Dead to Me by Lesley Pearse Read Free Book Online Page A

feeding them out of the contents of the store cupboard, rather than going shopping for fresh food – Verity felt she had to try again.
    Catching her mother in the drawing room listlessly picking out a tune on the piano, she decided this was the moment.
    ‘If you think someone is going to come and take yourthings away, why don’t you pawn some of the smaller valuable bits, like your jewellery and the silver, before they get here?’
    ‘Pawn!’ her mother exclaimed, her eyes wide with surprise. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
    Verity hadn’t known the word until Ruby told her, but she was astounded her mother didn’t know. She had thought adults knew everything.
    ‘Pawnshops are places you take valuables and they give you money for them,’ she said. ‘They have three brass balls above the shop sign to let you know that’s what they do. Mostly people just use them to borrow a bit until they can pay it back, but I think they buy stuff too.’
    ‘I can’t imagine how you’d know such a thing,’ her mother sniffed disapprovingly. ‘Where are these places, for goodness’ sake?’
    ‘Mostly where poorer people live, I don’t think there’s one in Hampstead. But I have seen one in the Finchley Road. That’s far enough away from here that we wouldn’t be spotted going in there by anyone we know.’
    ‘I couldn’t go into such a place,’ her mother replied, clutching nervously at her throat. ‘But maybe you and Miss Parsons could go.’
    Verity felt very adult in finding a solution to their immediate problems. ‘Maybe we should just take a few small trinkets first,’ she suggested. ‘But we ought to find a hiding place for all the other precious things, so they don’t get taken away with the house. Then we could sell them as and when you need money.’
    For the first time Verity ever remembered, her mother looked at her in real admiration. ‘I hadn’t realized you’dgrown up so much,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Verity, for the suggestion, I think I’ll start making a list and try to think of somewhere to store things.’
    ‘It would have to be away from here,’ Verity reminded her. ‘Maybe at Aunt Hazel’s?’
    Verity went with Miss Parsons to the pawnshop the next day. They took a diamond brooch, a pearl necklace and her father’s gold cufflinks and tie pin. Mother had said she hoped for at least thirty pounds. But they must accept whatever they were offered, as there was no money to pay the milkman, baker or butcher.
    ‘Don’t be surprised at anything I say to the man,’ Miss Parsons said as they hurried up the Finchley Road. ‘At times like this you have to use all the wiles you possess, and you must look stricken with grief so he feels sorry for us.’
    Verity saw a completely different side of the housekeeper once they were in the dusty pawnbroker’s. She wasn’t starchy at all; in fact she was so sweet and charming to the owner, a man called Cohen, that Verity barely recognized her. She held a lace-trimmed handkerchief in her hand and kept dabbing her eyes as she told the man her widower brother had just died leaving her with all the bills to pay and his child to take care of.
    ‘I knew he had become a little disorganized since he lost his wife,’ she said with a catch in her voice that sounded like she was going to break down. ‘But I didn’t realize that he’d squandered so much money and that he didn’t have any savings or insurance. I feel so humiliated, having to sell jewellery he gave me, but this child has to be taken care of.’
    Mr Cohen was bearded, thin and small with a slighthunch to his back. Verity guessed him to be about sixty and she thought he looked poor, as his jacket was shiny with age and his shirt collar was none too clean. But he was kind to Miss Parsons.
    ‘That is very sad for you, my dear,’ he said. ‘But don’t judge your brother too harshly. Losing a loved one can make even the most steady of people behave out of character. I see it all the time