Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [119]
‘There was never a right time to tell you,’ she said wearily.
Jack bent down and kissed her cheek. ‘How do you feel now?’
‘A bit strange.’ She sighed. ‘But I’m not in pain any more. What did they do to me, Jack?’
‘The doctor will explain to you in the morning,’ he said.
‘But you must go to sleep now, I’ll go and find Sam and Theo and tell them. We’ll come to see you tomorrow.’
It was after ten at night and as Jack walked through the deserted snowy streets, his eyes filled with tears when he thought of what the doctor had said.
‘I had to perform an emergency operation to remove the parts which had not come away naturally, and sadly I have to tell you it is highly unlikely she’ll ever be able to bear another child.’
Many women Jack had known wouldn’t much care if they never had a child, and anyone who had ever seen Beth playing her fiddle would think that being a mother would be unimportant to her. But Jack knew different. He’d heard the sadness in her voice when she spoke of Molly, and knew that giving her sister up was something she’d never quite reconciled herself to, however much she declared she had. At Christmas, when she received a photograph of Molly, she had looked hungrily at it for hours. He had always thought that it would only be when she had a child of her own that she’d recover fully.
Now she’d lost that chance.
Theo didn’t come home that night, and Jack lay awake hating the man for treating Beth so casually. Theo didn’t of course know she was in hospital, but Jack was unable to understand how any man with a girl as lovely as Beth could bear to stay away from her for even one night.
Sam had looked incredulous when Jack told him the news. ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’ he kept repeating, as if he thought that if she had done, none of this would have happened. But even Sam, close as he was to his sister, expressed the opinion that it was perhaps for the best.
‘The best for who?’ Jack had roared at him. ‘For you and Theo maybe, so you can do what you want without any hindrance! But not for Beth. A part of her will have died with the baby, and when she finds out she can’t have any more, what’s that going to do to her?’
It was close to daybreak when Jack heard Theo come in. He and Beth shared what she laughingly called the parlour, which was the slightly larger of the two rooms downstairs and the one with a fire. She had to cook on that, and she’d made herself a little kitchen by putting a wooden crate with a cloth over it in the alcove beside the fire, and arranging all the crockery, pots, utensils and foodstuffs in or on it.
Her ability for home-making astounded Jack. She’d covered the bed with a bright-coloured quilt, and made cushions for the two wooden armchairs. Most people around here lived in squalor, defeated by poverty and hardship, but Beth kept the place spotlessly clean, and was always adding something to make it more homely.
Since working at the bunkhouse, she’d acquired a small table, and on Sundays when they were all home, they ate their dinner at it sitting on crates. She’d stuffed cracks around the windows with newspaper to keep out the draughts and covered the stains on the walls with theatre posters and pictures cut out of magazines. Sitting there beside a roaring fire on Sundays, a tasty dinner in front of them, they could forget the bitter cold and grimness outside for a few hours and be a real family.
Since he met Theo for the first time, Jack’s feelings towards him had swung away from jealousy because he’d snatched Beth away from him and indignation that he allowed her to think he’d masterminded her rescue from the cellar. He had eventually grown to like him once they moved to Philadelphia.
For all Theo’s flashiness, smart clothes, cut-glass accent and impeccable breeding, he was no snob. To him there were only two kinds of people: those he liked and those he didn’t. What they had or where they came from didn’t enter into it.
Once Jack had put away his old resentments, he found Theo to be generous, kind-hearted and an amusing companion — smart too, always one jump ahead of