Wait Till I Tell You Read Online Free PDF

there was no chance of going unnoticed. Talk was the pastime, talk and work the currency. Euphemia was pleased to be among women, with her daughter. When, as now, she was irked at her man she did not tell, or it would have been round the place before tea.
    She wanted him to give up the boat and come into teaching at the school with her. She could not see the future in working on the pier. It took up a good day three times a week, when the following up had been done, the cargo counted, the letters sorted and settled in the red Land Rover to be taken round the only road by the post; and by the time drink had been taken, with the purser maybe, or with whoever came off the boat or was in the bar off a fishing boat.
    He was a good man, but where did these boat days go? Whereas, should he come in with her at the teaching, they would see their work as it grew day by day. And he could still do the lobsters, if there were any left in the sea. With the French and the Russians and the warm-water breeders at it, the sea was full of mostly red herrings, forget the silver darlings.
    Sandy now, she would see more of her father if he came in with the teaching, and then Euphemia maybe, when it was all settled, would get down to having another baby.
    The purple line at the horizon lay over the slow grey sea. The air smelt of weed, cigarettes and diesel; the post office van was idling and the men gathered around it in their oilskins, smoking for the warmth. The children of the island were standing against the rail at the end of the pier, their feet kicking against the robust wire barrier with a bright harsh chiming. Six of them red-headed, in shades of red from orangeade to a bracken mixed with rough briar brown, and one of them with the crow-black hair that does not shine and goes with blue eyes. The children were waiting to wave, even those who were waving no one off; it was the boat, which was the presiding event of their lives, that they wished to acknowledge.
    Against the folding evening clouds, and frosted by their departing rims of hard light, the shining ruby-juice red of Sandy’s straight hair and the drained white of her face seemed to Euphemia to be stamped like a royal seal set to important words. It was not easy to think of Sandy with a brother or a sister. But Euphemia did not approve of only children; especially not here, where circumstances were already isolated in the world’s eyes. It was not possible to imagine loving Sandy any less or loving any child more than Sandy was loved; it was hard to imagine the love that Davie and she bore for their child stretching to accommodate more, but Euphemia was convinced that this would occur naturally, without pain, like passing through a door into a new room with open windows.
    The ferry was loaded. The gangplank was lifted on its ropes and let down to the pier for rolling and storage in the metal waiting room at the end where the children hung and bobbed and cuffed one another’s bright heads. A long plaintive blast warned that the boat must soon go and the children hollered back to it through cupped hands. Lights were coming on in the boat; soon the dark would land over them all, steaming across the water from the purple edge of the sea.
    Davie was checking that goods had been properly exchanged, the gangmower sent to the mainland for fixing by June time, the cowcake fetched up out of the hold, the canned goods and frozen gear stowed ready for the shop, the box of specially requested medicaments boxed up for the doctor, the beer rolled into the pub’s Bedford van; detail was what mattered in this job, and he took a pride in it.
    In the restful numbed cold silence, people began to prepare themselves to make farewell and to depart for their homes. The moment the children loved was coming, when they could wave to the boat as it pulled out and away from the island, seagulls over the wake like bridesmaids. They stood and waited at the pier end, looking out to sea.
    There was a creak, a