Daughter of Mine. Anne Bennett
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Название: Daughter of Mine
Автор: Anne Bennett
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007343478
isbn:
Then, he’d started becoming friendly with a man called Stuart Fellows, who lived at the bottom end of Bell Barn Road. They’d all been to St Catherine’s together, but as Stuart was considered a troublemaker, Mike and Steve had kept well away from him. But now, with Mike meeting Tressa as many nights as he could, they’d sort of been thrown together, and Mike could hardly blame Steve for that.
Stuart was only too willing to go after the women with Steve, despite having a steady girlfriend of his own. ‘Don’t it bother you?’ Mike asked him when the three of them were together one day. ‘What if your girlfriend finds out?’
‘She won’t,’ Stuart said confidently. ‘Anyroad, if she does, so what? It ain’t hurting her, it’s helping.’
‘How d’you work that out?’
‘Look, she don’t want to go all the way, frightened of finding herself pregnant; and she’s right to worry because I think her old man would kill the pair of us. This way I don’t have to push her.’
‘Tressa wouldn’t see it that way,’ Mike said, shaking his head.
‘You sleep with Tressa,’ Steve pointed out.
‘Well, we’re engaged.’
‘I ain’t going down that route, mate,’ Stuart replied quickly. ‘Have fun while you’re young, that’s me. But I don’t think it would stop me if I was engaged, or even married.’
‘Talk sense, man.’
‘Look,’ Stuart explained, ‘you can’t do nothing to stop having kids, can you, cos the Pope says so. Well, I wouldn’t want a houseful of kids and a wife like an old hag. Some of these women having a baby every year and living hand to mouth would take it as a bonus to have their old man dip his wick elsewhere once in a while, I’ll tell you.’
Steve thought about that. Next door to them lived Bob and Chrissie Roberts. They’d been married thirteen years and Chrissie was pregnant with her tenth child. All the children were pitifully thin, dressed in rags and usually barefoot, and Steve had heard them crying with hunger and cold.
And countless times he’d heard Chrissie pleading with Bob to leave her alone and the resultant slaps and thumps and punches, followed by her muffled moans and the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of their bedhead against the wall, and later in the quiet of the night he’d often hear Chrissie sobbing.
The young, once beautiful girl was gone for good. Her golden locks were dark, lank and greasy and her skin had lost its earlier bloom and was heavily lined and sallow and thin. Added to that, her body was shapeless and she’d lost a lot of teeth. And the woman was too poor and wretched to take joy in anything. Would you want that for any woman you married? No, by God you wouldn’t.
So, when Stuart said, ‘Seems to me the church has you by the balls every which way, and I’ll go on the way I’ve always done, wife or no wife, and no bloody church will tell me different,’ Steve could see the reasoning behind it.
‘Well, I have no wife, no girlfriend, no nothing,’ Steve said. ‘And I’m not doing without female company a minute longer. Are you coming along with us, Mike, or are you not?’
Mike shook his head, and the other men laughed. ‘Suit yourself,’ Steve said, and with a wave they were gone.
‘You said it would be all right,’ Tressa said accusingly to Mike as they wandered arm in arm down Colmore Row.
Mike was still getting to grips with the news that his lovely, beautiful Tressa was carrying his child, and yet he knew she had a right to be angry with him. He had promised she’d be all right and that he would see to it. He knew he couldn’t wear anything to prevent pregnancy, the Church’s teaching was clear, but he’d intended to pull out before any damage was done. He hadn’t realised how difficult that would be, how carried away he’d become, so that he’d be virtually unable to do that. So the condition Tressa was in was entirely his fault.
He wasn’t aware she was crying until he felt her shoulders shaking. ‘Don’t cry, pet,’ he said, ‘please don’t.’ He turned her away from the city centre into one of the deserted side roads and kissed her gently. ‘Now,’ he said, facing her. ‘You are sure about this?’
Tressa nodded her head. ‘My monthlies were due a week after we became engaged, but nothing happened and it’s been the same this month, and it’s nearly the end of March now.’ She looked at Mike and added, ‘It must have happened that first time.’
Bugger! thought Mike, and he knew it must have. That time he was so buoyed up with the culmination of his dreams, and drunk with lust as much as the drinks he’d consumed, he could no more have stopped than he could have turned back the tide, and this was the result. ‘We’ll get married sooner rather than later, that’s all,’ he said reassuringly.
‘We haven’t money enough,’ Tressa cried. ‘Where will we live and everything?’
‘Look, Tressa, many start with less and manage,’ Mike told her. ‘We have a bit saved between us and I know you’ve been picking up bits and pieces in the market. I’ll put in for any overtime going and as long as you are feeling all right you can work a wee while yet, till the wedding at least.’
‘Where will we live?’
‘We might have to stay with my mom and dad for now,’ Mike said.
Tressa gave a shiver of distaste. Mike’s parents were almost as bad as Steve’s and Mike’s two sisters also adored their baby brother. They’d resented Tressa from the beginning, sensing how Mike felt about her. They were too clever to do this in front of Mike, when they were icily polite, but they had plenty of opportunity to give digs and make comments to show Tressa she wasn’t welcome in their family. Tressa never complained about this to Mike, for she knew the high regard he held his family in and she told herself it was Mike she loved and was marrying, not his family. But then she’d never envisaged living with them.
Mike, catching sight of her face by the light from the lamppost, said quite sharply, ‘It’s no good looking like that, Tressa. It’s my parents or the streets as far as I can see just now.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. It’s just not what I imagined.’
‘D’you think I did?’ Mike snapped, and then he put his arms around Tressa. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ he said, kissing her gently. ‘I’m a brute yelling at you. It’s all my fault, because I know you would have waited.’
Tressa knew Mike spoke the truth. However hard it was, she would have held out to keep her virginity till the wedding night if Mike hadn’t wanted it so much. That first night, the night of the engagement, she’d done it fearfully to please him, because she knew he expected it, and she’d been totally bowled over by the experience. Few of the women she had spoken to had mentioned any enjoyment they got from sex, never mind the exhilarating, mind-blowing rapture Tressa had felt. After that first time she’d been as anxious to repeat the experience as Mike was, and so she said, ‘No, I loved you too much to want to wait.’
‘Well,’ Mike said with a rueful grin. ‘See where our loving СКАЧАТЬ