Unspoken: A story of secrets, love and revenge T. Belshaw (good books to read for beginners txt) 📖

‘He’s dead!’ she cried. ‘Mr Tansley. He’s dead.’

Chapter 59

June 1938

My father had fallen out of his chair, Miriam found him with his head and right shoulder on the floor and his right knee bent over the arm of the armchair. The noise we heard was his head knocking over his whisky table as he fell.

He was definitely dead, there was no doubt about that. His unblinking eyes were still staring at the spider on the skirting board which had stopped dead itself to stare back with all eight eyes of its own.

Frank, who seemed to have sobered up very quickly, took charge of the situation.

‘We can’t leave him like that,’ he said. He looked around the room but there was nothing we could lay him out on. The table was round, and not very wide, and if we pushed two chairs together, we’d have to sit him up, as he was a tall man.

We were all in shock, but in the end, it was Frank that came up with the solution.

‘Let’s get him into the parlour, we can get the old foldaway bed out that I used to sleep on. At least he’ll be lying flat.’

The next problem was getting him in there. He weighed next to nothing, but picking up a man’s body proved difficult to say the least. Frank managed to lift him at the third attempt, and Miriam went ahead to set up the bed, while Frank, still swaying a little, followed her to the parlour with my father’s head and legs hanging over his arms.

Once he had laid the body on the foldaway bed, Frank crouched down beside him, said a few words that I couldn’t make out, and crossed himself. I was quite touched by this show of respect, and not a little surprised, as apart from dragging me to the Catholic church on Sheppey, he hadn’t showed the slightest sign of having any religious tendencies. I was agnostic at best but I did believe in some sort of life after death, just not with the angels, harps and St Peter’s judgement.

When Frank had finished, I asked for a few minutes alone with my father. Frank left, closing the door quietly behind him and I sat down beside the shell of my former parent, and berated him for abusing me the way he had earlier in the evening. Then I had a go at him for being so selfish, for becoming a drunk, and for leaving me to sort out the farm. Then I burst into tears, took hold of his hand, put my head on his chest and sobbed.

Half an hour later I had run out of tears. The almost endless day had got the better of me. You couldn’t make this sort of thing up if you were an author. No one would believe it. I let go of his hand and promised him that I’d remember the good times, and not the misery of his final months. I’d remember the piggy back rides, the times he carried me up to bed when I had fallen asleep playing with my dolls. The ticking offs for hiding in the cornfield when I should have been cleaning out an empty pig sty. I’d remember the way he looked at my mother when we were sitting around the dinner table. The way he kissed her every morning before he went out to work, the way he kissed her again when he returned for lunch. I remember being out in the fields for the harvest when she brought us sandwiches, cake and homemade lemonade and he said that Kings and Princes couldn’t be served better fare. I’d remember the time I came down from my bedroom after having had a bad dream, to find them dancing to a song on the radio, their bodies so close, there wasn’t room to slide a playing card between them.

But the time I remember most, is the day of the wedding anniversary at the Village Hall, where he made a speech, telling everyone in the room, why he was the luckiest man in the world. How he held both her hands, looked into her eyes and told her that he loved her with all his heart. There was no manly embarrassment, he didn’t care who saw, or heard, when he said, I love you with every fibre of my being. I have loved you from the moment we met. The first time you spoke to me I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest. I have never looked at another woman since that day, and I never will. You own my heart. You are my world and everything in it.

Before he was half way through that speech, my mother burst into tears along with every other woman in the room. When he finished, she kissed him on the lips and said, simply, I love you too.

I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket, dabbed my eyes and then blew my runny nose.

‘Sleep softly,’ I said, kissing him on the cheek. ‘Say hello to Mum for me when you see her.’

Chapter 60

Alice

Jessica read beautifully, Alice thought. She really had a talent for it. If she wasn’t able to make a living out of writing, she should consider narrating those new-fangled Audrey Books or whatever they were called. Alice had a few, but hadn’t bothered listening to them for a few months. She had always preferred a paper book to any of the new ways of consuming literature.

She put her head back on her pillows as she listened to Jess read, her voice became quieter as a vision of the big clock came into her mind. The hands were just coming up to ten minutes to twelve, whether it was day or night, she couldn’t tell. Jess’s voice faded away into the distance, and suddenly she was sitting around the stove in her kitchen. Amy was there, and the two of them