Page 98 of The Girl from the Tea Garden
As they left the tasting room, Jack’s frown returned. ‘You’ll not say any of this to our Olive, will you? Not about things being bad. She’s such a worrier; it doesn’t do to let her fret.’
‘Course I won’t,’ Adela said, putting a reassuring hand on his arm. ‘But wouldn’t it be better if she knew what was going on? Then nothing would come as too much of a shock.’
Jack gave a hopeless shrug. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
Adela worried about her uncle, but after that visit he refused to talk to her about the business and avoided being alone with her. Even a few words exchanged in the hallway seemed to annoy Olive. ‘Don’t you pester your uncle about his work,’ she warned. ‘When he comes home, he wants to leave all that behind.’
So Adela gave up trying to chat to her brooding uncle; he was so very different from the jovial, ambitious man that her parents had once described. She enjoyed George’s company best of all. She went to watch him play cricket at the club and met his girlfriend, Joan. Adela thought she was a bit dull, despite her dreamy blonde looks, but she could see how George basked in her adoration. He took Adela out in the van around his delivery route to the pit villages south of the Tyne, and she stared in fascination at the clanking pit wheels, the coal-blackened miners trudging back from the morning shift and the women dashing into the street at the sound of George’s horn. The miners’ wives were cheerful and saucy and reminded Adela of the tea pickers, who would make ribald remarks about their menfolk when out of earshot.
She went with George to see Hitchcock’sThe Lady Vanishesat the nearby Pavilion Cinema, a former theatre which was still decorated with ornate pillars and busts of naked women. He took her to seeThePrisoner of Zendaat the Gaumont, which Adela enjoyed so much that she went a second time, and she chivvied Jane into going too.
‘Ronald Colman is to die for,’ she said. ‘We’ll sit at the back by the aisle so you can make a run for it if you feel unwell. And there’s a massive Wurlitzer organ gets played in the interval. George says they brought it over from the Bronx in New York. Isn’t that exciting?’
Jane went reluctantly, but the trip was a big success. She didn’t feel any panic sitting next to her chattering cousin, sharing a bag of lemon drops, and was so caught up in the film that she sat on to watch the credits. Sheepishly on the way home, Jane admitted that she hadn’t been to see a film since she was twelve and had never been to a talkie before.
‘I had this terrible memory of scary music being played while a monster came up on the screen. It seemed that real. I screamed and hid under the seat for the whole of the film. Mam was so cross with me for making a scene that she said she’d never go again.’
‘And she never let you go either?’
‘Said it wasn’t worth the risk of me getting hysterical. I know it sounds silly,’ Jane said and blushed, ‘but I’ve always been frightened of the dark and being stuck somewhere where I couldn’t get out.’
‘It’s not silly,’ said Adela, ‘but you don’t have to be frightened any more. You’ve proved you can do it.’
‘Yes, I have, haven’t I?’ Jane smiled.
‘When that Essoldo opens at the end of August, me and you are going to be first in line,’ Adela declared. ‘We’ll stuff ourselves with chocolates and swoon over the stars.’
The next time there was a social at the cricket club, Adela insisted Jane came too.
‘I can’t dance and I’ve got nothing to wear,’ Jane protested in alarm.
Adela marched her upstairs and pulled out the summer dresses she had brought from India. ‘Try them on.’
‘But I’m taller than you.’
‘We can let down the hem.’
‘And you’ve got more, you know,bosom.’
‘Only since you’ve started fattening me up with all your lovely cooking.’
They were reduced to giggles as Jane wriggled into Adela’s clothes and paraded around the room wearing a topee and impersonating a memsahib.
Adela laughed. ‘You’re a good mimic.’
They decided on a full skirt in turquoise chiffon with one of Jane’s white short-sleeved blouses, a wide pink belt and a matching diaphanous scarf, which Adela pinned around Jane’s shoulders, and clipped a mother-of-pearl hairslide into her short dark hair. Adela allowed Jane to borrow her deep pink lipstick.
‘You look gorgeous,’ Adela gasped. Jane blushed at her image in the mirror, amazed at the poised dark-eyed woman who gazed steadily back at her.
Adela put on a bright yellow frock that accentuated her curves.
‘I’ll have to watch myself with your pies,’ she joked, ‘or this dress won’t fit me much longer.’
She tied her hair in a golden snood, put bangles on her wrists and dark red lipstick on her full mouth.
Olive was sent into a panic when she saw them ready to go out.
‘Lipstick!’ she shrieked. ‘Get that off now, do you hear?’
