Patrick Parker's Progress by Mavis Cheek Page A

'And your Peggy? How's she?'
    'Starting in Orchard's next spring. In the Modes. If she does well she's hoping to be a buyer.'
    'Nice girl,' said Florence. 'I'll tell Patrick. He'll want to know. He always asks after her. Nice hat too, Ruby,' she added.
    May God forgive you, she thought, as she hurried away. Leaving the elegant Mrs Ruby Boxer standing on the pavement with her mouth wide open.
    Alerted, Peggy Boxer began to observe Patrick as he cycled to and from school. She watched him going in and out of the Library and into Stonor's Bookshop where she wisely left him alone. Only when he went to sit in the Cathedral grounds, gazing up and around at the shell of the new building with its scaffolding, and the old walls and the spire (which he stared at as hungrily as if he could eat it) and the sky beyond, his book discarded on the bench beside him, his sketch book open on his knee, did she reckon it was safe to approach.
    High above her the workmen whistled as she stepped towards her prey. Nose well up, she ignored them. Patrick seemed not to notice her, though what he could find quite so interesting in the scaffolding escaped her when she was, she knew, looking particularly nice. She had progressed from bunny ears and bobbles to a nipped-in waist and full skirts (of her own creation) and she wore shoes that made her much taller and which she tied with a fancy little bow around her ankles. She sat down daintily on the bench next to him and said, 'Hallo.' He dragged his gaze down from the spire and scaffolding and the clear, blue sky and looked at her. Puzzled. She reminded him that they had been at junior school together. He pretended to remember her then, but she knew he did not.
    Peggy Boxer was undaunted. His mind was on much higher things. Different. Artistic, so her mother said. With a good future ahead. After another respectful silence, she began to tell him that she thought this place was very interesting. All that history it had - and the bombing. He agreed. He told her that he was born on the night it was destroyed and that it was a miracle he survived, which impressed her. He saw that she was impressed and decided not to explain that he was actually down in London at the time. He told her that he came to sit here quite a lot, something which she knew but with her own economical approach to the giving-out of information, decided not to say. He liked, he said, to watch the new walls rise, get inside the spirit of the thing.
    'Mmm,' she said. Peggy was game and quite as able as Audrey to appear as if she understood. Then he added, much more understandably as far as Peggy Boxer was concerned, that the Cathedral site was somewhere to go, something to do. That there wasn't much for the likes of them in Coventry. She agreed.
    They sat on in silence for a few minutes more and then she said, quite pointedly, that they had just opened a coffee bar down Trinity Street. Patrick nodded, looking up again to where a scaffolder hammered more fittings into place. The noise rang out sharp and metallic, making them both wince.
    'He's brave,' said Peggy in a sweetly breathy voice. ‘I couldn't do that.'
    'I could ’ said Patrick. 'But I wouldn't want to.' They watched the man flitting around the poles, agile as a bird or a bat.
    'It's taking ever such a long time,' said Peggy, her peevishness echoing her parents and the whole town. 'You'd have thought they'd have finished it by now.'
    Patrick turned on her. 'Of course they haven't finished it yet.' He said. 'Because it's the work of a committee. Not one man.'
    'Oh ’ said Peggy. 'Really?'
    'If we had a Brunel working on that Cathedral,' Patrick said, 'it would be finished by now.'
    'Of course it would ’ she said, imagining a Brunel to be some gigantic machine sending the walls rising rapidly into the sky like a scene from a science fiction film. Which reminded her . . . And she thought, nothing ventured. So she remarked that there was a good show on at the Picture House, a