At the Break of Day by Margaret Graham Read Free Book Online

see the shame in Grandpa’s eyes, to hear that voice slashing and wounding as it had always done. The war had changed nothing in Norah.
    Norah ate on, chewing, drinking her water, not listening. Rosie knew she wasn’t listening but at least she wasn’t speaking.
    Grandpa rose and walked to the back door, out to the privy. ‘Won’t be a moment,’ he said.
    Norah continued to eat. Rosie talked then of New York’s rundown East Side, the ‘lung blocks’, those tenements which gave their people TB.
    ‘Like Mum and Dad,’ she said. ‘If we hadn’t had Grandma and Grandpa, what would we have done? He was just great to us.’
    ‘They wouldn’t have been working in the laundry anyway if he’d stayed in Bromsgrove.’ Norah pointed her knife at the yard. ‘What was wrong with being a nailer? He goes on about it enough. Grandma didn’t want to come down. She told me.’
    Rosie said, ‘Grandma was always complaining. You couldn’t take anything she said seriously and you’ve got awful like her. You’ve got a tongue like a …’ but Grandpa came back and so she hurried on and spoke of the hop-picking they’d done in the years before the war. The sun, the smell, the fun.
    ‘Couldn’t go to Kent like the rest though, could we? Had to be up in Malvern because that’s where the Midlanders used to go.’ Norah didn’t look up as she spoke, just hooked a piece of mash at the corner of her mouth with her tongue. ‘Why couldn’t we be the same as everyone else? That’s what I want to know.’
    Rosie cut in. ‘So, how was Somerset then, Norah? Did you settle in?’ She wanted to draw that sour tongue away from the old man who had sent her away and then brought her back, but only because he thought it best for her. She knew that now. She had always known it really, but the anger was still there, inside her, mingled with the pain.
    ‘Not as good as America. Country life is hard. I skivvied, worked my fingers to the bone.’
    Rosie looked at her. ‘Got enough flesh on you now then, Norah, you could slip on a marble any day and not break that goddamn backside.’
    No one was eating now. Norah sat back, her eyes dark with rage, her mouth closed into a thin line. Then she finished her potatoes, stabbing them with the fork. Rosie took the plates, washed them in the kettle water. It was nearly dark now and the cracked clock above Grandpa’s bed said nine o’clock.
    ‘I’ve got presents in the trunk,’ Rosie said, turning, leaning back on the sink. ‘A great nightdress and stockings for you, Norah, a sweater for you, Grandpa.’ Her voice was conciliatory. She must try again if they were to live together. She must keep telling herself that, because Norah had suffered, while she hadn’t.
    Norah was reading a magazine at the table but she looked up now.
    ‘You’re sleeping in the boxroom. I’ve got the front bedroom.’
    Of course you’ve got the goddamn front room, Rosie thought, and I bet that goddamn fox fur is hanging on the back of the door, his goddamn eyes glinting, but she said nothing.
    She pushed open the door into the yard and took Grandpa’s arm, feeling him lean on her as she helped him to the bench under the kitchen window. The air was full of the fragrance of his roses.
    She put the newspaper on the bench which was still damp and then they sat, neither speaking, for what was there to say? So much, too little.
    ‘Of course he wouldn’t dig up his precious yard to put in a shelter. It would have disturbed the roses,’ Norah called through the door.
    Rosie put her hand on Grandpa’s. ‘Quite right too,’ she said quietly.
    ‘Wouldn’t go down to the shelter in Albany Street either. He wouldn’t sleep with strange people. Got to be different.’
    ‘I like my privacy,’ Grandpa said loudly now.
    ‘I guess we all do,’ Rosie nodded, patting his hand, glad that he was answering Norah, jerking his head up, sticking his chin out. Glad too that she need not sleep in the same bed with that girl