The Promise Read Online Free PDF Page A

shoulders. She saw one fall flat on his face. She had no idea whether they would be off tomorrow to the training camp in France, or if it took longer to arrange, but it was frightening to think that within a few weeks they could have guns in their hands. They were shop assistants, clerks, bricklayers and gardeners; the nearest most had come to a gun was on a rifle range at a fair. Her stomach tightened in fear for them, and she had a premonition that some wouldn’t make it to their next birthday.
    She shook herself out of such maudlin thoughts and went downstairs to help, as there would be a great deal of clearing up after such a busy night.
    Half an hour later, the bar and tables were wiped down, stools and chairs stacked on them, and most of the glasses were washed and dried. Mog looked exhausted. Garth was out in the back yard hosing it down, muttering to himself about the pools of vomit and the filthy state of the lavatory.
    ‘We’ve taken more than a whole week’s takings tonight,’ Jimmy said as he took a tray of clean glasses and replaced them on the shelves under the bar. ‘But I hope to hell we don’t get another night like this one.’
    ‘You won’t join up too, will you?’ Belle asked him anxiously.
    He laughed, stopping what he was doing to pat her cheek. ‘What, and leave you, the prettiest lady in London? Of course I won’t, at least not unless they make it compulsory. And that’s unlikely, because who would run everything in England if everyone under forty was sent to France?’
    ‘The old codgers like me,’ Garth called out from the yard. ‘And if I have to clean up a mess like this again I’ll lie about my age and volunteer.’
    Jimmy fell asleep that night almost as soon as he got into bed, but as always he had one arm around Belle, curled into her back. She lay there in the darkness listening to his gentle breathing, and moved his hand down on to her belly. She had got over the shock of Mog’s suggestion now, and here, tucked so cosily into bed, the thought of her and Jimmy having a baby was a good one. She could imagine Mog and Garth cooing over him or her, always ready to lend a hand, as loving as grandparents. Jimmy would make a superb father too; he was loving, patient and so big-hearted.
    But would she make a good mother? She knew nothing about babies, having no younger brothers or sisters, and brought up as she was, she’d never even held one in her arms. The closest she’d ever got to a baby was seeing women in Seven Dials with one tucked into a shawl in their arms. Here in Blackheath many of the mothers had nursemaids who walked their charges in a perambulator on the heath.
    Would she be able to keep her shop going? While she certainly didn’t like the thought of giving it up, she wasn’t going to do what her own mother had done and hand over the baby to Mog.
    Thinking of Annie, Belle wondered how she’d react to becoming a grandmother. Would she be indifferent? Or see it as a chance to make amends?
    Belle had hoped when Annie helped her to get the shop they might become closer, but that hadn’t come about. If Belle didn’t go and see her once a month, there would be no contact at all.
    Annie was still running the boarding house in King’s Cross that she’d acquired when the old place in Jake’s Court had been burned down, and doing very well for herself. No one would ever guess by her elegant clothes and genteel manner that she’d once owned a brothel. Belle suspected that she kept having a daughter a secret too, so she wasn’t likely to be enthusiastic about a grandchild.
    Belle ran her hand over her stomach and silently vowed she was going to give her child all the love and affection she’d never received from her mother.

Chapter Three
     
    Belle fanned herself with a newspaper. It was so hot in the shop that she felt she might just melt. Not for the first time in the past few days of stifling heat, she wondered who it was that decided women had to wear so many