A Brighter Tomorrow by Maggie Ford (read with me .txt) 📕

there for her tomorrow evening, that single thought brushing away all others.

‘Don’t worry, my sweet,’ he was saying. ‘Everything will be all right.’

He said it with such conviction that she believed him implicitly as he kissed her with such passion that it made her head spin.

It was only in bed that night that darker visions came to plague her, playing tug-of-war with the fervent wish to see him waiting there tomorrow evening, ready to whisk her away to a new life.

Nineteen

This morning Bertram was being exceptionally nice to her, even more doting than usual. Ellie wasn’t fooled. The pricking of bad conscience – that’s what it was. His chat to Michael’s father as to what was going on having apparently ruined their chances of finding love, maybe he now felt sorry for her.

Ellie smiled grimly. He didn’t know that he’d be the one destroyed when he found her gone a few hours from now. She just prayed it would be with Michael. But her harder self knew it was wishful thinking, and it took all her reserves to hide the deep ache in her heart and pretend to be beguiled by Bertram’s fatherly tones as she prayed Michael would be waiting for her.

He thought he was fooling her, but it was he who was being led on as she let him put an affectionate arm about her shoulders, his words probing. ‘You are comfortable here with us, aren’t you, my dear?’

Such a question! Ellie gave him a beaming smile. ‘Of course.’

‘I have done everything in my power to make you happy. If you are not, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’

‘Of course,’ she repeated. Fat fool, came an inner voice. Doting idiot, thinking he could replace his lost daughter with her. She felt no sorrow or regret for the further loss he would very soon suffer.

‘Having a tutor as well,’ she pandered. ‘I really do enjoy those three days each week.’ She couldn’t resist dropping that in, but he evaded that.

‘My wife and I will be entertaining this evening,’ he said, gazing about her little studio, as he liked to call it, taking in the several finished studies. ‘Saturday, you’ll be alone, I’m afraid.’ He breathed in the smell of linseed oil and varnish. ‘But you are at home up here with your paints, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she obliged yet again, eager to be rid of him now.

‘Maybe a little lonely for you, but we’ll see if we can remedy that. Well, perhaps tomorrow, if the weather proves clement enough, you and I can take a little jaunt somewhere interesting, perhaps after church?’

Was this supposed to be a consolation? And where would they go on a Sunday with most places of interest closed? Surely not a country trip in the chill of November! But she obliged him with a nod, only too glad to see the back of him, and in return received a tender, fatherly kiss on her brow.

After his morning surgery he would return, play the kind guardian again, call her ‘my dear’, praise her for her artistic talent, put an arm about her shoulder. Would he then carefully work around to how much more she could learn with a better tutor than Michael Deel? He’d no doubt enlarge on it, explain that Mr Deel’s circumstances at home were beginning to make it awkward for him to come again but that it wouldn’t take long to find another teacher, a far better one. She would be expected to smile and agree with him. She wasn’t looking forward to the pretence at all.

The day spun itself out in a prolonged procession of endless hours. As she’d anticipated, Bertram came later on in the afternoon to act out his lies, she in turn lying, first with a show of surprise, then with questions to which his replies were no doubt well rehearsed, finally accepted by her with feigned resignation. It went just as she’d anticipated and he left reasonably comforted to prepare for his dinner guests.

About six, while Mrs Lowe was downstairs talking to Cook concerning the dinner arrangements, Ellie went to find Dora.

‘I mustn’t be long,’ she said urgently. ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

Standing in the little ante-room where Dora slept, she hurriedly told her what she was about to do. ‘Whether Michael is there waiting for me or not, I’m off. I want to know: will you come with me?’

There was an astonished look on Dora’s young face. The girl was now fifteen and a half – old enough to know her own mind; but that mind could be seen in her expression as she shook her head. She was scared.

‘I don’t know, Ellie. I’ve come to like it here. It’s nice and comfortable and I don’t have to worry about where I’ll be tomorrow. I’ve learned how to speak nicely and be a lady. Mrs Lowe is kind to me. We’re friends. I mean it, Ellie: we are friends. She looks on me as a friend.’

‘Companion,’ Ellie corrected her sharply, irked by her sister’s stupidity. Any moment Mrs Lowe might come back before she could persuade her sister to run off with her.

‘You’re a paid companion. You can’t call that being friends. And with a woman nearly three times older than you? You should have friends your own age. And there’s me, saddled with a fat old man who wants to look on me as his child. Come with me. We’ll go together, get out of this unnatural relationship that’s going on here and find plenty of friends our own age.’

Still Dora shook her head. The delay was mounting. ‘I can’t just go without you, Dora. And I can’t leave you here.’

She knew that this was just an excuse, hiding a sudden fear of the unknown that was assailing her. She needed company. Without it she’d be cast adrift on a sea she had become unused to by soft living.

Suddenly she was frightened. Could she really walk off alone into the wide world? With