The Soldier's Bride by Maggie Ford Page B

from East India Docks – me being East India Docks. Come to think of it, she was in white – a sort of tea gown thing – all frills and froth and drapes, as if she was going to a royal ball or something instead of just meeting me. All I hope is I don’t have to go there again, that’s all.’
    ‘What was his dad like?’ Lucy said, spreading jam for herself on a piece of buttered bread.
    ‘Oh, he wasn’t so bad,’ Letty said as she bit into her slice. She took a sip of tea to wash it down, Mum’s thick sturdy everyday cups and saucers, painted with fern leaves, and thought of the fine china at the Baron home. Sunday luncheon it had been termed – set more like a banquet with so many knives and forks and things, she hadn’t known which to use first, having to watch David before she dared to pick one up – all designed to intimidate her, she was sure. And a good job it had done too.
    ‘I think he was a bit sorry for me. But he didn’t approve of me either for all that. He kept looking at me as if he had a real low opinion of me. And all the time she kept referring to her poor David’s sad loss. Made me feel proper awkward, it did. And how do they get their o’s and a’s to sound like they’ve got a plum in their mouth? Ours always sound flat, have you noticed, Lucy? I tried to make themrounder but it made it look like I was trying to show off. I wasn’t half glad when me and David left. I ain’t never going to go to meet them again, not if David goes on his bended knee to me.’
    Outside in the early dark of the winter evening, a hand bell was ringing, a voice calling some undistinguishable word, but its message was understood well enough. Lucy jumped up and hurried to the mantelshelf where some coins were always kept in an ornate jar.
    ‘Shall we get some for tea?’ she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer, was out of the parlour door and yelling down the stairs: ‘Dad – I’m getting some muffins for tea!’
    Letty had the parlour window open, the cold December air hitting her face like an icy hand as she called to the man immediately below, his face hidden by the large flat tray balanced on his head. All she could see was a foreshortened view of legs, one hand swinging the bell, the other hand gripping the tray’s rim, and on the tray a cloth covering the delicious muffins, some of which she would soon be toasting by the fire.
    Lucy had come out. The tray was put down on the pavement, showing the man’s cloth cap white with flour. Six muffins were put in a paper bag from a bundle on a string around the man’s waist, Lucy’s coins received and dropped into the pocket of his apron. The tray hoisted adeptly back on to his head, the muffin man went on his way, energetically swinging his bell as Lucy came in and up the stairs, yelling to Dad: ‘Tea’s getting cold!’
    Lovely to eat the muffins, dripping with butter, around the fire, Letty’s face hot from the flames, then to go back to thetable to pour another cup of tea for herself just as she fancied. No sitting on ceremony around a posh laid table, watching every word she said, every mouthful as if she was eating cotton wool.
    Afterwards, David had taken her to see the house he still owned, the one he had bought for himself and his wife to live in. It had given her the creeps. Loss had seeped into the very walls, not because the poor woman and her baby had died there but because the house itself had died. For all his furniture there it felt so empty, desolate, a shudder had run through her and she knew nothing would induce her ever to enter the place again, much less go and live there when David proposed marriage to her – if he did.
    ‘Most of the time,’ he’d explained, ‘I stay with my parents. I pay a woman to clean and dust it, open the windows to air the place. But I can’t bring myself to live here on my own, if you see what I mean.’
    She did see what he meant, that even now his sense of loss had not gone away, that she