Free The Most Precious Thing by Rita Bradshaw Page A

like this.’
     
    Joan nodded, murmuring, ‘Aye, all right.’
     
    His arm came round her and he pulled her close into his side. ‘Now you get to sleep, lass, an’ don’t worry, all right? I’m not havin’ you make yourself bad over this. Whatever’s wrong with the bairn I’ll sort it.’
     
    Joan made no answer to this, but she reached up and kissed the stubbly square jaw before lying quietly again.
     
    Don’t worry, he said, and there was him beside himself. There had been plenty who’d said she could do better than Sandy McDarmount when she’d started walking out with him - her own mam and da included - but none of them saw the man she knew.
     
    True, she’d come near to braining him with the frying pan on occasion when he was well-oiled and playing the goat, but he wasn’t a drinker like some she could name. The trouble was, Sandy only had to have a pint or two to be falling over and the drink always made him silly.
     
    She knew plenty who could sit down and drink all night and then get up and walk out of the door as though they’d been supping water, or others who regularly got so drunk they couldn’t speak. They’d stagger home, flopping down on to the hearth, there to sleep right through until the buzzer sounded for the next shift, often with their bairns stepping over them where they lay. Nothing was said about them of course, because ‘they could hold their drink’. Her lip curled in the darkness. How she hated that phrase. A man could come home and knock ten bells out of his wife and bairns, but because he hadn’t made a fool of himself outside, that was all right. Well, she wouldn’t swap her man, not for all the tea in China she wouldn’t. He was all heart, was Sandy, in spite of playing devil’s faggarties at times.
     
    She’d seen him give his last bit of keepy-back money he’d earmarked for baccy to the ex-soldiers who’d been too badly injured to get a job after the war, and who came round the doors selling bobbins of thread and bootlaces. And only she knew how it affected him when he recognised one of the blind ones who walked up and down queues playing battered old fiddles or mouth organs as ex-comrades from his early days down the pit, along with the ones with no legs who sat on mucky pavements outside the theatres, drawing pictures of animals and birds and scenes from the Bible with chalk.
     
    Sandy stirred beside her. ‘You reckon our Renee might wheedle it out of the bairn if you have no joy?’
     
    ‘Renee?’ Joan blinked, striving to keep her voice matter-of-fact when she said, ‘She might. Aye, she might at that. I’ll put it to her the morrer if I get nowhere.’ By, he must be worried to suggest bringing Renee in, normally the mere name of their eldest was like a red flag to a bull, Joan thought, her brow wrinkling in the darkness.
     
    And it was this last which guaranteed she lay awake with her mind buzzing until dawn was breaking.
     
     
    At the other end of the street, David, too, was enduring a sleepless night. Strangely, it wasn’t the fact that he’d walked the streets with his father for over two hours before he could persuade him to return home which was now keeping him tossing and turning, or that Alec had still been awake when he’d entered the bedroom he shared with his brother, and in the resulting row - albeit in low, hushed voices - they’d both said unforgivable things. Rather it was the memory of how Carrie had looked in the few brief minutes before she’d left that had really disturbed him.
     
    He hadn’t seen her since the night of the wedding, and there had been little of the laughing-eyed, high-spirited girl he’d known all his life in the white-faced figure standing so quietly in the sitting room. Even allowing for his mother’s barbed tongue and what might have gone on before he and his father and Alec had entered the house, his gut feeling was that something was terribly wrong with the lass.
     
    His heart was thumping against