Belle - Lesley Pearse [227]
‘Then I suppose I shall have to look back and see if I can find something I’ve gained,’ she said.
‘It’s too soon for that yet. You are still dwelling on your lost innocence, the people who hurt you. But I bet there were people you are glad you met, things you’ve seen that have changed your thinking. One day you will wake up as I did and be glad for that.’
‘Maybe,’ she said. The only person who she was truly glad she met was Etienne, but she couldn’t say that, and changed the subject to something lighter.
Belle found Greenwich enchanting with its quaint little old houses and pubs close to the river front, and the elegant Georgian houses further back. She thought the Royal Hospital School and Naval College looked splendid with such lush green lawns before them. After pie and mash from a stall by the river front, they climbed up the hill to look at the Observatory and sat on a bench to enjoy the view of the river.
‘Henry VIII was born here in the Palace,’ Jimmy said – he always seemed to know about history. ‘It burned down though. And where the Observatory is now was Greenwich Castle where he used to keep his mistresses. It must have been quite a sight when kings and queens sailed upriver in the royal barges. And it’s odd to think this is where time is measured, and longitude so people can sail by it all over the world.’
‘Are you happy to carry on running the Ram’s Head, or have you got other plans?’ Belle asked. They had talked about so much. Jimmy had told her about the funeral of King Edward and then the coronation of George V a year later, when he’d stayed up all night to get a good spot to see the royal procession come past. He explained what the suffragettes had been doing in her absence, how many of them were force-fed in prison, and how one was killed when she threw herself under the King’s horse at Epsom race course. He said Mog and Garth had had some very heated arguments about them. Mog admired them but Garth thought they should stay at home and look after their families and leave politics and voting to men.
They discussed the sinking of the Titanic on her maiden voyage too, which had happened on 15 April while Belle was still recovering in the nursing home in Paris. Noah told her that one thousand, five hundred people were lost when the ship hit an iceberg, but perhaps thinking it would make her upset he didn’t say much more, and she couldn’t read the French newspaper accounts of the tragedy. But Jimmy knew all of the story and related it to her in such detail that anyone would have thought he’d been on the ship.
Belle noticed that although Jimmy had talked a great deal about current affairs, neighbours and Mog and Garth today, he hadn’t answered her question about his work. So she asked him again about it.
‘I think once Uncle Garth and Mog are married, they’ll be very keen to get out of central London,’ Jimmy replied. ‘I suppose I could stay on and run the pub myself, but I don’t really want to. We all went out to Blackheath for the day at Easter, a while before we heard you’d been found. They talked of nothing else at the time but trying to find a pub there, but that’s been forgotten since you came home.’
‘Where is Blackheath?’ Belle asked.
Jimmy pointed behind them. ‘Just the other side of Greenwich Park. The road down to Dover goes through there, and with so many people getting motorcars now it would be a good place to choose. And they are building lots of new houses out that way too. If Garth found the right pub they could have paying-guest rooms as well. I think it is a brilliant idea. The Heath is lovely, with ponds, and there was a fair on when we were there. They play cricket up there in the summer, and the village is really pretty.’
‘Sounds like you really want to go there,’ Belle said. ‘Would it be a good place for