A Kind Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

been given to lying when they were girls.
    From the field they heard the boys whooping and shouting.
    ‘They love it up here,’ Miriam said.
    ‘I love it.’
    ‘Aren’t you lucky?’
    Eve had never before heard her sound bitter in that way.
    The day drifted down into a soft warm evening. The boys came back covered in what Eve thought of as clean dirt, dust from the track and the sandy burrows under the far hedge, and helped her feed and shut up the chickens and by the time John Bullard came for them it was dark and they were asleep and had to be lifted in to the back seat of the old car. Miriam sat in front, and did not so much as glance back.
    * * *
     
    Eve’s own pregnancy was without incident and she felt well after the first weeks, walked every day across the track towards the peak because the autumn was early and chill but bright and walking was easy. It was how she found the church, walking when she was not yet too heavy to do the two miles and back without discomfort. It was late November. She had never been to the other side of the peak but once she found the church, stranded alone like a ship at sea, she went several more times, wandering round the graveyard reading the stones that could be read, before going inside where it was dim and cold, and smelled of the earth. Once, she had brought Tommy and there had been a service, the church lit by candles and only one other person there besides the parson. It was the last time, he told them, when the winter came it was impossibly cold and if it snowed, no one could reach it. Eve thought of it often in January, trapped in whiteness and cold, waiting for the spring to bring it to life again.
    Tommy went steadily through the days, and though he was caring of her, did not fuss or cause her any anxiety. He looked forward as she did but he was a man to focus on the present and take the future as it came to him. But she could tell by the way he glanced at her, took over the lifting and hen feeding, madeher tea before he left each morning, that he felt some small anxiety. What had happened to Miriam had shocked them both. Nothing could ever quite be taken for granted again.

7
     
    HER LABOUR , beginning in the early hours of a Sunday morning, was short and fierce. There was no time for Tommy to run for the midwife, but hearing the sounds, Mary Ankerby came, in time to see the child, a small, dark-haired girl, lying next to Eve on the bed, mad as a wasp and still attached to the cord, which Mary cut deftly, having had seven of her own and all born at 5 The Cottages.
    ‘And what better place to start in life?’ she said, handing the girl to Eve, who lay dazed, the birth not having been expected for another week.
    ‘Jeannie,’ Tommy had said from the beginning. ‘Jeannie Eliza,’ though where the names had come from Eve did not know for there was no one called either in their families.
    Jeannie Eliza Carr lay tight-swaddled in the whiteflannel sheet like a small chrysalis, dark blue eyes looking out. Tommy drew the curtain against the first sun streaming in through the window onto them but Eve made him pull it back again, wanting their daughter to be touched by it and to have a sight of the wide sky.
    From the first, she was a quiet, watching child, only crying for her needs, and when they were satisfied, lying peacefully, not always sleeping, and as she grew, always looking for her father at the sound of his voice, following his movements. For years he had played the fiddle, though he did not know music. An Irishman who had worked for a while in the town had taught him, and when he had moved on, left Tommy his own violin, saying that when he got back home he could always pick up another. Tommy had played the dances and jigs and occasional slow sad tearful ballads he had heard and, getting gradually more tuneful and confident, taken to entertaining people outside in the street or the public house. He became in demand for wakes and weddings, though everyone knew what