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

if she had tried? The moments when Eric begged were one of the few pleasures she had in life. She stopped and looked back over her shoulder.

‘You are a waste of good air, do you know that? You are the most pathetic specimen of a man I have ever known in my life, and that’s saying something because the streets around here are full of them.’ She stared at him, waiting for a response, but there was none. Disappointed, she turned away.

‘Your trotters and mash are on the table,’ she called back as Eric carried the water into the stable, asking himself the usual question: was it normal to have been married for as long as they had and, for the last twenty of them, to have been spent loveless and in separate rooms? He had no idea.

Eric was a shy man, he never spoke of such things as sex, but he knew other men had it and he didn’t, which had come as a surprise, given that Gladys had been so very keen to lure him up the aisle with promises of a wild and reckless love life once he had been allowed to do battle with the tops of her suspenders. It was Gladys who had unbuttoned her blouse and encouraged him to explore, not him, and the night of his downfall had been filled with such passion, too. They had been dating for only three months when he had been called up and when he had walked her home after telling her his news, they had stepped into the pool of darkness alongside the bins.

The news of his imminent departure had turned Gladys into a much more accommodating girlfriend. She had always been very insistent on setting boundaries before the day his call-up papers had arrived. ‘Not until we are married, Eric,’ she would whisper into his ear as his hands cupped her buttocks and Eric, always a gentleman, had obeyed her every command. This night, however, Gladys was on fire as she pressed herself into him and things advanced too quickly for Eric to ask himself the question, what is going on?

She startled him as she placed his hand firmly on the most private part of her body, a place he had never thought he would ever be allowed to roam free. He froze in astonishment, the act robbing him of his breath, and her next words were, to Eric’s total amazement, ‘Marry me, Eric, if you want to go any further.’

Eric was stunned and recoiled, but she grabbed his arms and pulled him back into her, lifting her woollen skirt which had slipped back down to her knees, and replaced his hand. ‘Marry me,’ she’d said, pressing his hand harder into her, his fingers as frozen in movement as a dead man’s.

‘When I come back, Gladys,’ he had said, his voice sounding thick, not at all like his own, his senses dulling, then all he was aware of was the warm mound beneath his hand. It was as if nothing else in the world existed right at that moment.

She grabbed his free hand and pressed it to her thin breast. ‘Go on, Eric…’

Suddenly Eric was alarmed; the speed and direction at which events were moving were faster than his reasoning could keep up. ‘No, Gladys, we can’t, it isn’t right.’

What he meant was that Gladys wasn’t right. Eric was young, he was about to do his duty to fight for king and country. The fog in his mind became thicker as he tried to work out how and why he was here. The truth was that Gladys had singled him out, not the other way round. She was the only girl he had been brave enough to approach at the dance and that was because every time he looked over to the chair she was sitting on, she was already looking his way, and smiling. He’d thought that, as she was alone, she would be grateful for the offer of a dance, but that was all. He was a nervous kid and he looked it. If he survived the war and came back alive, he was determined that he would set his sights on Maggie, the popular girl who worked in the grocer’s on the Dock Road and lived on Nelson Street. She wouldn’t look twice at him now, but maybe if he returned a hero, he might stand a chance.

Gladys could sense his resistance, had known it was there for the past three months. Their evenings had followed an established pattern. They attended the weekly dance in the church hall, then he walked Gladys home and pecked her on the cheek and said thank you. Her behaviour on that fateful evening was a wild deviation away from the norm. Unbeknown to him, she had received strict advice from her mother.

‘Get him to marry you,’ her mam had said. ‘That way, if he doesn’t come back, you will at least get a payout and maybe a pension until someone else takes you, but it will be a struggle, Gladys. You don’t have our Pauline’s looks.’

Her mam’s words were ringing in her ears as she felt Eric resisting. Without another word, she raised her thigh, pressed her heel into the wall, placed her hand over his own and pushed hard against him. He gulped hard.

‘Marry me, Eric, before you leave and then I’ll be waiting when you come home on leave. I can make you the happiest man on earth before you go and then you know there will be something to return for.’

She’d kissed his lips, hard, pushed her tongue into his mouth and pressed it against his own and Eric, confused, felt the picture of Maggie slip from his mind, to be replaced by a pounding, relentless urgency in his loins. The inside of her thigh was warm and soft, surprisingly so in comparison to the rough, calloused skin on her hands. He didn’t answer her question, he just said her name, ‘Gladys’, with