Read Online The Four Streets by Nadine Dorries - Free Book Online Page B

river in groups of two and three. Within minutes they began to discuss the Everton away match on Saturday.
    The children began to filter into the entry one at a time. Everyone began helping the older residents to put away their chairs before they made haste to check the babies and little ones they had been allocated for the morning so that the younger neighbours closest to Bernadette could attend the mass together.
    They had all been too solemn, preoccupied and tearful to notice the thin young woman who had arrived at the top of the street and now stood at a distance.
    She hugged the wall of the corner house, more to remain discreet than to shelter from the wind. She was dressed in a sage-green coat, fastened with a belt, and a matching green Napoleon hat with the front flap held up by three fashionable brass buttons.
    She had a thin face, pale and pinched except for her nose, which appeared unusually large for her narrow face. Wisps of shoulder-length fine dark hair escaped from her hat to blow around her face.
    Unemotionally, with small, dry, hazel eyes, she observed every second of the scene before her. She scanned the houses, all with curtains drawn both upstairs and down, and noticed, as the carriage had arrived in the street, a flurry of small faces dip under the upstairs curtains as, in one house after another, little noses pressed against the glass to view the horses.
    She gave an involuntary shudder. She had the same distaste for children as she did for vermin.
    She observed, with interest, that one of the women mourners appeared to be more distraught than the others. As she raised her hand, kept warm in her brown leather gloves, to tuck back an errant wisp of hair, she made a mental note of which house the woman had come out of.
    As the mourners dispersed and went about their business, she moved away to catch the bus back into town. She was the only person that day who entered the four streets and smiled.
    Most of the inhabitants, especially Jerry, felt as though they would never smile again.

Chapter Four
    When the last of the mourners had left the house, Jerry’s daddy, Joe, managed to get the best part of a bottle of whiskey into Jerry with the sole intention of knocking him out. It worked.
    Once Kathleen and Joe had him undressed and tucked safely into his bed, they tiptoed down the stairs and closed the door at the bottom behind them, just as they had done when he was a young and vulnerable boy. They looked at each other and breathed a sigh of deep relief.
    ‘We haven’t put him to bed in years,’ said Kathleen, tears quietly trickling down her cheeks for the very first time.
    Joe put his arm round her shoulder for comfort, struggling to contain his own worry and grief. The way Jerry had cried over the last week had torn at his father’s heart.
    ‘He’s hardly put the baby down and he’s going mad with no sleep,’ she said, as she pulled her hankie out of her apron pocket to wipe her eyes. Kathleen was a strong woman and unused to crying.
    Joe had known the whiskey would push Jerry off the cliff. He knew how strong his son was, but he also knew no man could last a week with hardly any sleep.
    ‘A night’s sleep and all will be different in the morning, you wait and see. He will be stronger and we can all move on a bit,’ he said reassuringly.
    They had to return to the farm and their younger boys soon. Kathleen hoped Joe was right.
    At five-thirty the following morning, Kathleen placed Nellie in the pram Bernadette had chosen, covered the hood with netting, to keep out the flies, and placed her in the backyard to sleep after her morning feed. It was the only day she had been able to get her hands on the baby for more than a couple of minutes, since she had carried her out of the hospital, five days ago.
    Kathleen looked through the kitchen window, at the pram stood against the brick wall in the grey morning light, and whispered to no one other than herself, ‘Thank God for Maura.’
    Maura had