Free The Soldier's Bride by Maggie Ford

yet, to Lucy or Vinny or your father. Too many things to think about. We will be married, yes. In say a year’s time. But listen,’ he continued hastily as she made to interrupt. ‘If I can help your mother … By help, I mean financially towards getting her abroad for a cure. I can do that, Letitia. I’m pretty well solvent. If your father feels he must pay me back at some time, that will be fine with me. Though that isn’t a condition, you understand, darling.’
    Her happiness slowly dissolving while he spoke, she said joylessly, ‘I don’t think he’d take it. Dad’s never beena strong man except when it comes to his pride. He’s never borrowed money off anyone.’ This last she couldn’t help saying with some pride.
    ‘It’s your mother’s life we’re talking about. He cannot refuse,’ David said resolutely, and wouldn’t listen to any argument.
    He tackled her father one Sunday after Lucy and Jack had gone out for a walk, braving the cold damp breeze with its threat of snow.
    Keeping out of the way, Letty waited in the kitchen. Sitting at the narrow baize-covered deal table, she stared aimlessly about: at the kitchen range, its coals blazing bright on this cold day – Mum used to cook delicious bread pudding in the oven above it, which Letty now did; at the cups hanging on hooks on the dresser in the recess beside the range; at the shelves, one above the other, where several durable iron saucepans stood upside down to stop the grease of cooking getting into them; to the heavy iron kettle, still warm from making tea, set on the gas stove; at the copper in the corner; at the sink where, besides dishes, the family washed themselves, a steamy mirror over it.
    Beyond the coloured glass of the door was an open landing with an iron rail. It housed a wrought iron wringer, a tin bath that hung on the whitewashed brick wall, and a lavatory in one corner screened by a wooden wall and a door.
    Letty glanced again and again at the clock on its own small shelf. Two-thirty, twenty minutes to three, quarter to. David had been with Dad for half an hour – not only about helping Mum, but also she hoped about permissionto marry. She knew with a surge of excitement that Dad would agree to the latter though she hoped he’d agree to both. She remembered how Jack had gone to see Dad and they’d both emerged beaming at the ecstatic Lucy. Letty waited for that wonderful moment to be hers, very soon now, straining her ears to catch what was being said, hearing Dad’s low tones, David’s just a little higher, but both too blurred behind the closed parlour door for her to make out.
    Once she heard David raise his voice and her heart sank. Dad hardly ever raised his, never as far as she could remember. But he could be sullenly stubborn when he had a mind to be. Most likely he was being stubborn over the offer of money. As David’s voice modulated, Letty’s hopes rose again.
    She sat on in a fever of impatience, jumping up with anticipation as David came back into the kitchen. Then she noticed he had come back alone and that his eyes were shadowed.
    ‘Your father’s a frightened man,’ he told her after he’d made Letty sit back down on her chair. ‘He said he appreciated what I was trying to do for your mother, but …’
    He paused, and Letty watched him move towards the stained glass of the kitchen door to the whitewashed balcony, to stand gazing out, his back to her.
    ‘You do know,’ he said, without turning round, ‘that her illness has gone beyond any hope of a cure – beyond the help of money?’
    She knew but had refused to believe. They’d all refused to believe. It had remained to Dad, dear, quiet-spoken,dependent Dad to convince them that they must accept that his wife, their mother, would not be with them for much longer, and nothing under God’s heaven was going to alter that. Staring into David’s dark eyes as he turned sharply to look at her, a suffocating weight descended to weigh upon Letty’s