Coming Home to the Four Streets Nadine Dorries (book recommendations for young adults TXT) 📖

help was needed he had women he could call in on, and Maura Doherty had been at the top of his list. Peggy wasn’t the only one who missed her. ‘Tell your Paddy to come and see me, Peggy, and maybe you should drop Maura a line, a nice letter back would be something to look forward to; she’s always full of good advice and wouldn’t that just make you feel better now?’

‘Oh, I did, Dr Cole. Kathleen helped me to write a letter, didn’t you, Kathleen? I just haven’t had a reply. I think Maura is busy getting on with her new life now.’ To Dr Cole, she sounded deflated. Only Peggy knew it was despair.

Dr Cole gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Listen, if you stop sleeping, or find your nerves are getting worse, come back and see me, because we can’t have you fainting again.’

‘Thank you, Brendan – I mean Dr Cole,’ said Kathleen. ‘And when you are writing to your mammy, send her my best; a kinder woman never walked this earth, Peggy, ’tis no wonder he became a doctor himself.’

Brendan Cole allowed himself a smile as the door closed and then picked up the phone to his receptionist. ‘Can you get me an outside line, Cynthia? It’s an international call. Give me ten minutes, please, and if you could just pop to the post office for me, with today’s hospital referrals, that would be grand.’ He waited for Cynthia to make contact with the exchange and then to buzz him, once the operator was on the line. He knew that the Dohertys had bought the Talk of the Town – Maura had told him on her last visit to have Harry’s chest checked and he had thought it the most ridiculous idea, but had kept his opinion to himself. He would ask his mammy to see that Maura dropped Peggy a line. She lived in Galway with his sister for half of the year and she had a telephone. He had an idea that Peggy needed a ray of sunshine in her life, something which, in his experience, could deliver better results than the little yellow tablets they might have to resort to if Peggy didn’t improve.

Chapter Thirteen

Eric began his milk money collection at six o’clock every Friday evening, but when it came to the local shops and businesses, he called on a Wednesday, straight after he had finished his morning round on his way back to the dairy. His last stop was always at Cindy’s, the hairdresser. There was no fancy name painted on the hoarding above her window, it was simply Cindy’s and if it hadn’t been for the sink with the rubber spray hose attached to the taps, two pink overhead dryers, the swivel chair perched in front of the large mirror and the spider plants along the windowsill next to a display of light-faded Woman’s Own and Woman’s Weekly magazines, no one would have known what service Cindy offered inside her shop which was on the end of a row of prefabricated units, hurriedly erected after the war.

Nelson’s parade boasted greengrocer’s, butcher’s, fishmonger’s, a hardware store, Simpson’s the tobacconist and paper shop, the chippy, Cousin’s the baker, the betting shop and, finally, the hairdresser. Cindy was the only woman who worked on the parade to wear make-up and sheer stockings every day, had a hemline which appeared to be creeping upwards at an alarming rate, and she never went to church. Cindy wasn’t married, by choice and there wasn’t a woman on the four streets who didn’t know that Cindy was taking contraception. Yet, despite the fact that she was often whispered about over kitchen-table gatherings, not one of them had withdrawn their custom as a result. This was due, in large part, to the fact that Cindy had covered herself in a veneer of respectability and credibility, provided by good-looking Reg, her long-suffering boyfriend, the well-respected local garage owner and mechanic who, it was said, popped the question every Saturday night, half an hour after the official Anchor closing time and five minutes before he hopped into her bed.

Reg was the closest the community had to a successful self-made man, evidenced by the fact that he was never slow to put his hand into his pocket in the pub. People were in awe of the hours he worked, the cash he flashed, and the number of young men he employed who called him ‘the big boss man,’ and, despite all his obvious attributes, his absolute failure to persuade Cindy to walk up the aisle astounded everyone.

‘She’s strong-willed, that one, but surely not strong enough to resist the likes of Reg? Who could do that? Tell you what, he can slip between my sheets any day,’ Peggy would say in the presence of Maura and, for all her holiness and jangling of rosary beads, Maura laughed as loud as all the others.

‘Peggy, stop, would you!’ Maura would exclaim in mock condemnation, and in order to outrage Maura even more, a sport in itself, Shelagh would chip in, ‘She got that wrong there, didn’t you, Peggy? She means between her legs, Maura, not her sheets.’

And that would make the tea spray from Maura’s mouth and the laughter would be so loud the children would run in from the backyard to see what all the noise was about, then someone would shoo them back out with a broken biscuit in hand and put the kettle back on. When the women ran out of others to gossip about, or times were hard and problems tough, as they often were, they always had the tales of Cindy to cheer them up. There was only one woman on the Dock Road who didn’t experience a tinge of jealousy in the company of Cindy, or spend hours discussing her audacity, and that was Eric’s wife, Gladys.

‘She’s not normal,’ Gladys, with her sallow skin and curled thin lips, would often say to Eric. ‘With all that muck