A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas

his hand. She had taken it, and with her other hand she had pulled her skirt down to cover her knees. She had struggled to her feet, with his arm round her waist to support her, and the tinny tune wound down as the bicycle wheel stopped spinning.

      ‘The bike will mend,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

      Kath had never said more than a good-morning to him before. She noticed that he spoke in a smart voice, like an announcer on the radio. She looked up at him and smiled, although her shin was smarting under a fierce graze and her hip and thigh throbbed from where she had hit the pavement.

      ‘I’m all right.’

      ‘Shall I fetch your mother?’

      Kath made an imploring face. ‘No, please, unless you want to see me get a telling-off.’

      ‘You’d better come in with me, then. That leg needs a dressing.’

      He wheeled her crippled bicycle into his garden and propped it behind the tall hedge. Kath had hobbled after him, up the path to the front door.

      Inside, the house was bare and not very comfortable, but quite clean. Her rescuer made her sit on a wooden chair in the cream-painted kitchen, with her leg up on a low stool.

      ‘Dear me,’ he murmured. ‘Now then, first aid kit.’

      Kath looked around, trying to focus on something other than the stinging cut. There was an old stone sink in the corner with a single dripping tap, a blue-and-grey enamelled oven on bowlegs, an old-fashioned wooden dresser with a few plain plates and cups, and a table in the middle of the room covered with an oilcloth.

      It was shabbier than the kitchen at home and different from it not so much in its furnishing as in its feeling. Her mother’s kitchen was warm, busy, and scented with cooking. This room was cold, and Kath guessed there wouldn’t be much food stored behind the zinc grille of the meatsafe. She wondered about Mr Archer as she watched him filling a small metal bowl with hot water from his kettle. She knew that he was a widower, because she had heard her mother mention it, and she also knew that he did small electrical and mechanical repair jobs for people. That was all. She couldn’t even remember when he had come to live in the corner house, although he hadn’t been there for ever, the way her own parents had.

      When he carried the bowl over and knelt down in front of her, she studied him carefully. She guessed that he was almost, but not quite, as old as her father. He had fair, rather thin hair, with a high parting, and a tall forehead. He was rather handsome, she thought, in a Prince Philip way, except that his face was lined and greyish. He glanced up at her and she saw that he had pale blue eyes.

      ‘You’d better take your stocking off, before I bathe your leg. I’m afraid it’s ruined, isn’t it?’

      ‘I can’t mend a huge hole like that.’ As if he was a doctor, Kath drew up her skirt and unhooked her suspenders. There was a tiny bulge of white flesh above the brown mesh stocking top, and she knew that they both saw it. She rolled the stocking deftly down until she reached the graze, and then she winced. ‘It hurts.’

      ‘Here.’ He slipped his thumbs inside the nylon tube and eased the torn edges away from the oozing graze, then twitched the stocking over her toes. ‘Done.’

      Kath noticed that he had small, precise hands. He washed the wound, dabbing away the fragments of grit, and then lifted a piece of antiseptic gauze from its tin of thick, yellow grease and laid it in place. He finished off the job with a roll of bandage and then sat back on his heels to admire his handiwork.

      ‘Thank you,’ Kath said. ‘That feels much better.’ She wondered if they ought to shake hands, now that the emergency was past and they were looking at each other in an ordinary, social way. But he had taken off her stocking: it had created an intimacy between them that couldn’t be handshaken off.

      ‘I don’t know your name,’ he said, as if he had been thinking the same things.

      ‘It’s Kath. Katharine, really.’

      ‘Katharine’s pretty.’

      ‘I’m always called Kath,’ she said firmly, shaking her head to flick the hair back from her face. It had come loose in the fall.

      ‘Simon,’ he said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Kath?’

      She still felt shaken, and it was comfortable, sitting with her leg up on the stool.

      ‘Yes, please, I would.’

      While he boiled the kettle and set out two cups and saucers, Simon talked to her. She liked the sound of his voice.

      ‘Are you still at school? I haven’t seen you in your uniform lately, so I suppose not.’

      So Mr Archer watched her coming and going. Kath was surprised to find that she was pleased with the idea. She pretended to be offended by the question, but went on smiling at him.

      ‘I’m seventeen. I work in an office, typing invoices, mostly. Not very interesting.’

      ‘And what else do you do?’

      ‘As much as I can.’

      That was how they talked. Kath would tell him about herself and laugh, and he would ask more questions. He was friendly, but there was a hesitancy about him, as if he didn’t enjoy many conversations.

      That first time, she remembered, he had told her that he would repair her bicycle. She had promised to come back a few days later.

      When it was time to go she glanced down at her legs, and saw one glossy and smooth and the other bare and bandaged.

      ‘Better take the other one off too,’ she had said. She had peeled off the other stocking and then dropped the two of them, one perfect and one shredded, into her pocket. Simon made no attempt to look away, nor did she try to be coy. He didn’t leer, as most men she knew would have done. He simply watched her, with an openness that she found flattering.

      ‘I’ll be back, then,’ she had said.

      ‘That’s good.’ He had held the door open for her to walk through.

      They had become friends. He mended the bicycle and came out to see her ride away on it. She called on him again and sewed the hem of a pair of curtains in his living room, where before they had hung down in neglected loops. After the third time she visited him without pretext. It was understood between them that she came when she felt like it and that it wasn’t necessary for him to visit her at her own house in return.

      Kath’s mother referred to him as ‘Kath’s friend’, with a touch of pride. Mr Archer was gentlemanly, he had been an officer in the war, and had lost his wife tragically young. She didn’t, as she often protested, have any idea why he put up with listening to Kath’s nonsense. But he seemed to enjoy it, and it would do Kath no harm to talk to someone with a bit more sense than the boys she was endlessly running off to the pictures with.

      That was how it was. Kath’s friendship with Simon Archer lasted for less than a year. Towards the end of that time Kath’s full skirts were no longer concealing the bulge underneath them, and her pretty face had taken on a pinched, defiant look.

      Kath stopped talking. Busy with the threads of recollection, she didn’t see that Harriet was sitting stiffly upright in her chair. Kath was remembering one winter afternoon, early on, when she had knocked on Simon’s door after walking back from shopping. She had been wearing a scarlet wool scarf, and a matching knitted hat. She had followed him into the kitchen, laughing about something, and had dropped her hat and gloves on the oilcloth. She had taken off her coat too, because she was warm after her walk. Simon had turned from the sink where he had been filling the kettle, and seen her. She knew that her cheeks must be rosy from the wind, because she felt the heat glowing in them.

      Simon put the kettle carefully down on the stove. He came to her and put one hand on her waist. It rested very lightly, curving with the hollow. He lifted his other hand and touched her cheek, brushing it with tiny movements of the fingers, as if he wanted to feel the texture of her skin.