Starlight Read Free

younger.
    ‘That’s just it, Glad,’ she said, half under her breath, ‘it’s one of these here rackmans. A real bad type.’
    Gladys made a kind of terrified lowing sound, her eyes fixed, wider and wider.
    ‘But he’s got plenty of money. ’Eaps of money, she said, and he offered ’er a good price and his money’s as good as anyone else’s.’ She shrugged again. ‘So she’s sold it. And next door, and all the row’s gone, too, she said.’
    There was a silence. Into it, from the next room, there came faintly a voice calling, ‘Glad! Glad – what’s it all about? Glad!’
    Gladys stirred in her chair. ‘I’ll ’ave to tell her,’ she said fearfully, ‘it’s no use. She’ll ’ave to know … did Mrs Adams say when she’d be round? … not that it’ll do any good, if ’e’s – ’e’s that sort … we’ll be out before you can say Jack Robinson.’
    ‘Oh don’t be so soft, pull yourself together, can’t you?’ Mrs Simms suddenly almost shouted, ‘his kind’s not all that popular nowadays, you go down to the Town Hall and moan a bit, they’ll do something for you – you’re a pensioner and God knows what, aren’t you, I’m damned if I’d take it like you are.’
    ‘You’re young, Jean.’
    It was unanswerable. Mrs Simms shrugged, and put her fingers up to the tower of hair above her peaky white face. She hung for a moment, as if uncertain what to say, then said sharply, ‘We got some ice cream. The kids didn’t want it – care to finish it?’
    ‘Thanks, Jean. Annie would like it, I expect,’ Gladys said dully. Mrs Simms shrugged again, and after another glance at the doughy, downward-gazing face, down which tears were now running, went out of the room.
    In a little while, Gladys forced herself to get out of the chair. She straightened her cardigan, which was a bright turquoise blue and looked as if it had formerly belonged to an even larger wearer than herself, and uselessly fingered her hair, hanging in curls round her face, while staring unseeingly at herself in the dusty looking-glass over the mantelpiece. Then she turned out the light and marched across to the bedroom door.
    ‘Well!’ Annie observed, as it opened and her sister stood there in dramatic silence, ‘what in ’eaven’s name was all that about? I thought you was never coming.’ She peered closer. ‘You been crying?’
    Gladys had intended to be brave. But the sight of the familiar room, with the teapot and loaf on the table and her sister sitting up thin and birdlike in their bed, broke all her bravery down. She gave a great kind of howl, and fell across the shiny blue coverlet, weeping out that Mrs Adams had sold the house to one of those awful rackmans who was going to turn them out into the street. The gas-fire, with that meticulous sense of the fitting sometimes shown by domestic objects assumed to be insentient, chose this moment to go out. Gladys heard its expiring groan, and cried the louder.
    ‘Well,’ said Annie, temporarily stunned by all this, looking down bewildered at her sister’s grey-streaked head, ‘crying won’t ’elp. Do get up, Glad, ’ere, ’ave this – and tell us all about it.’ ‘This’ was a paper handkerchief.
    Some natures find relief in telling, and hearing, all about it, and Gladys’s was one of them. Already, too, her dramatic, colourloving spirit was relishing the drama of their situation … and though it was awful, shocking, terrible, they were not out on the street yet, and Annie, amid her cries of amazement and indignation at the baseness of Mrs Adams, and her shudders at the hints of their new landlord’s nature, managed to remember there was a shilling in a pocket of one of her old coats.
    Under her directions, Gladys first dried her eyes, then hunted, still whimpering, through the row hanging behind their curtain, found the coin, and put it into the meter. Then, as the gas began its heartless but cosy roaring again, another cup of tea was suggested, and