VINCENT'S PARTY

The party was in full swing. Evelyn could hear the sexy blare of the trad jazz almost as soon as she got off the bus at St. Mary Redcliffe and began walking over to the Steam Packet, the pub that Vincent—who was a friend of Evelyn’s older sister, Moira—had commandeered for the evening.

- TESSA HADLEY

He’d decided that they all needed a party to cheer them up, because the winter had been so bitter, and because now, in February, the incessant rain had turned the snow to slush. It was raining again this evening; the bus’s wiper had beat its numb rhythm all the way into town, the pavements were dark, and the gutters ran with water. Frozen filthy formless lumps, the remainders of the snow, persisted at the street corners and in the deep recesses between buildings, loomed sinisterly in the gaping bomb sites. Crossing the road, Evelyn had to put up her umbrella—actually, her mother’s worn old green umbrella with the broken rib and the duck’s-head handle, which she’d borrowed without asking on her way out, because she’d lost her own somewhere. Probably she’d get in trouble for this tomorrow, but she didn’t care; she was too full of agitated happiness. Anything could happen between now and tomorrow.

Evelyn couldn’t believe her luck, that she was going to an actual party—and not just any dull, ordinary party but this wild one with her sister’s friends, in a half-derelict old pub with a terrible reputation, hanging over the black water in the city docks. If her parents had known where the party was, they’d never have let her out, but she’d lied to them fluently and easily, saying that Moira had promised to look after her, and that they were meeting in the Victoria Rooms. She was proud of herself. Who knew that you could be a Sunday-school teacher one minute, asking the children to crayon in pictures of Jesus with a lost lamb tucked under his arm, and then lie to your parents with such perfectly calibrated, innocent sweetness?