Gypsy by Lesley Pearse Read Free Book Online

being a loving husband and father till the end.
    Sam moved over to Beth and put one arm around her, looking down at Molly asleep in her arms. Tears were rolling down his cheeks.
    ‘Why, Mama?’ he cried out. ‘Why did you have to do that?’
    ‘I did love your father, but it was the sweet love of a friend,’ she replied brokenly. ‘Passion is quite another thing. Maybe one day you’ll discover that for yourselves and understand.’
    ‘But why didn’t this other man come for you?’ Sam shouted in anger. ‘If it was true love, why isn’t he with you now?’
    ‘My biggest failing was to confuse passion with love,’ she replied, her eyes burning as she looked at her son. ‘He vanished into the night as soon as he heard Frank was dead. That was my real punishment, to know I had thrown in my lot with a philanderer who cared nothing for me, and Frank died thinking he’d found the way to make me happy.’
    ‘Did this other man know you were carrying his child?’ Beth sobbed.
    ‘No, Beth. I didn’t realize until after the last time I saw him.’
    She began to cough and wheeze, and it was plain she was too weak to say anything more. ‘Go to sleep now,’ Beth said curtly. ‘We’ll talk again tomorrow.’
    In the kitchen later, Sam walked up and down, white with anger. ‘How could she?’ he kept repeating. ‘And if she doesn’t recover, are we supposed to look after that brat?’
    Beth was crying as she nursed Molly in her arms. ‘Don’t say that, Sam. She’s just a baby, none of this is her fault, and she’s our sister.’
    ‘She’s no sister of mine,’ he raged. ‘Our father might have been weak enough to accept his wife had a lover, but I’m not going to follow in his footsteps — she can go.’
    ‘Go where?’ Beth asked through her tears. ‘Are we to take her to the Foundling Home? Leave her on someone’s doorstep?’
    ‘I can’t and won’t keep the child of a man who seduced my mother and caused my father to take his own life,’ Sam said flatly, his mouth set in a determined straight line. ‘Get rid of her!’
    Beth stayed up for a long time after Sam had gone off to bed. She fed and changed Molly and put her down in the cradle, then sat in the chair trying to make sense of everything.
    But nothing did make sense to her. Until tonight she hadn’t thought it possible that a woman who had a good husband, children and a comfortable home could ever want anything else. She had of course heard whispers of loose women who went with men other than their husbands, but she had always had the idea that they were the kind of sluts who went into ale houses and painted their faces. Not ordinary women like her mother.
    ‘Passion’, in the way her mother had meant it, she had no understanding of. Miss Clarkson had been fond of the word, though she had mostly used it in connection with music. But once, when she was talking about how babies were made, she had said that ‘passion’ overtook some women and robbed them of their own will. Beth had to suppose that was what had happened to her mother.
    Beth was still sitting in the chair crying when she heard a sound from her mother’s bedroom. Something had fallen to the floor, perhaps the water glass. She didn’t want to see Alice again tonight, but she knew she had to go in there and check on her.
    Her mother was lying over to one side of the bed, trying to reach for the family photograph which stood on the bedside table. It had been taken a year ago in a booth on New Brighton Beach when they had gone there for the August Bank Holiday. Reaching for it, she had knocked over a bottle of pills the doctor had given her.
    ‘Is that what you want?’ Beth said, picking it up and holding it out for her mother to look at.
    Her mother lifted her arm with great difficulty and put one finger on the picture. ‘Don’t tell anyone about Molly,’ she whispered. ‘Let everyone think she was Frank’s. Not for me, but for her, and give her this when she is grown