch. Edna was late, understandable having three children to deal with.
    She looked towards the wide lawns where Rosie the Indian elephant was being led up and down by her keeper, a bevy of people sitting on a swaying howdah suspended over her back.
    ‘Aunty Janet!’
    She turned at the sound of her name and spotted Susan running towards her, closely followed by her brother Peter who, bearing in mind the proximity of the elephant, seemed to have adopted a suitably regal canter on Trigger.
    Wearing a dress of sunshine yellow that complemented her brown eyes and hair, Edna brought up the