Veil of Darkness by Gillian White

authorities can tell him nothing simply because they don’t know anything. All she told them on the last day she delivered the children was that they were going on holiday. He knows nothing about the centre, but he’d get short shrift from there if he did. Kirsty left work without giving the required one week’s notice… she rang up and said she was sick.
    Whenever she thinks of him she goes cold.
    But she has friends, real friends at last.
    Close as chums in a Blyton novel, thrown together by bizarre circumstance—people in cold climates huddle together for warmth and safety—Kirsty, Bernie and Avril are confidantes and sympathizers. They have already laughed till they cried three times, a release Kirsty thought she’d lost long ago. But she doesn’t get to see them enough because of Avril’s office hours, and Bernie stays up until after midnight working in the bar. It is heartening how much they have in common when you know how different they are—Avril and Bernie being ten years younger—Avril all soft, jelly and custard; Bernie a fiery, reheated curry.
    ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ Avril frowns on Bernie’s self-pity.
    ‘How would you know?’ quips Bernie.
    Sometimes, like children in the dark, they talk so long into the night that Kirsty drops off in the middle of a sentence. Her only moans are of Bernie’s sluttish habits—she stubs out her fags on the bottom of her shoes and drops her old pants around like litter—and Avril’s adenoidal snores are as rasping as blasts from a liner’s funnel.
    ‘Give and take,’ says Avril happily. ‘We are family now. We must make concessions.’
    ‘You’re not my family,’ moans Bernie. ‘Prig.’
    On her second day at the Burleston Kirsty had poured over a letter from Maddy and two precious home-made cards from the kids. ‘All is going beautifully smoothly. I’ve taken some snaps which I’ll send next time. Jake plays “Peggy Sue” on the guitar and Gemma is breeding newts for her farm. If those two children aren’t in their element then I will eat my hat.’
    Kirsty had smiled and hugged the cards close, trying to breathe their soapy smell, but the messy bits of glitter and sticker and the raving mass of colours had said more than words to comfort her.
    This evening, after a hectic Saturday and one week after she started, Kirsty takes up Mrs Stokes’s offer and heads for the quiet hotel lounge in search of the promised books. This is a room of antiques and pictures, made fluffy with tasselled cushions. Two elderly ladies reading by the fire sense she is staff and pointedly ignore her. She can smell the books before she reaches them, decaying paper, damp and neglect; dusted occasionally but rarely removed, they are in grave danger of welding together. Far more popular, it seems, is the vast array of periodicals set out on the coffee table, a far cry from those at the doctor’s surgery because every one is up to date, thick, shiny and fashionable. Below the books are stacks of board games, playing cards and jigsaws for use on rainy afternoons, but these days how many kids would be entertained by such simple pastimes?
    Most of the kiddies staying here have gone out to the many all-weather attractions, chauffeured in one of the Audis, BMWs, Daimlers or Range Rovers parked round the front entrance, giant wet lizards under the palms. Unfazed by the weather these hearty, healthy, high-spirited kids go riding, sailing, climbing or walking, never a moment’s boredom. Bleep bleep bleep go their Gameboys in the evenings, and while their parents linger over dinner they shriek around in the indoor pool.
    There are no lightweight paperbacks here, certainly no Mills and Boons among the colonel’s collection. These are jumble-sale offerings, books you buy by the box-load. Kirsty loses herself for a while reading the introductions so many travel books and manly adventures: King Solomon’s Mines and Moby Dick, White Fang and Huckleberry Finn . She