A Song Twice Over Read Online Free PDF

dance to his tune. You know the kind of thing.’
    â€˜I do.’
    â€˜And you don’t care?’
    â€˜What difference could it be making to me?’
    â€˜It might. If I get elected who knows if I wouldn’t make it law that all girls with black hair and blue eyes had to wear silk dresses? But for now I’ll just see you on your way to Frizingley – satisfy myself that’s really where you’re going – and then I’ll persuade this good gentleman carter to give me a lift back to Leeds again. I expect he’ll be glad of the company on his homeward trail.’
    But he had not climbed into the pedlar’s wagon to air his views on electoral reform. He did not know why he was here, except that he had not yet had his fill of looking at her, which had seemed reason enough when he had chased the cart down the alley a moment ago and vaulted over the tail-board. Reason enough now. Why explore it? Particularly since that strange languor they had experienced on the crossing had come back again, warmer and sweeter and deeper – much deeper – than before, hushing them, lulling them, filling their entire, complicated, busy minds with the one simple, all-absorbing pleasure of looking , listening to the sound of the other’s breathing, taking in the odours – like no other odours anywhere – of hair and skin, so that the rough, jolting miles and the scowling, dark grey mill villages blending one into the other on the road through Leeds to Bradford and then to Frizingley passed very nearly un-noticed.
    The cart stopped.
    â€˜Oh … Are we here?’ Once again, as on the approach to Liverpool, she spoke with a slow-dragging reluctance, oddly fearful of the answer.
    â€˜What a vile place.’ And now it was Daniel who spoke resentfully, sullenly, as he retrieved her bags and her child from the cart-tail and set them on a sodden patch of unpaved ground.
    Vile? Blinking rapidly, clearing her eyes of Daniel Carey and the bemused trance he had created, she looked for the first time at this place to which her father’s letters had brought her. Not a pretty place, he had called it. And she saw that in that, at least, he was to be trusted.
    She stood in a mean, dark street in the decaying centre of an old town, a pleasant enough place once, perhaps, before the belching chimney stacks of newly created industries had blackened it; even a quiet place before the demands of the factories for labour had caused workers’ cottages to spring up like acres of ragged mushrooms around every mill-yard. While here, in the street to which her father had directed her, the tall, narrow houses, standing on what had once been a picturesque location with their backs to an old shipping canal – nauseous and gaseous now with industrial waste and human sewage – had lost their status as ‘residences’and become lodging-houses crammed far beyond their brim.
    â€˜What a pest-hole,’ he said, angrily, as if he held her to blame for it. ‘Is it better here you’d be than in a mud cabin in Tipperary?’
    Yes. Although she could not tell him so. Because where could one mud cabin in Tipperary lead to except another? What could one aspire to in Tipperary? Whereas here, through the gloom and grime and the low, grey cloud – did it never lighten? – there would be ordinary men and women somewhere, not just lords and ladies as seemed always to be the case in Ireland, who wore fine clothes and drove fine carriages. She had her mother’s word for that.
    Nevertheless, a vile place, the light – such as it was – just fading, a hint of dampness in the heavy air, a crowd of indifferent passers-by, slouching heads down into the coming rain, who had seen too many arrivals and departures to pay much heed to yet another Irish girl with her glib chatter coming, as so many came and went, to a town already bursting at its seams with an alien