Small Island by Andrea Levy Page B

their cheeks. And then, without warning, she rose from her seat, grabbed these boys, smothered them in loud, greasy kisses while tickling them saying, ‘You good enough to eat – just give me a kiss of that neck.’
    Mr Anderson pushed back the table at the end of the meal and shook his shoulders, clicking the fingers of one hand while carefully putting on his record with the other. Jazz.
    ‘You like jazz, Celia?’ he asked.
    Mr Anderson was a public-works officer – a government man, he told Celia with pride, but who, as far as I could tell, spent every day of the week staring and scratching his head over holes in the road. Celia tapped her foot to the noise that came from the gramophone but sensibly declined the offer to dance. She made no conversation at the table, only smiling or nodding or passing or chewing as was politely required. When we were alone she leaned in close to me to say, ‘But I like this family very well.’ And this family liked Celia so well that Mrs Anderson, who badgered me beyond torment to call her Myrtle, invited her to dine with us on many more occasions.
    ‘Hortense, perhaps you should take the time to know the Andersons,’ Celia advised me. But it was not her that had to live in the midst of their cackle.
    ‘So,’ Mrs Anderson asked Celia, ‘you a pretty girl, you have a young man, Celia? Someone to walk out with?’
    Celia blushed and wisely let forth a little lie: ‘Oh, no, Myrtle,’ she said.
    For it was to me, and only to me, that Celia Langley ever talked of the RAF man she had become friendly with. He had been in the thick of the war in England. He knew not only of guns, air-raids and bully beef but of the wintry winds that blew across the English moors, freezing his moustache hair so stiff that he could snap off the brittle strands. She could talk of nothing else. ‘Have I told you, Hortense?’ she would commence, in that whispering tone of hers, before the descriptions of his eyes, his mouth, his hands, his hair were breathed from her lips in elaborate prose. His voice, she said, lilted with the soft melody of a baritone. Whenever she spoke of him her eyes wandered dreamy, her arms hugged tight round her body holding her together as she rocked from side to side. She had met him in a shop when he asked her, ‘Excuse me, don’t I know your sister?’ And she, forgetting that she had no sister, told him her name. Celia said his face smiled with a hundred happy lines. His eyes sparkled like polished glass, he was charming as a prince. He was a Leo while she was an Aries. This, she assured me, made them very compatible. ‘A Leo man will always want to go far. And Aries women are of a similar nature.’ But what aroused her more than anything else about this man was the thrill of knowing that he wanted to make a life for himself in England. She could see herself finally ringing the bell on that tall house. ‘He wants to return to England soon.’ She would sail far away from this island, safe in the arms of her handsome RAF man, to a place where he had told her everyone walked on a blanket of gold.
    ‘Well, Celia,’ I told her, ‘you must let me meet this man who would take you far away from here.’
    Standing, leaning against a wall, casually rifling the pages of a newspaper yet perusing the contents with a concentration that made him oblivious to our approach, was Celia’s airforce man. Her voice cracked with elation as, momentarily holding me back, she whispered, ‘There he is.’ The man lifted his hand and pushed a finger into his ear. His face contorted so with the effort of digging round this cavity that he looked to be killing a buzzing fly in there. It was when he removed his finger, carefully inspected the tip then wiped it down his trouser that I recognised him.
    ‘Well, hello again,’ this man said – not to Celia but to me.
    Celia, confused, almost squeaked, ‘You have met before?’
    I heard a plain voice – no lilting baritone – when the man said,