‘Ooh, thanks, love,’ he beamed. ‘Rotterdam Shag, my favourite baccy. I won’t be more than an hour or so.’ He headed off, the children disappeared into the parlour and Jenny stood up to help her mother with the dishes. Then Susan got up too.
‘I’ll see to ’dishes,’ she said, and Peggy looked at her in astonishment. ‘You and Jenny go and have a chat. I don’t mind, honest.’
‘If you’re sure? Are you feeling up to it?’ Peggy unfastened her apron before she changed her mind. ‘That’ll be nice. Come on, Jenny. Let’s sit in ’parlour and catch up with what you’ve been up to.’
They hoisted Emma and Rosie out of the chairs by the fire; Molly, Louisa and Robin were sitting on the floor playing pick up sticks and the younger girls joined them.
‘They play well together,’ Jenny murmured. ‘I’ve said to Susan I don’t think she need have any worries about the boy.’
Her mother nodded. ‘Susan’s a bit on edge at ’minute, as we all are since she lost ’baby.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘If anything, they don’t squabble when Robin’s there. The trouble is,’ she dropped her voice, ‘Molly tends to monopolize him and wants him to play only with her. He listens to her and explains things to her; he’s very patient.’
Jenny watched the children before speaking. ‘I think he’s more used to being with adults than with children,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘How many children do you know who shake hands with an adult on first meeting them?’
‘None,’ her mother said.
‘I don’t understand why his mother would leave him; and why here? He doesn’t have a Yorkshire accent – has he said where he’s from?’
‘They came from London, so he said. Though he’s also mentioned Manchester, and Eastbourne, and Brighton,’ Peggy added, ‘so they’ve been around a lot. Don’t seem to have stayed in any one place for long, and he told me that they were always moving on. But it’s a mystery why they should turn up here, unless they were visiting someone.’
‘Do you have a deck of playing cards?’ Jenny heard Robin say. ‘I could teach you how to play Patience.’
All the little girls laughed. ‘Patience,’ Emma said. ‘That’s not a game! That’s what you have to have, that’s what our ma says.’
Jenny turned back to her mother. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured. ‘What did you say?’
‘About what?’
‘About where they’d lived.’
‘London and Manchester—’
‘Yes, and where else?’
Peggy thought. ‘Erm, Eastbourne and Brighton. Why?’
‘Oh, I just wondered.’ Jenny thought for a minute. Something stirred in her mind. What was it she was recollecting? Then she murmured again, ‘He’s definitely spent time with grown-ups. Only an adult would teach a boy to play Patience, but why?’
‘No idea,’ her mother said. ‘Who has the time to do such a thing?’
‘Somebody with time on their hands? Or maybe so that he could entertain himself.’ You might think it could be a grandparent, Jenny pondered, but not one like my parents, who are working people. Somebody retired, perhaps, or not in regular work. They sometimes had gypsy children in the school where she taught and they were sharp and knowing and intelligent, but not all could read or write and she doubted that Patience would be the kind of card game that their parents would play.
She looked across at him now. He wasn’t from gypsy stock, that was for certain: fair-skinned and that reddish, brownish hair; he could almost be a brother or cousin to the girls.
Her mother was speaking, asking what she would be doing for Christmas. Was she staying with friends? Who was cooking Christmas dinner? ‘We’ll have most of ’family here on Boxing Day,’ Peggy went on. ‘We’ll all be to-ing and fro-ing between each other’s houses, I expect; your aunts and uncles and all of ’bairns.’
And that’s precisely why I won’t be here, Jenny thought. I know I’m being selfish but it’s like being with the Spanish Inquisition. All the aunts want to know why I’m not married with a houseful of children and the men eye me up and down and wonder why I haven’t got a man in tow and what’s wrong with me.
‘I’m meeting a group of friends at the Maritime Hotel in Hull. We’ve booked a table. We’re all independent and don’t have to rush off anywhere. In fact I’ve booked a room.’ She thought her mother looked rather forlorn, so she added, ‘And the day after Boxing Day I’ll come home and help you eat up all the extra food you cooked and didn’t eat, and as everyone else will have gone home you and I and Da can have a nice cosy time together.’
Peggy smiled. ‘Oh, I’m so pleased, and your da will be too. And you do know, don’t you, that you can bring a friend with you at any time?’
She had said the same thing every year since Jenny had left home, and Jenny said again, as she always did, ‘I do know that, Ma, but there’s no one special that I’d want to bring.’
But then she remembered Dorothy – or Delia as she now called herself – and wondered how on earth she had managed not to mention her name.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was on the return journey to Hull that Jenny began to put two and two together and remembered who it was who had mentioned Brighton. No one around here would know much about the seaside resort on the Sussex coast. A young Prince of Wales had infamously made the fishing village a fashionable resort a hundred years before, and with the coming of the railways the coastal town had become popular with London day trippers; that in turn led to the building of hotels and theatres and made the town even more attractive.
It was a long way from the north of England, but Delia had been desperate to get away from her
