The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [153]
Myra shuddered. ‘He never wanted to marry me. It was a pack of lies, all of it. Even the ring he gave me turned out to be a fake, and besides…’ her voice dropped to an agonised whisper, ‘he was the one that put me in here, Jimmy. He beat me up real bad,’ she confessed, ‘worse than Dad ever did Mum.’
Jim had clenched the hand that wasn’t holding hers into a tight fist and there was a hard fiery look in his eyes.
‘By God, when I get hold of him…’
‘He’s gone, scarpered, no one knows where. I’ve been such a fool,’ Myra wept. ‘Such a ruddy, ruddy fool.’ She shook her head. ‘Even if he were to come crawling back here now I wouldn’t have him back. No, sir, I wouldn’t,’ she announced vehemently.
‘So what are you going to do?’ Jim asked her gruffly. ‘You’ve got the kiddie to think of now, after all,’ he pointed out, nodding in the direction of her bedding-covered body.
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Myra demanded with a return to her old sharp self. ‘I’m the one that’s going to have the ruddy thing. A proper disgrace that’s going to be and no mistake. Me with no husband and a kid about to be born.’
‘No husband, my left foot. Of course you’ve got a ruddy husband,’ said Jim indignantly ‘Still married to me, aren’t you?’
Myra stared at him. In the place of despair and misery suddenly there was the tiny beginning of hope.
‘You won’t want me now,’ she told him, ‘not after what I’ve gone and done. And if that weren’t bad enough I’m carrying the kid to prove it. It’s a pity it wasn’t my stomach he thumped; then I might have lost it.’
‘Aw, Myra, don’t say that. Poor little blighter, it isn’t its fault. ’Sides, who’s to know whose kid it is anyway if you and me stay together?’
Myra’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t mean that,’ she told him. ‘Why should you take another man’s kid on?’
Jim said quietly, ‘It’s like this, see, Myra. I never told you ’cos you allus said that you didn’t like kiddies, but seemingly on account of me having mumps as a lad I can’t have no kids of me own, so me being a dad to this one you’re having – well, it will be like there’s summat good come out of this war for me. I’m not saying that it didn’t feel like someone had ripped my guts out when you told me that you wanted to leave me for this other chap, and I’m not saying neither that I didn’t want to punch his lights out and give you a piece of me mind, because I did. But you and me, Myra, well, I reckon we belong together, and when this kiddie comes along, it will be our kiddie, and I promise you this: I’ll love it like it were me own, Myra, because it will be me own…not a little bastard but a little Stone…’
Myra was laughing and crying at the same time, hiccuping in between her tears and laughter as she clung to Jim and tried to tell him what she felt.
For some reason fate had relented and given her a second chance. All these days she had been lying here, knowing what a fool she had been to give up a good man like Jim; a kind man who loved her and who made her feel safe, just for the sake of a bit of excitement with a man like Nick. Her longing for a glamorous life in America was gone, as though it had been some kind of dream she had now woken up from. And she had changed too, grown a conscience that she found inconvenient at times – times such as now, for instance.
‘I can’t let you do this, Jim,’ she told him. ‘You’ll end up hating me. It’s not right, you deserve better.’
‘No, it’s you who deserves better, Myra – you and me and our baby, and I’m going to see that we get it, just as soon as this war’s over. I’ve got to thinking out there in the desert, and I’ve been making a few plans. I’ve saved up a fair bit and I’ve got a bit put by now. There’s a chap out there who told me that he’s planning to buy himself a little house now whilst the war’s still on and he can get one at a good price, and that’s what I’m going to do. A nice house with a bit of a garden for our lad – or lass – somewhere decent where we can have a fresh start…summat a bit posh, like, so that you can have your bit of a show-off…I know what you’re like. So what do you say? Shall we