Patsy of Paradise Place by Rosie Harris

Author:Rosie Harris [Harris, Rosie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780099436249
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-04-02T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

PATSY’S EYES WERE still red and swollen when she went to work on Monday morning. Several times while they were fixing Samson’s harness she saw Billy looking at her questioningly, but each time she avoided his eyes and quickly turned her head away.

‘What’s wrong with you today?’ he asked jokingly as they hitched the horse up to the cart. ‘Too many late nights over the weekend?’

‘Something like that,’ she mumbled. ‘I think I might be going down with a cold.’

‘Perhaps you ought to take the day off, then. Why don’t you go home and go back to bed, Patsy,’ he suggested, his voice full of concern. ‘You certainly don’t look too good.’

‘Perhaps I should,’ she agreed.

He sounded so solicitous, so caring, that she had to rub the back of her hand across her eyes to brush away the tears. She wondered what he would say if she told him the truth about exactly why she was not looking too good.

She wanted to tell him and to warn him about her mother’s reaction, but she was afraid to do so in case Billy turned against her and then she would have no one to confide in.

She had been stunned by her mam’s attitude. It wasn’t as though Maeve was strait-laced or particularly moral herself. Patsy was so dog-tired at night that her mam could have taken umpteen men up to bed and she wouldn’t have known. Since she’d found Bruno in with her she’d never opened her mam’s bedroom door ever again. What she didn’t see didn’t bother her.

So why had her mam been so outraged? Patsy wondered. Was it because she feels I should have told her sooner, or was it really because of what she thinks Dad would have thought if he was still alive?

She knew he would probably have regarded it as a heinous sin, because he’d been such a good Catholic, but her mam wasn’t. She never goes to Mass these days, Patsy mused, and she never checks on whether I do or not.

The way her mam assumed that it was Billy’s baby bothered her. What would she have said if I’d told her that Bruno Alvarez was the father? Patsy wondered.

In the end, Patsy came to the conclusion that her mother was so incensed by the news because the truth had been kept from her for so long and some of the neighbours might already know. Patsy felt guilty about that, but one of the reasons why she hadn’t spoken out before was because deep down she wasn’t sure whether her mother and Bruno were still seeing each other. It was something she tried to blot from her mind because she had no idea how to handle the situation if they were and she was still so much in love with Bruno that she didn’t want to lose him, even though things were far from right between them.

If he noticed that she had put on weight he never mentioned it. They hadn’t made love for

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