Through the Storm by Maureen Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

a fee of ten shillings for his trouble.
    All this correspondence had been going on without Arthur’s knowledge. Jess liked to keep her own affairs private, not that he would have been interested if she’d told him – if she’d had an opportunity to tell him, that is, whilst he was so engrossed in bits and pieces several thousand years old.
    It was when she got this last letter that Jess had her great idea.
She
would live in Helen Brazier’s house. She would move back to Pearl Street with Penny, which was what she’d been yearning to do ever since she’d left for the second time.
    She told the agent to have the house cleaned and decorated;
pastel colours; pale pinks, blues, white
. She’d recently read in a magazine that pale colours were all the rage in Mayfair.
Leave the furniture where it is
, she – wrote.
I’ve some business to sort out in Liverpool which might take quite a while. I’ll live there myself
.
    It was almost dark by the time Jessica neared Liverpool. Although Arthur had drawn a map of the route she should take, the road signs had been taken down some time ago when there’d been the threat of invasion, and she got lost several times. Penny was in the back by now, fast asleep on the cot mattress.
    Jessica threw back her head and sang at full throttle: ‘In Dublin’s fair city where the girls are so pretty …’
    The enclosed space seemed to enhance and give even greater depth to her already glorious soprano voice. She’d joined a choir whilst she was away, but choirs seemed dull in the extreme compared to the troop concerts she used to give, at which she’d sung all the latest hits. The audience, men perhaps on the point of going off to fight within a matter of hours, had joined in the chorus if they knew the words, cheering to the echo when the concert finished. The atmosphere had been charged with emotion. Sometimes dear old Jacob Singerman, who accompanied Jess on the piano, had been close to tears at the end.
    When Jessica drove into the dusk of the great city where she was born she felt her heart lift. She found the headlights worse than useless to see by with their metal caps which left merely a narrow slit of illumination. But she didn’t need lights to witness the damage that had been wrought. Parts had been reduced to little more than brickyards and elsewhere bare skeletons of buildings remained, silhouetted black against the grey sky. She drove around, almost aimlessly, for a while, forgetting she was wasting petrol, her horror increasing with each corner she turned. Eileen Costello had told her what had happened in her letters, but nothing could have prepared her for actually seeing the terrible destruction for herself. It was as if the city had been hit by an earthquake.
    Jessica sighed, thought about the petrol, and turned the van in the direction of Bootle.
    Yet more destruction and broken buildings. Some streets seemed to have disappeared completely, wiped with ruthless finality off the face of the earth. She felt a strange sort of resentment that she’d missed all this, though she knew she was being ridiculous and silly. It didn’t seem right that she, a Liverpudlian, had avoided the suffering that everyone else in the city had endured.
    She pressed her foot on the accelerator, anxious to get to Bootle, to Pearl Street, to be home.
    The first thing she did when she entered the house was draw the curtains everywhere and turn the gaslights on. She was pleased to find the place looked quite respectable, and as the agent had said, the furniture was good, if rather ornate and over-large, and had thoughtfully been polished. The heavy embossed wallpaper had taken the distemper well and the rooms were bright and cheerful, and would look even brighter once she got some pretty chintz to cover the ugly blackout material. She’d just have to go without carpets until she earned money of her own, though the quaintly old-fashioned oilcloth looked the sort that was quite likely to come back