After a moment he must have felt her looking at him and turned. Their eyes met for a couple of seconds and she could see he was curious, meeting her gaze. She looked down, blushing in confusion. He’d caught her staring at him! But she kept thinking about it afterwards. Hadn’t she, in that very brief look, seen the beginnings of a smile in his eyes?

Most of the time they had little reason to talk. She was not his typist, after all. But the next afternoon, when Mrs Crosby was sitting in her usual frigid silence and Mr Graham was at his desk muttering grumpily to himself about something, it was her turn to glance up and see Mr Collinge looking at her. To her extreme annoyance she blushed, thickly, and was about to turn away when he gave a mischievous glance round the office as if to communicate something to her, as if to say: What a shower!

Without thinking, before she could stop herself, Katie pulled her cross-eyed face that she and Em used to make at school when they wanted to be cheeky about the teacher. She saw Simon Collinge look bemused, before a grin broke over his face and he turned away so that Mr Graham didn’t see. Katie was mortified. What on earth did she go and do that for? But at least he had looked amused – she hoped to goodness he’d carry on seeing it that way.

That evening as she hurried home she kept thinking about it, about the way he had looked at her, worrying about how badly she had put her foot in it. She had plenty of other things to be thinking about, like seeing to the tea because her mother’s cold was obviously turning into something worse and she was becoming more and more feverish, and about stoking the fire and washing up. But it was his face that kept coming back to her. That wide smile. She couldn’t seem to stop thinking about it.

Eleven

Vera O’Neill’s cold turned into a nasty bout of the flu. She took to bed in her little room with the pale-blue walls and white window frames, the pretty flowered coverlet flung to the bottom of the bed when she was too hot to bear it, then pulled up again as she grew cold and shivery. Katie, attending to her every need, lit a fire in the grate and made drinks and refilled the hot-water bottle from time to time. There was a wicker chair by the bed with a cushion made of floral material that matched the coverlet, and Katie sat with her mother and kept her company.

‘It’s a good job it’s the weekend,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I’d be worried about leaving you to go to work.’

Vera smiled glassily and said in a rasping, martyred voice, ‘I expect I’d have managed. But I’m glad you’re here. Could I have another sip of water, dear?’

Katie reached over for the glass of water on the bedside table and helped her mother take a mouthful. She saw the muscles in Vera’s neck strain as she lifted her head, and the crinkly look of the skin of her neck and chest, which made her see once again that her mother had aged. Lying there, she looked vulnerable. It was a rare thing for Vera to be ill as she was usually a very healthy woman, but Katie realized she also seemed to be enjoying it, lying back and being looked after, almost like a child.