The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [80]
When he came towards her, all she could do was offer him a tremulous half-smile as he took hold of both her hands, squeezing them emotionally.
There was so much she wanted to say to him and so much too she needed to know. Like why he was here after the way he had turned his back on her and walked away.
‘I’ll tell you what, Mrs Philpott,’ Mrs Brown was saying warmly to her mother, ‘why don’t we let these two young ones go for a bit of a walk together whilst you and me get on with clearing up?’
‘But Ruthie hasn’t had her tea yet,’ her mother objected in that little-girl voice that Ruthie had learned to recognise and dread.
‘It’s all right, Mum. I had something to eat before I came home,’ Ruthie fibbed quickly, hating herself for the small deceit but knowing that it was necessary if she was to have the opportunity she desperately needed to talk privately with Glen.
Mrs Brown gave her an approving look, and urged, ‘Off you go then, you two, whilst me and your mam clear up and have a bit of a natter.’
‘Oh, but I want Glen to stay,’ Ruthie’s mother was protesting.
‘He’ll be coming back once he and your Ruthie have had a bit of a chat,’ Mrs Brown soothed her firmly. ‘It’s nearly time for that wireless programme you like, and I reckon that since Glen has bin so generous and bought you such a lovely slab of fruit cake that we might put the kettle on and have another slice.’
‘Oh, yes. I like fruit cake. It was always Mr Philpott’s favourite – did I tell you that?’
It seemed an age before Ruthie and Glen were finally outside, and she was able to release the anxious breath she had been holding. She had determinedly put at least a foot between herself and Glen as they stepped into the Close, but when he reached for her hand, clasping it in his own, she didn’t resist. His hand was so large compared with hers – so very large, in fact, that her hand was lost in it. Lost and yet at the same time somehow so very, very safe.
‘It wasn’t true what you said to my mother, was it?’ she asked him quietly, unable to look at him, and instead studying the tired dullness of the shabby pavement. ‘About not coming in with me, I mean.’
‘No.’
Relieved tears stung her eyes. She would have hated it if he had lied to her.
‘It was because of Mum, wasn’t it?’ she continued in a low voice.
Immediately his hand tightened on hers.
‘I…I can understand what you must have thought when…when you saw her like that. It’s Dad’s death that did it. She was never like this before. They were so close, you see,’ she explained earnestly, ‘and she depended on him so much. The doctor says that she’s gone this way because she just can’t bear him not being here any more. She knows that he’s gone really but sometimes she has to…to pretend that he hasn’t.’ She felt another squeeze on her hand.
‘I…I would have told you.’ Somehow it was important that she made him understand that, and that he didn’t think that she was the kind of girl who would have kept something so important from him. ‘I don’t blame you for walking away like you did, but—’
‘I wanted to stay,’ Glen interrupted her gruffly, ‘but I kinda thought that you didn’t want me there, and then there was your mom. I guess I was afraid that having a stranger around might upset her even more. My dad had this cousin – she’s dead now, God rest her soul – well, she was more of a second cousin really. When she was little she and her kid brother used to play a game of dare, running across the lines down at the railyard where her pa worked, only one day little Joey got his foot caught, and they couldn’t get him out in time. She was fine most of the time, but every now and again she’d get it into her head to go down to the railyard to look for him. Some folks round our town used to reckon she was off her head.’
Ruthie winced.
‘But my mom always used to say that it was God’s way of shielding her from her own pain, and that you never knew what something like that would do to you unless you had to go through it. I guess,