The Girl on the Beach Read Online Free PDF

she’s been dismissed because Her Ladyship found out about it. I don’t reckon that’s fair, do you?’
    ‘No, perhaps not, but Her Ladyship is one of the old school.’
    ‘It isn’t as if we were doing anything wrong, simply going for walks and talking. Now she’s gone and I don’t know where. I’ve been going round all our old haunts but there’s no sign of her. She’s such a little innocent, I’m afraid she’ll get into trouble.’
    ‘I don’t see it’s any of your business, son.’
    ‘Of course it’s my business. She lost her job because of me and I don’t think she’ll have been given a reference either. I can’t understand Sir Bertram. What’s so bad about seeing me?’
    ‘Nothing if you have been behaving yourselves.’
    ‘Of course we have. I wouldn’t—’
    ‘Glad to hear it.’
    ‘I’ve got to find her, Pa. She means the world to me.’
    ‘Oh, come on, son, she’s only a little orphan you’ve befriended. Don’t take it to heart.’
    ‘She is not only a little orphan. She’s Julie. There isn’t another like her in the whole world.’
    His father sighed. ‘Oh dear, you have got it bad, but I should try and forget her if I were you. She’ll survive on her own.’
    Harry could not forget her. He had remembered her for ten years and he would remember her for another ten, and it would not change how he felt about her nor his growing anxiety that she had come to grief. That bounder, Ted Austen, might know and he had a good mind to beat it out of him.
    Seeing his obdurate expression, his father added, ‘Don’t do anything rash, Harry. Remember she was working for our boss and you don’t want to make trouble, do you?’
    Harry didn’t, but it didn’t stop him seeking Ted Austen out and giving him a hiding. It didn’t do any good. Ted didn’t know where Julie had gone and he cared even less.
     
    What Ted did care about was the fact that he had a black eye and Sir Bertram would be bound to ask how he got it. He went to the kitchen and told the astonished staff he had caught a tramp snooping in the garden and seen him off. They were all for reporting the matter to the police, but he said the fellow had gone now and wouldn’t be back, he had seen to that. But he promised himself that wasn’t the last of it. He had endured regular beatings from his drunken father as a child and been unable to fight back, but after one particularly vicious punishment when he was twelve yearsold he had run away from home, vowing no one, no one at all, would ever lay a finger on him again. His life from then on had been one of begging and stealing and dodging the police, not always successfully. It was borstal that found him a job cleaning cars at a garage and it was there he had learnt to drive. When he saw the advertisement for a chauffeur for Sir Bertram, he invented a past that would be acceptable, forged a reference and found himself with a well-paid job, a smart uniform and comfortable home. But more importantly, there were no more beatings, until that fellow turned up and hurled him back into his childhood and the pain and suffering he had endured, and that he could not forgive or forget.
     
    ‘The hospital cannot take you back in once you’ve left,’ Miss Paterson had told Julie when she arrived on the doorstep of the brand-new Coram home, tired and hungry, and related her sorry tale. ‘And I’m afraid they would be disinclined to help you after getting yourself dismissed.’
    ‘It wasn’t my fault. We weren’t doing any harm.’
    ‘You broke the rules. Goodness me, after all the years with us, you must have realised the importance of obeying rules.’
    In spite of the scolding, Miss Paterson, who was very near retirement and had found herself a small first-floor flat in Shoreditch in preparation for that day, had taken pity on her and allowed her to move into the flat and helped her to find a job washing up and scrubbing floors in a boarding house on City Road, run by a Mrs