Read Online Strumpet City by James Plunkett - Free Book Online

do.’
    They went through back streets to the cottage where Fitz lodged with Mr. and Mrs. Farrell, who were expecting Mary and had the table set for tea for both of them. Farrell was at the fire, smoking a pipe and spitting now and then into the flames.
    ‘That’s a nice way to receive anybody,’ Mrs. Farrell chided him.
    ‘How?’ he asked.
    ‘Sitting there in your stocking feet.’
    ‘The girl knows us all by now,’ Farrell said, amicably.
    ‘I do indeed,’ Mary agreed.
    ‘We’ll leave them to themselves just the same,’ Mrs. Farrell suggested to her husband.
    ‘Anything strange at the foundry?’ Farrell asked, ignoring her.
    ‘Not a thing,’ Fitz said. He sat down opposite Mary while Mrs. Farrell, having failed to move her husband, covered her defeat by picking up the pot and pouring tea for them.
    ‘I thought you might. I heard talk myself of a strike with the carters.’
    ‘They were working up to twelve.’
    ‘Ah—it didn’t come off so.’
    ‘It’s a bit near Christmas for anything like that,’ Fitz suggested.
    ‘Not when I tell you who’s in town.’
    Fitz looked at him enquiringly.
    Farrell spat into the fire before replying.
    ‘Jim Larkin.’
    ‘Larkin,’ Fitz repeated.
    ‘He had a meeting with the carters and with a crowd from the purifier sheds in the Gas Company. He had a word with us too.’ Farrell was a docker.
    ‘When was that?’
    ‘After the morning read.’
    ‘Did you speak to him yourself?’
    ‘I told him what had happened to me and about the stevedores paying us in pubs,’ Farrell said. ‘He says he’ll put a stop to it.’
    After almost a year of constant work, Farrell, in a moment of stubbornness, had refused to put up a drink for the stevedore. He had not been jobbed by him since. It was hard on Mrs. Farrell, especially with Christmas so near.
    You can talk to Fitz tonight,’ Mrs. Farrell hinted once again.
    This time her husband grunted and heaved himself from his chair. ‘Right,’ he said.
    The Farrells retired into their bedroom. It was an understood thing by now.
    After tea they sat a little while by the fire, then it was time to leave. She rose and Fitz took her in his arms.
    ‘I hate having to go,’ she told him. He held her tightly. It was a rare happiness to be together in a warm room, in the intimacy of firelight and lamplight. He kissed her. They went out into the street once again. The air was moist. The raw wind smelled and tasted of fog.
    Later it rolled in from the sea, creeping across sandbanks and fingering its way up the river, curling across the sea-wall and fanning out lazily about houses and streets. It trapped the light from each lamp-post in turn and held it inescapably in a luminous tent. The foghorns at regulated intervals intoned their melancholy warnings. Rashers, returned to his cellar, drank tea in the light of a candle and shivered because of the rising damp. Fitz on his way to the foundry blinked constantly to remove its cobweb breath from his eyes.
    On her way to bed Mary brought a glass of warm milk to Miss Gilchrist, who had been told to go early to her room because she had not been feeling well. The old woman was sitting at the fire which Mary had been allowed to light for her earlier. She gestured to Mary to sit.
    ‘We have plenty of work before us tomorrow,’ Miss Gilchrist said. ‘There’s the drawing room to do and every stick of furniture to move for the sweeping.’
    ‘You won’t be able for it,’ Mary said.
    I’ll be right in the morning. It’s only a little turn.’
    But Mary felt she would not be right. She looked drawn and wan.
    ‘Drink your milk,’ she said gently.
    ‘I was thinking to myself that I’m the lucky woman,’ Miss Gilchrist said, ‘with my own little room and my own fire. There’s many a one this night that’s cold and hungry.’
    Mary wondered that she could be contented. She had spent her life giving to others what she could have spent on a home and children and she would die without