Read Online Birmingham Rose by Annie Murray - Free Book Online Page B

place which drew him. Of course he could have chosen to walk round the Birch Street area at any time, but something had inhibited him. He would have been merely a voyeur. Now he had a real reason to go.
    When George opened the door, Dora saw Rose standing outside with an enormous man, his dark clothes topped by a dog collar. She knew at once who he must be. At any other time she would have felt like giving Rose a good hiding for bringing him at all, let alone with no chance to get the place spick and span first. But at this moment she couldn’t have cared less.
    Dora stood up silently. She looked more gaunt and pale than ever. Ronald saw just how small were the houses in which so many large families had to live, how mean and cramped.
    ‘Mom,’ Rose said. ‘This is the Reverend, Diana’s dad. I told him about our Violet and he wanted to come and see you himself.’
    Dora looked at this stranger whose head nearly touched the ceiling, and uttered her first words for days. ‘You’d better make a cuppa tea, Rose,’ she said. ‘Kettle’s boiled.’ And then to Ronald: ‘Have a seat.’
    Ronald sat down on a wooden chair at the table, carefully avoiding a blob of congealed porridge on the side of it. ‘I don’t want to intrude.’
    He felt foolish as he spoke, knowing that apart from death itself and the Means Testers from the Parish he was the greatest intrusion they’d had for years. He could hear the baby crying upstairs.
    Dora folded her arms across herself as if to hide her breasts. ‘Go and get him, Rose. I’ll have to feed the babby, if you’ll excuse me,’ she said to Ronald in a flat, lifeless voice.
    Rose carried Harry down. He was a bonny four-month-old who looked as if he’d taken all the nourishment from his mother. He was beginning to look rather like Sam.
    ‘Now,’ Dora said decisively to Rose. ‘You can take this lot outside and leave us.’
    She sat down with Harry on her lap, covering herself modestly with an old cardigan as she fed him. Rose, bemused, shoved Grace and George out of the door.
    When the children had closed the door behind them Ronald said, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about little Violet, Mrs Lucas.’
    The moment he spoke he saw her eyes fill with tears. ‘All I can think of is how all her life I’ve been that worried by everything I’ve hardly had a kind word to spare for her.’
    She felt very shy, sitting feeding her child and blarting in front of this huge, educated stranger. But she could also feel an enormous sympathy emanating from Ronald Harper-Watt. And he had two things that she needed: distance from her own situation, so she could talk to him, and time. His job allowed him the opportunity to sit and listen.
    ‘You’re a good mother, Mrs Lucas,’ Ronald said gently. ‘You mustn’t think otherwise. Rose often talks about you – fondly.’ He’d noticed that more and more recently. ‘And it’s easy to tell you always do the best you can for your children. I know things haven’t been easy for you. I’m sure Violet knew you cared for her very much.’
    Dora looked up at him, at his wide, handsome face, the brown hair swept back from his face and his kind, grey eyes. He was the first truly gentle man she could remember meeting.
    She began to talk. She had sat in her house for three days feeling she was losing her mind. She had been afraid to speak for fear of what might come out – mad, raving gibberish so that she’d have to be locked away and never let out again.
    For about twenty minutes Ronald didn’t speak at all. He sat listening attentively, watching Dora as she talked while the baby sucked and sucked at her breast.
    She told him everything, from the early, happy days of her marriage to the present, how her once loving husband forced himself on her several times every month and she had almost no feeling left for him in her heart. She spared nothing, talking entirely out of her own need as if it was her last chance.
    Finally she stopped and prepared