LITMIR.BIZ

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have felt better. Amy knew what her friend was fretting over.

      ‘You can’t do anything about Hannah,’ she said. ‘She’s a married woman now.’

      ‘I know that, Amy, but you must admit she was peculiar over Christmas, they all were.’

      Amy knew they were. She and Tom had come over in the evening for a bit of tea and you could have cut the atmosphere between Hannah and Arthur with a knife. But it wouldn’t help Gloria to tell her that. She was a proper old worryguts about the girl as it was, but she was no fool either. ‘Maybe she was a bit strained,’ she admitted. ‘They’d probably had a tiff.’

      ‘Do you think that’s all it was, a bit of a row?’ Gloria asked anxiously.

      ‘Bound to be,’ Amy said confidently. ‘Newlywed, see. Still getting to know one another.’

      ‘If only I could see her, check that everything is all right.’

      ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’ Amy said. ‘She’s better off than us, only yards from the High Street in Erdington and Tom says they try and keep that clear. Doesn’t always work of course, but I bet Hannah can get out to shop and get coal delivered.’

      ‘You’re right there,’ Gloria said. ‘I thought that last coal lorry was going to overturn.’

      ‘Or go ploughing through someone’s garden and into their front rooms,’ Amy said with a grim smile, remembering the coal man’s valiant efforts to control his lorry that had skidded the last time he’d tried to deliver coal to them. ‘Tom says this road’s a bugger,’ Amy went on. ‘You should see him slithering and sliding over it to reach the main drag. Mind you, the kids make it worse. Them and their flipping slides. Something should be done about it before someone breaks their neck.’

      ‘They’re bored with the schools all closed,’ Gloria said wearily. ‘We’ll just have to put up with it. God knows, it can’t go on forever.’ She gave a sigh and said, ‘Put a few pieces of coal on that fire, Amy, before it dies out altogether and I’ll make us some tea.’

Chapter Six

      ‘What’s happened?’ Gloria asked, staring at Hannah in shock. Even in the gloomy half-light of Hannah’s breakfast room, for the February day was dark and overcast, she could see the blue-black bruise on her left cheek and the split lip on the same side. The rest of Hannah’s face was bleached white and her hair, once her crowning glory, was lank and tied back from her face with an elastic band. ‘I walked into a door,’ Hannah replied.

      Even Josie, sitting on the chair in the room watching silently, couldn’t have stilled the retort from Gloria’s lips. ‘Walked into a door, my Aunt Fanny. This is me you’re talking to and I wasn’t born yesterday. I know what manner of door it was.’

      Gloria glanced at the child. There was nowhere else she could go, for the rest of the house was like an icebox and Gloria supposed Hannah could only get coal enough to heat one room. In front of Josie she could take this no further. But she’d not let it rest there. No, by God, she wouldn’t. She’d encouraged Hannah to marry Arthur, she felt responsible. She never thought he’d be the kind to hit her, to hit anyone in fact.

      But this would never do – this uncomfortable ominous silence. She must find something to break it. ‘Did you have a nice birthday?’ she asked Josie, knowing it had been two days before. ‘I sent a card, did you get it?’

      To her surprise, a shudder passed through Josie’s slight frame before she said, almost expressionless, ‘Yes, yes thank you, Mrs Emmerson.’

      Gloria felt decidedly uncomfortable, but she soldiered on. ‘I couldn’t get out to the shops to buy you anything with the weather you know, but I found this in my jewellery box and thought you might like it,’ and handed Josie a tissue-wrapped little parcel.

      ‘Oh,’ Josie cried, pushing the tissue paper aside and taking the delicate silver chain with its sparkling sapphire pendant from the velvet box. It was the loveliest thing she’d ever owned and she was almost overcome with pleasure. ‘Oh, it’s beautiful.’

      Hannah came forward to examine the necklace. ‘Gloria,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely, but isn’t it a little valuable to give to a child?’

      ‘Not at all,’ Gloria said. ‘Josie is ten now, a fine age. Double figures at last and I know she’ll look after the necklace. I haven’t worn it for years. It’ll do it good to be worn by someone who values it.’

      ‘You’re very kind,’ Hannah said and she smiled at Josie. ‘Take it up to your room, pet, and put it safe,’ she said gently.

      There was a look exchanged between them, but Josie left the room without another word. Barely had the door closed when Gloria asked, ‘Hannah, what is it?’

      Hannah sighed, a resigned and weary sigh. ‘It’s many things,’ she said. ‘Too much to tell. Josie will be back in a minute, the upstairs is no place to linger. The whole house is freezing apart from this room.’

      Josie would have loved to linger, to have snuggled down under the covers of her bed and pretended what had happened two nights before, the night of her birthday, hadn’t happened.

      She felt particularly guilty because she knew it had been partly her fault or at least that’s what had annoyed Arthur to begin with.

      Hannah had said she could invite three friends to a birthday tea, but with the bad weather it would be best to choose three who lived close so they wouldn’t have so far to come. But that was all right for Mary Byrne, Cassie Ryan and Belinda Crosby, the three girls she’d made friends with at the Abbey school, all lived near her. ‘It’s a party,’ Josie had told them.

      She’d never had a party before in her life and neither had the others. The war years had put an end to that, rationing not allowing much in the line of party fare, and when Josie saw the table filled with delicacies and the beautiful cake in the middle with ‘Happy Birthday’ written on it in icing and ten candles, she felt tears prickle her eyes.

      The children had gone by the time Arthur came in from work, Hannah had seen to that, and she was in the kitchen cooking his tea when he came through the door. But his eyes alighted straight away on the remains of the cake. ‘What’s this?’

      Hannah turned down the stove. ‘A cake I got for Josie,’ she said and closed the door so that Josie had to strain her ears to hear. ‘It’s her birthday today.’

      ‘And where did you get the money for such rubbish?’

      ‘Not from you anyway,’ Hannah snapped. ‘From her sister and brother in New York, that’s where I got it.’

      ‘I should say that’s for necessities, not frivolous nonsense.’

      ‘It’s for anything I see fit to spend it on. And a cake and a few goodies is not considered nonsense when you are just ten years old. Can’t you see, Arthur, what the child has had to put up with this year?’ Hannah hissed in a lower voice. ‘This was her first birthday without her mother and family around her. I wanted to make it a little special for her, that’s all.’

      ‘I still say it’s stuff and nonsense.’

      ‘Then say what you like,’ Hannah snapped. ‘You have your opinion and I’ll have mine.’

      Josie, in the other room, sitting on a cracket pulled up before the fire, had been trying to read The Railway Children, one of the books Hannah had given her, but the voices distracted her. It was a shame, really, because she’d been enjoying the story. She’d never had a book bought for her before – not one to read just for itself. She’d had school books with extracts from stories in and poetry that you had to read and then answer questions about, but never a whole book for pleasure. And now she had two, for as well as The Railway Children, she had Black Beauty.

      Arthur

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