Black Sheep by Susan Hill

Author:Susan Hill [Susan Hill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

8

WHEN ROSE HAD been married for two years and there was still no pregnancy, people, as they always did, made remarks and hinted to Evie, and before much longer began to ask one another if all was well, not with Rose’s health but with her marriage. Ida Minns commented in this way, first to her husband and daughter, then to several friends. She did not speak to Rose because, in truth, she did not care for her daughter-in-law and had disapproved of the marriage from the outset. But she held Rose’s mother in reserve, to speak to if things went on in the same way. And Evie Howker, being proud, would have listened in silence and sent her away and not only because she would not be patronised by the wife of a pithead manager. She had borne her own children without trouble – trouble came later, with too little money and too much grinding work as the backbone to four men. If Rose escaped any of it, even though she would also miss the short-lived joy of each baby, Evie could only envy her. Why Rose had not conceived she did not know and would not ask. Meanwhile, unhappy on her own all day in the empty house, Rose looked for work and found it behind the counter of the shop beside the Institute, from which the previous girl had been sacked and disgraced for thieving.

From the first morning she loved everything about the shop, loved the smells, the way the shelves were crammed with dozens of different items and yet always orderly, loved weighing out and filling up, loved the swish of the sugar into the cone of blue paper and the soft billows of flour, loved the meal sacks and the rattle of the coarse feed into the metal scoop, loved the cotton threads arranged in their colours on a rack and the smell of the balls of string and the shine on the boiled sweets. She felt as if the place behind the counter had been waiting for her to fill it. She had found more than work. People remarked that she looked well, her eyes were bright, her colour up, that she had ‘something about her’ and after a short time they forgot that Rose continued to be childless and, like Evie, they envied her.

Charlie Minns had moods when a livid humour weighed him down and to be rid of it he flailed about him, and in flailing, caught Rose on the side of her face. At the end of her first week in the shop he was early home because he had trapped his hand in a pulley, and although not broken, it was deeply bruised, and painful.

‘I don’t care for this,’ he said. He was sitting at the table looking straight at Rose as she walked in. ‘I like to come in to my food not an empty space and I would have done if you hadn’t started as a shopworker.’

‘I came out dead on half past five.

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