The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton Read Online Free PDF Page B

began to cry, though he didn’t even care who it was, and then another shrieked. The others, four of them now, held him and dragged him to the door. They threw him out, in spite of his struggling, and the front door was slammed. Joe lay in the gutter, in the bitter night air, which had never been quite as bad as it was now.
    He tried to remember what had happened, but he couldn’t put his thoughts into any kind of order so he hailed a cab and sat down, wondering how things could have got so much worse after his five years of soldiering, and surviving. Wondering how he could come back to his father dead and the love of his life apparently gone and with nobody knowing where.
    Angela was at the front of his mind, but he was in shock, he couldn’t think clearly, and so he tried to think about his father first because he was dead and hopefully Angela was nothing of the sort. How awful must his father have felt to be so alone, to feel so bad that he didn’t want to be here any more, even though he had a grown-up child. The trouble was that Joe had never made him proud. His father hated soldiering, everything about it. He had wanted Joe to be different. Joe had won medals and done well, but his father had never mentioned it.
    Joe could not stop thinking of his father in that bloody great house all alone. He had always been alone, Joe had not been able to stem that loneliness, and by God he had tried as he was growing up. It was no wonder he was no good at school; he was always trying to get home to save his father from the person he had become. He had spent all his childhood thinking that his father would die. His mother had died, so why not?
    He had been a coward. He had gone willingly to France because he no longer wanted to face the man his father had become. Every time he left he thought they would not meet again, that his father was fated to meet such an end. France had been his retreat, his cover. It was almost amusing. Other men were terrified to die, scared of having limbs blown off, of being in pain they could not bear. Joe hadn’t understood until now that he was not afraid because somehow in his heart he had known that he would come back to this. And now he had. And the one person who could have saved him from total despair was gone from him.
    His first instinct was to run after her, to go wherever she might have gone, to bring her home, to hold her safe, but he knew in an awful way that Toddy was right. She was not there and by God they had made sure he would not find her. What had they done with her?
    He tried to see how she would feel about him now that he was nobody and had nothing. He could not reconcile Toddy’s view of his sister with the woman he loved. She would not have deserted him, ever. She would not have let them send her away. She adored him. She had loved him so very much, almost as much as he had loved her.
    He tried to think otherwise, that she was young and beautiful and used to the best of everything. Her family was old and respected and she was well loved and cared for and he could not take her down with him to wherever he was going now. It would have been the most awful thing of all to do to her. His lovely golden girl. She would have gone with him and he could have managed something – surely people would have helped? – but what would have been her fate? Her family would never have allowed it. They had talked her round, they had held out something beyond him, they had made sure that she was not there for when he came back. He admitted that much to himself at least.
    It seemed strange that the war had not defeated him, yet the homecoming had. What an odd end to it. Worse still, he now remembered the weekend he and Angela had stolen.
    He had come back a few months ago, not told anyone, and she had lied to her family because they had wanted to be together so very much. They met at a hotel on the southcoast, used his name, and Joe had the best time of his life. It seemed to him now that he was