A Step Too Far Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the sort you suffered from twenty years gone, a blindness you be sufferin’ still if you thinks Jacob ignorant of the fact that by marryin’ you he walked a trodden path. Oh no, he weren’t told by any of the family but by the man who put a child in your belly, the child old mother Hanley took from you with a long knitting needle, almost takin’ your life the same time she took that of the babe. Yes, Jacob knew of your lying with a man who refused to wed you, just as he must have known it was no miscarriage you had twelve months after his taking you to the altar. Your so called loss was a pretence to cover the fact you could never again carry a child, that your backstreet abortion had deprived him of a family.’
         Violet was attempting to hold the cup with little finger affectedly raised.
         ‘That’s a lie.’
         ‘Then why not bring him here to this house, have him stand at this table while I repeat what I’ve just said. Let me ask him if he was on the verge of leaving you when you were both asked to take the child of a dying woman, to be father and mother to it; it were that child kept Jacob Hawley at your side. It was duty, you hear that Violet, he felt it his duty to care for and rear that child, a child he came to love. You tricked Jacob Hawley but be warned, others might not fool so easy, and that could mean not only the loss of a husband but also a daughter and that be the root of your fears don’t it Violet? Deep inside you knows that once the girl be married and gone from your house then will Jacob leave it and with his going so will go the lifestyle you’ve built for yourself. It be this knowledge has you dress that wench like a band box, only the best for the daughter of Violet Hawley . . . except it don’t be the girl you be thinkin’ of do it? It be yourself, yourself as it has ever been. That were why she went to grammar school while every other kid in the street went to the council school. That’s why you pays a fortune for clothes from Jim Slater and his black market friends, why you scheme to ensure her were given no job workin’ on a factory floor but were taken on for office work. That way her stands a better chance of bein’ noticed by them as has money, a better chance of landing a fish wealthy enough to keep Violet Hawley in her trumped up little world. It be your future you be lookin’ to Violet, your future, not that of the wench and that be a truth even you can’t deny.
     
    As the third bus, already packed to the seams, passed the long queue of would-be passengers, Alice Butler tutted her vexation. The day had not gone well, a broken die had meant her machine lying idle for more than half the morning until the part could be repaired. ‘We don’t ’ave no spare.’ The tool setter had been crusty as a fresh baked loaf. ‘I can’t go puttin’ in what don’t be ’ad, I ain’t no magician.’
         He was no Clark Gable either! His rat-like features and whining voice made even Peter Lorre look like a sex god. Half a morning! She shuffled restlessly, her eyes in search of the next bus. Half a morning she had been forced to log as day work, the flat hourly rate which paid half that she could earn at the newly introduced piece work; with piece work the more she produced the more money went into her pay packet, but for all the extra she worked her heart out, she saw no more of it than the regular half crown. ‘You don’t never miss what you ain’t never had.’ Her grandmother’s saying whispered in Alice’s mind but the answer was a shout in her brain. She did miss what she never had! She missed the pleasure of drawing pure silk over her legs, of seeing herself dressed in expensive fashionable clothes instead of those she wore now, government controlled Utility, drab things which might well have been designed by Methuselah.
         Casting a furtive, beneath the lashes glance at the figure next in line in the queue, a figure who could have stepped