The Tender Winds of Spring by Joyce Dingwell Page A

town.
    Then it began.
    Twenty-one, nineteen and ten (Amanda, Dicky and Sukey) added up to fifty gifts to be bought. In half an afternoon. With each gift had to go a card, and a different card, and no two presents, of course, must be the same.
    Different wrapping paper ... (would Dicky’s friend John really take to Welcome to the new baby that Dicky had chosen without reading first, but then the parcel contained trick matches and a false moustache, so all might be well.)
    Amanda meanwhile had bought false eyelashes, a startling lipstick that no school would permit, and ‘parfum’. She asked each time for Parfum. ‘It smells better than scent,’ she informed Jo. That was the lovely thing about it all—the children were actually confiding. Not Sukey. Not quite yet. Sukey’s presents, too, baffled Jo. She had bought her best friend Karen coloured toilet paper and a plug of tobacco.
    The shops were beginning to put up their grilles when the money ran out and they agreed to come home. Jo sighed with relief, a relief that lasted for exactly one block.
    ‘Stop the car!’ squealed Amanda in agony.
    ‘Darling, are you sick?’ asked Jo.
    Amanda had the book and pencil on her lap, and she looked up in pain at Jo.
    ‘I’ve spent two cents more on Catherine. It has to be the same as Janet, Lynda, Miranda—’
    ‘But, darling—’
    ‘Oh, I couldn’t, I couldn’t! It would be awful. I’d die of shame. Could you go back?’
    ‘They’ll be closed.’
    ‘They mightn’t be, they were only putting out the cages.’
    ‘Grilles. But—’
    ‘Please. Please !’
    This was a moment of breakthrough, and all at once Jo recognised it.
    ‘Yes,’ she smiled, ‘we’ll go back.’
    Bringing the others up to what Amanda had spent on Catherine (through a loan from Jo) sometimes made them more than Catherine. It all had to be cleverly adjusted, and it was all very involved, but at last it was done, and by that time the shop attendant had a strange look.
    Jo had a strange look, too, but she felt absurdly happy, almost lightheaded. They came out of the store and the thankful proprietor turned a key.
    Amanda had asked Jo to try on a sample lipstick she intended to give to Lynda now that the agreed amounts had been changed. Only it hadn’t stopped at one sample lipstick, it had grown to many. Jo had forgotten how many, but she was very conscious of the rainbow she wore as Gavin came out of his office at the same time as she and the children emerged from the store. She was aware of her ruffled hair ... she had been trying on a fishing cap for Dicky. She was alerted to many things ... particularly one of the things. What had Abel said? A case for a second thought. She knew she must look very much like a case for a second thought to Gavin on the opposite side of the street.
    ‘There’s that man who came to see you,’ said Dicky.
    ‘Yes,’ said Jo weakly. She waved.
    Gavin bowed back, then looked indicatively ... and thankfully? ... at the traffic.
    Jo nodded, and returned her group to the car.
    In the back seat she could hear them babbling, arguing, quarrelling ... and not in soft voices. Wonderful, she rejoiced, they’re talking like, normal beings. No, they’re shouting. They’re not whispering together so I can’t hear them. Gee darling, can you hear them as well? But of course you can. Oh, I’m happy, happy!
    I love Gavin, I love Gavin. In her joy Jo included Gavin, too, with every turn of the wheels back to Tender Winds. At the house the children tumbled out and actually raced up to Abel. Not Sukey, though. Not yet.
    Jo followed more thoughtfully. She was sober again now and could not have said for sure how she felt.
    Yet she must have been content, for when Abel, the children in their rooms discussing their purchases, asked keenly of her: ‘Success?’ without a moment of hesitation Jo answered:
    ‘Oh, yes, Abel, success.’

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    But still there was no magic. All the next morning the children wrote their