The Esplanade Café, by Hilary Duxbury

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

I knew her before she had her coat off. She came in out of the drizzle at ten past four, when the café was empty but for two lads from the fairground and the steam on the windows, and she stood shaking her umbrella in the doorway exactly as she used to stand at the front of Form 3B, as if the room had been put there to inconvenience her.

Miss Thurlow. Smaller than I remembered. The same hat.

She sat at table six, by the radiator, and as I walked across the lino I could hear her reading my composition to the class: ‘My Ambition, by Linda Broadbent.’ The pause. The way she said ‘air hostess’, holding it up between two fingers like something she had found in the sink. ‘Girls like you, Linda,’ she had said afterwards, not unkindly, which was the worst part, ‘should aim for something you can actually reach.’

I had not become an air hostess. I had become this: eighteen months at the Esplanade, a pinny with a frill, the bus home at nine. For one hot second I hated her for being right.

‘A pot of tea for one,’ she said, ‘and a toasted teacake, if it isn’t too much trouble.’ She looked straight at me. There was nothing in her face at all. Four years in her classroom, and I had left no mark on her whatsoever.

I could have said it. I had rehearsed it since I was fourteen: the cool little speech, the raised eyebrow, the moment she would remember and be ashamed. Instead I wrote on my pad and went behind the counter, and my hand was so steady I frightened myself.

When I brought the tray she was counting coins out of a small black purse, laying them in a line on the cloth, and I saw that her gloves had been darned at the fingertips in a wool that did not quite match. She counted the coins twice. Then she slid the teacake an inch away from her.

Something in my chest turned over, slowly, like a key in a stiff lock.

‘That’s on the house,’ I said. ‘We only throw them out at five.’ It was a lie. I would pay for it from my tips, and I did not know whether I was being kind to her or cruel, or whether, at eighteen, there was any difference.

She thanked me very correctly, the way she had taught us to. She never did know who I was.

How does the writer show Linda’s thoughts and feelings when her former teacher comes into the café?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Linda
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.