Gypsy by Lesley Pearse Read Free Book Online Page B

words of the committal, Beth glanced over to where her father was buried in unhallowed ground. She thought how unjust it was that a man who had never sinned against anyone should be there, while his adulterous wife lay in the churchyard.
    By the first week in February, when Sam became seventeen and Beth sixteen, they were forced to sell the piano. Beth didn’t really care much about it, after all she still had her precious fiddle, but seeing the piano being lowered out through the window to the street below brought home to her how tragically ironic it was.
    To her parents the piano was a symbol that they had succeeded in lifting their children up to the middle classes, and as such they would never suffer the hardships they themselves had endured. Yet by being protected from want and shielded from the hard facts of real life, both she and Sam lacked the resources to cope with poverty.
    Beth could bake cakes, lay a table properly, starch and iron a shirt, and had acquired dozens of other refined accomplishments, but she’d never been taught to plan a week’s meals on a tiny budget. Sam might be able to haul in coal for the stove, shovel snow out of the backyard and be on time every day for work, but he had no idea how to unblock a sink or fix a broken sash cord in the window.
    All their childhood there had always been a fire in the parlour, the stove in the kitchen and even fires in the bedrooms when it was really cold. The gas was lit in all the rooms before it grew dark, there was always fruit in a bowl, cake in the tin and meat every day.
    The coal ran out soon after Christmas and when they ordered more they were shocked at the price and could only keep the stove in the kitchen going. The gas ate up pennies so fast that they were afraid to light it. Fruit and cake disappeared from their diet.
    Sam’s wages were spent on food long before Friday came round, and once they’d eaten all the preserves and stores of sugar and flour their mother had so frugally tucked away in the pantry, they were down to bread alone until pay day.
    Maybe Sam should have held out for a better price for their mother’s prized round mahogany table and matching chairs, but they needed the money to pay for the coal and the bill from Dr Gillespie. There was no doubt they were swindled when the grandfather clock was sold. But neither of them had any idea of the real value of these items, or that second-hand furniture dealers could smell desperation.
    Although Beth loved caring for Molly, she hadn’t reckoned on the loneliness of being home all day alone with a baby. She never seemed to have a minute for herself to read, play her fiddle or take a bath. Sam wasn’t interested in hearing about Molly when he came in from work, she had no one other than Mrs Craven she could talk to, and she was continually worried about money.
    By the middle of March Sam could see no alternative other than to find lodgers to make ends meet.
    One of the more senior clerks in his office suggested his cousin Thomas Wiley and his wife Jane, who had been staying with him and his family since Thomas moved from Manchester to take up work in the Liverpool post office. The couple were in their mid-thirties, and Beth took an immediate dislike to Jane. Everything about her was sharp — her eyes which darted around the room as she spoke, her nose and cheekbones, and even her voice had a sharp edge to it.
    She showed no interest in Molly and she looked Beth up and down as if pricing up the value of her clothes. When Beth tried to suggest they figured out a plan when each would cook their evening meal, Jane dismissed her by saying she wasn’t one for cooking.
    Her husband, Thomas, was easier to take to, a jovial, ruddy-faced man who appeared very grateful to be offered the parlour and Beth’s old bedroom up on the top floor above the kitchen, for she and Molly were now in her parents’ old room. Thomas said he had begun to despair of ever finding anywhere decent, or even clean,