Love and Devotion by Erica James

for bed he wondered what she’d been doing out so late, especially as, if his guesswork was correct, she’d emerged from his side of the road, where the footpath was. Surely she hadn’t been down to the canal in the darkness on her own.
    He knew next to nothing about his neighbours; he’d been so busy since moving in he hadn’t had time to get to know them. Perhaps now, after his monumental gaffe, he ought to make more of an effort to be sociable.

Chapter Eleven
     
     
     
     
    It was the last week of August and with only six days to go until the start of the autumn term, Harriet and her parents, plus Carrie and Joel, were meeting the headmistress of Kings Melford Junior School. There was an air of forced jollity as they drove the short distance and Harriet suspected that the children could see right through Bob and Eileen’s attempts to reassure them that there was nothing to worry about. Joel’s anxiety, as he twisted his silky round his hand and sucked his thumb, was all too evident; he hadn’t eaten much breakfast and he’d wet the bed again last night. Perhaps it was a mistake to keep lifting him out of Carrie’s bed and putting him in his own.
    Privately Harriet was counting the days until the children would go to school. Once they were there, it would give her and her parents some much-needed breathing space, but more importantly it meant that Harriet could make a start on finding a job. She’d promised her parents she wouldn’t do this until the children were settled at school and the pressure was off them all. There had been talk of Carrie attending school part way through the summer term, but rightly or wrongly, they’d decided against it. Splitting the two children at such a crucial time hadn’t seemed a good idea.
    Bob parked in an allotted visitor’s space next to one marked ‘Headmistress’. The school was just as Harriet remembered it. An expanse of depressing dark brickwork that shouted from its slate roof tops that you entered at your peril. The Victorians had a lot to answer for when it came to designing schools. Had they deliberately gone all out to make them seem like prisons? But despite its daunting appearance, both Harriet and Felicity had enjoyed their time there.
    ‘Well,’ said Eileen, when they were all out of the car and she was fussing with Carrie’s skirt, which had got rucked up during the journey. ‘Here we are then.’ The breezy note was again too forced and completely at odds with the look on Carrie’s face as she glanced up at the forbidding building.
    ‘It looks horrible,’ she said.
    Yesterday, in a rare moment of loquacity, Carrie had talked about her old school - not the one in Newcastle, which she’d hardly got to know, but the previous one in Exeter. She’d told them how new and modern it was, and how there were carpets in the classrooms and hamster cages and fish tanks in the corridors.
    ‘Well,’ said Bob, echoing his wife. ‘Shall we go in?’
    Neither child moved.
    Impatient to get on, Harriet took hold of their hands. ‘Okay kiddos, let’s get this over and done with.’ She dragged them through the doors, ignoring the dead-weight reluctance in their bodies and the look of alarm on her parents’ faces.
    The headmistress, all bustling efficiency, greeted them with a handshake. Her name was Mrs Thompson. She was a plump woman in her mid fifties with a shaggy perm and gold, hooped earrings. She was wearing a navy jacket that was slightly too large for her, the cuffs dangling down as though she might one day grow into it. Pearly pink toenails peeped through open-toed sandals. Her lipstick was the same colour. ‘And you two must be Carrie and Joel,’ she said with excruciating cheerfulness, pushing her shaggy head into their faces. ‘We’re all looking forward to having you here with us.’
    Carrie gave the woman a cool stare. Joel edged away.
    ‘And now that you’re such a big boy starting school,’ she laughed, fixing her attention on Joel and