Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [16]
In the kitchen later, Sam walked up and down, white with anger. ‘How could she?’ he kept repeating. ‘And if she doesn’t recover, are we supposed to look after that brat?’
Beth was crying as she nursed Molly in her arms. ‘Don’t say that, Sam. She’s just a baby, none of this is her fault, and she’s our sister.’
‘She’s no sister of mine,’ he raged. ‘Our father might have been weak enough to accept his wife had a lover, but I’m not going to follow in his footsteps — she can go.’
‘Go where?’ Beth asked through her tears. ‘Are we to take her to the Foundling Home? Leave her on someone’s doorstep?’
‘I can’t and won’t keep the child of a man who seduced my mother and caused my father to take his own life,’ Sam said flatly, his mouth set in a determined straight line. ‘Get rid of her!’
Beth stayed up for a long time after Sam had gone off to bed. She fed and changed Molly and put her down in the cradle, then sat in the chair trying to make sense of everything.
But nothing did make sense to her. Until tonight she hadn’t thought it possible that a woman who had a good husband, children and a comfortable home could ever want anything else. She had of course heard whispers of loose women who went with men other than their husbands, but she had always had the idea that they were the kind of sluts who went into ale houses and painted their faces. Not ordinary women like her mother.
‘Passion’, in the way her mother had meant it, she had no understanding of. Miss Clarkson had been fond of the word, though she had mostly used it in connection with music. But once, when she was talking about how babies were made, she had said that ‘passion’ overtook some women and robbed them of their own will. Beth had to suppose that was what had happened to her mother.
Beth was still sitting in the chair crying when she heard a sound from her mother’s bedroom. Something had fallen to the floor, perhaps the water glass. She didn’t want to see Alice again tonight, but she knew she had to go in there and check on her.
Her mother was lying over to one side of the bed, trying to reach for the family photograph which stood on the bedside table. It had been taken a year ago in a booth on New Brighton Beach when they had gone there for the August Bank Holiday. Reaching for it, she had knocked over a bottle of pills the doctor had given her.
‘Is that what you want?’ Beth said, picking it up and holding it out for her mother to look at.
Her mother lifted her arm with great difficulty and put one finger on the picture. ‘Don’t tell anyone about Molly,’ she whispered. ‘Let everyone think she was Frank’s. Not for me, but for her, and give her this when she is grown up, so she’ll know what we looked like.’
Her hand went from the picture to catch hold of Beth’s wrist. It felt as dry as an autumn leaf, so small and bony, and she was gripping tight. ‘I’m so very sorry,’ she said. ‘Tell me you forgive me.’
Instinct told Beth that this was the end or very close to it. Whatever her mother had done, whoever she had hurt, she couldn’t let her die without a kind word. ‘Yes, I forgive you, Mama,’ she said.
‘I can go then?’ Alice asked in a whisper.
The grip on Beth’s wrist loosened and her mother’s hand fell to the blanket. Beth stood looking at her for some little time before she realized she had stopped breathing.
Chapter Five
‘We will have the cheapest funeral,’ Sam argued stubbornly. ‘Because of her, Father couldn’t be laid to rest in hallowed ground and no one came to the funeral to say what a good man he was. So why should she have anything better?’
‘We can’t let her have a pauper’s funeral,’ Beth said wearily, for they’d been over this several times already since he came in for his supper, and it was nearly eleven o’clock now. ‘What would people think of us?’
‘Why should we care about that!’ he exploded. ‘Apart from the Cravens, everyone’s been whispering maliciously about us since Papa died. Let them carry on doing it.’
Beth began to cry because she didn’t know this stonyhearted person who had taken the place of her brother.