The Morning Tide by Audrey Howard

Author:Audrey Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448106066
Publisher: Random House

Chapter Twenty-Two

JENNY KNEW NO one. Her own brothers who had tossed her in the air when she was a baby, who had guarded their little dear, their golden-eyed, tumble-legged, little pet, for she was still an infant when they were almost grown, were strangers to her, as were Kate and Elly.

Kate and Elly never left her alone. Whenever Kate went out, whether it was with Charlie when he was home, or just to town to do a bit of shopping, Elly would come and sit with Jenny, and when Charlie was at sea, Kate had taken to bringing the silent girl into their bed, though she didn’t tell Charlie. It was as though she was afraid to take her eyes from her. Someone must watch her for fear she would slip away from them completely, Kate thought, and even when Charlie came whistling into the house and took her to the deep warm bed, when he slept she would slip along the landing and bend in the dark across the sleeping form of her sister. When she had satisfied herself that the breathing which whispered in the tiny bedroom was deep and natural, she would creep back to the warmth and security of Charlie’s back and fall into the light sleep which nowadays was hers.

Kate was in her seventh month of pregnancy and the tiredness weighed heavily upon her. Elly came as often as she could, sometimes for a couple of days, banging the cobbler’s shop door in her protesting Pat’s face. He was fed up with it, he told her, and could see no reason why their Jenny couldn’t go in the asylum like the other ‘looneys’, but he only said it once. Elly hit him with the frying pan that time, and his breakfast still in it.

Without her, Kate would have gone under. Elly, with her cheerful challenging, careless outlook on life was the tonic Kate needed when the pleasing, pretty, blank face of the doll who sat opposite her from morning till night, began to get her down. Elly would ‘cock a snook’ at anything, and though she had cried when Kate had shown her the pale and lovely form of her sister’s dead child, she did not dwell upon it, nor on Jenny’s illness. Elly was at odds with the world, with life, as well as with her husband. Anything she could find to laugh at, or fight with, in the dreary round of her days, she welcomed. Not that she welcomed her sister’s despair, either of them, but the challenge of bringing a ‘right good laugh’, or a flare of temper to at least one of them, proved that life was still there, and as she was fond of saying, ‘If yer didn’t laugh yer’d only bloody cry.’

In the beginning, when she did not turn her head as they entered the room, nor answer when they greeted her, Jenny had frightened her visitors. The men stood around looking in compassionate bewilderment at the silent, unknowing girl in the chair.

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