Pure as the Lily Read Online Free PDF Page A

hair was pale brown, fine of texture and sparse, and stuck out in wisps from under her blue felt hat; but the face still, held the shadow of a onetime attractiveness.
    She was sixty-three years old and when she had been thirty-four, as Alice was now, she had likely looked the same, and, like Alice, been entirely unaware that her claim to good looks was marred by her expression of peevishness.
    Grandma McAlister looked at her son-in-law sitting in the armchair to the side of the high, slack-coal-banked fire, and her tone itself was an accusation as she said, “She not back yet?1
    “No.” Alee rose slowly to his feet.
    “She’s a bit late but she should be in any minute. Sit down. Sit down, won’t you? Will I make you a drop tea?”
    “No; no thanks.
    “Tisn’t long since I had mine.” She sat down in the chair opposite and Alee resumed his seat. She had not spoken to Mary who was ironing on the scullery table that had been brought into the kitchen, nor had she spoken to Jimmy who was sitting doing his homework. But after a few moments of stretching one leg out, and then the other, as if to ease a cramp, she brought her feet together, folded her hands in her lap, looked at Alee and said, “Nothing doing?”
    “No, nothing doing.”
    “Ted Bainbridge, you know next to me, he got set on in Wallsend last week.”
    “Lucky for him. We were over that way this morning we nearly got set upon, not set on.”
    “Well, you shouldn’t go over there and cause a disturbance.”
    “Who said we went to cause a disturbance?” Alec’s voice was rising.
    “We went lookin’ for work. We’d been told there was some going.

    Disturbance! What do you mean, causing a disturbance? “
    “Well, look at what happened over at North Shields last year. They say it was the Shields lot an’
    fellows going over from here and incitin’ them.”
    “Oh my God!” Alee moved his head slowly. They don’t need any incitement, their dole queues are as long as ours. What you’re on about was the demonstration. They were demonstrating against. “
    “Demonstration! Better if they used their energy to look for work.”
    “Oh dear God!” Alee uttered the words to himself as if in prayer.
    Could you blame Alice for going on like she did, being brought up by that one sitting there? If ever there was a numskull in this world it was her.
    “She’s a long time.” Mabel McAlister looked round the aa room, and her eyes came to rest on Mary and she said, Your ma’s a long time. Go and see what’s keepin’ her. “ Mary did not answer her grandma but glanced towards her father, and when he gave her an almost imperceptible nod she laid the flat iron on the fender, saying to him, “Will you take the heater out of the fire for me, Da?” Then she went from the room and into her bedroom, and there, taking her working coat, she buttoned it up to her neck, tied a scarf tightly round her head, and went down the front stairs and out of the front door so that she wouldn’t have to pass through the kitchen and look at her grannie again. She couldn’t stand her grannie McAlister.
    The house was the last but one at the top of the street, and at the bottom end was Mr. Tollett’s shop where her ma worked.
    Mr. Tollett was a nice man, Mary considered, different. He had only been in the shop about four years; he came and took it over when his father died. His father and mother had died within a month of each other, it had been very sad. Some people said that they had died through worry because they’d had to close up their other two shops owing to bad debts.
    Mr. Tollett hadn’t been married when he first came home but shortly after he married a girl from Newcastle, from Jesmond, the posh end.
    They said she hardly spoke to anyone around the doors. Mary only remembered seeing her once or twice because she never showed herself in the shop. She hadn’t been bad-looking, but sort of uppish.
    Then last year she had gone and died, leaving a baby only a year