Read Online That'll Be the Day (2007) by Freda Lightfoot - Free Book Online

snapdragons, French marigolds and scarlet geraniums and saw only its smoke-blackened brick façade and cracked panes of glass.
    A plump woman stood at the door, a basket of violets on her arm, no doubt in case some guilty soul should wish to buy a bunch as a sop to his wife for the state of his inebriation. Two Teddy Boys lounged against the wall, looking very much the worse for wear, and if the men Helen had seen staggering out were anything to go by the place must be heaving with drunks.
    ‘Buy a bunch of violets, lovey?’
    Helen shook her head. She’d seen the woman before, seated by her flower stall, but hadn’t the faintest idea what her name was. ‘No thank you.’
    ‘Just suit your colouring, madam, they would. Nothing nicer than a rich purple next to porcelain skin, and violets are for faithfulness and modesty, which I’m sure you are, lovely young lady like yourself. Only sixpence a bunch.’
    ‘Oh, very well. I suppose they might at least distract me from the smell of this dreadful place.’
    Helen barely tolerated living in Champion Street with its jumble of stalls and Victorian iron-framed market hall, its stacks of orange boxes and rotting vegetables. It was an on-going grievance between herself and Leo that he wouldn’t even consider living anywhere else but in the corner Victorian three-story terraced house where he’d been born. The house might well have been in the family for generations and handy for the warehouse on Potato Wharf, but was highly in convenient so far as Helen was concerned.
    Leo was a lovely caring man, a good husband and employer, sensitive to the feelings of others yet not afraid to take risks or to live on the edge were it necessary to do so. He was his own man, which was what she loved most about him. It was a pity therefore that with so many natural attributes and undoubted success at his fingertips, he consistently failed to appreciate how she, his own wife, might sometimes see things differently and have utterly diverse needs and desires in life.
    As for public houses, they were, in Helen’s view, strictly for layabouts and drunks. Leo might wax lyrical about the character of the place and the friendliness of the locals, but such places were anathema to her.
    She hesitated before going in, hovering by the door as she tried to peer through the stained glass panels in the hope of seeing him, protectively holding the violets to her nose. She’d hate to arrive early and have to hang around with the riff-raff.
    Leo had insisted she meet him here for a bite of lunch because it was ‘handy’ after a long morning at the warehouse, allowing her no opportunity to refuse.
    It wasn’t difficult to guess the reason. Hadn’t he offered, almost threatened, to make her an appointment with the doctor, adamant that if something were preventing her from conceiving then they should go together to find out the cause of the problem? It would be just like him to have made such an appointment, for Monday morning perhaps, and choose a very public place to tell her of this fact in order to avoid her making a fuss.
    Why could he not be satisfied with their life as it was, or at least pour his energies into something far more worthwhile than children? He knew of her ambitions for him, her desire to see him succeed as a man of note in the community, with her by his side.
    He’d been offered the opportunity to stand for parliament at the next by-election but where was the point in her winning favours from the people who mattered, if he refused to take the offer seriously?
    Despite the worries over the H-bomb and the Aldermaston marchers who of course were either student idealists or communists, in Helen’s view, Britain was rapidly recovering from its post-war malaise. People had money in their pockets at last. The credit squeeze was coming to an end and, as Harold Macmillan frequently reminded them, they’d never had it so good. Even the likes of Harold Wilson, himself from a relatively modest