What choice did she have except to hope nobody noticed? She’d do her best to hurry up to bed without being seen. The kitchen door was likely open. She could sneak in through the porch and soap her hands off at the sink. If anyone came in, she’d rush upstairs, pretend to be upset. She’d say her fella had confessed that he was married. That was reasonable. Or she could say he’d tried it on with her, got too insistent as they’d left the club. And when he’d dropped her off, he’d put his hands inside her blouse, her skirt. Nobody would pry too much for details. It was private and she didn’t want to talk about it. That’d do the job, all right. She had a plan, but now she couldn’t muster up the energy to move. It had to stop. The lying. All these tales she kept on spinning to connect with all the others that had gone before, to make them hold. She was exhausted by it. Nothing in her life was ever stable. Permanence – that’s what she wanted.

Everybody knows he’s better off without you, Joyce. You’re going to drag him under. It was too late now to fix her old mistakes. She should’ve listened to her aunty then. She should’ve stepped aside. But she’d clung on. She’d paid her visits to the graveyard every summer, laid her flowers, promising her parents she was looking after Charlie, when it was her own best interests she’d been serving. Through borstal, she’d not visited at all, and not this year. If she couldn’t fix her old mistakes, at least she could prevent herself from making new ones. Why can’t you be honest for a change? The truth was, she’d been sinking him – one bad decision at a time, one wretched piece of luck after the next – and still he hadn’t cut the rope. She loved him for that loyalty, the goodness of his heart, but it was selfish to allow it. He was volunteering to be drowned. She had to let him go.

There was a sudden balance to her now that came from understanding what was right. She dropped the fag end, crept across the gravel, sticking to the darker edges of the yard. The Vanguard would still be there, on the verge, and she had money in her bag to last a while – until she found a place to settle. She could go north and taste the life up there. Or down to Portsmouth maybe, find work on the ships. The Dorset coast was nice, or so she’d heard.

Back along the track she went, towards the gate. She didn’t turn to look towards the house again, in case she landed on a reason to not keep on walking. She preferred to think of him the way he’d been that evening, in the hours before they’d got called in for supper. Hair all clean and shiny, combed. The zing of coal tar soap about him. Sitting at his draughting board, absorbed in work, with no consideration for her presence or her state of mind. Forgetting that she needed supervision. That was how she wanted it to be for ever. Charlie with his back turned and his eyes down on his paper, drawing with that steadiness and skill he had. In charge of his own actions. Happy. He belonged there, in the company of better people, in the rooms where opportunities were made.