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

sort? Well, I’m sorry I don’t please you. I s’pose you prefer women what dress like them in the café, like that female you were slobbering over at that New Year party.’

‘Woman?’ he said stupidly. Of course he’d forgotten since then.

‘The one with the red, dyed hair, showing half her bosom and plenty of her leg. The one you kissed in front of everyone. Not that they cared. They were all drunk. If I hadn’t come up to you, you’d have been off with her to where all the other lovers were going for a good time.’

Felix was staring at her. ‘Ah, the New Year party.’

‘Yes, that. And I’m sorry I can’t match the likes of her sort, nor do I think I want to.’

He was silent for a moment, then said slowly, ‘Ellie, it wasn’t a her.’

Ellie tried to focus her eyes on him. He was still holding on to her to prevent her from toppling sideways. Surely she wasn’t so drunk that she had misheard him. She wanted to giggle at the ludicrous admission, yet her heart seemed to be falling down into her boots.

‘What – what d’you mean?’ she stammered.

‘That one you saw me kissing. It wasn’t a woman. I’m sorry, I thought you understood.’

He spoke so calmly, his voice so gentle, a naturally lovely, gentle person: now it all came together. She’d secretly fallen in love with him and now she must fall out of love. Her heart felt so heavy in a way that she’d never expected.

‘Oh,’ was all she could say.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I thought you knew.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Does it matter to you?’ What a stupid question to ask. Of course it mattered.

‘No, it doesn’t matter,’ she said automatically. The street had begun to slow its whirling. ‘It just took me by surprise, that’s all.’

‘We’re still friends?’

‘Yes, of course.’ She wanted to get away, put the door between them, go upstairs to her little attic room and throw herself on the bed to burst into tears. But she wouldn’t make it on her own. She had visions of losing her footing on the bare flight of stairs and rolling back down them. ‘I need help getting upstairs,’ she said weakly.

There was a need to sort her life out. It was like being forsaken, just as she’d felt when Michael Deel had let her down. Then she’d felt insulted, belittled, betrayed. This time it was no one’s fault, no one was to blame, it was out of everyone’s control – like a sort of an act of God that nothing could be done about.

After days of moping, when she couldn’t even find heart to take her pictures to sell, Ellie pulled her thoughts together. She wasn’t doing herself or anyone any good behaving like this. The worst thing was that she couldn’t even bring herself to pick up a brush, her mind being utterly blank.

With fitful February sunlight picking its way through the grubby windowpanes, she set up the old easel she’d bought second hand and propped the partly begun canvas on it. Once a little more paint was applied she might find the impetus to continue.

Standing back from it, Ellie contemplated what was already there. It was going to be a portrait of Felix. She had begun it only a week ago with love in her heart – a beautiful, gentle face, this time not sharp and thorny and stark, with no harsh angles but gentle curves, the eyes, offset as was her trait, to be full of appeal. And now in the dark background a face, shrouded in shadow, like a spectre, looking on – the face of his lover as she saw him.

After staring at it for a few minutes she began to squeeze precious colours from half-empty tubes that would soon need replacing; money must be found for these at the expense of other essentials. But, of course, she had much of Hunnard’s twenty guineas left.

The palette dotted with small circles of oil paint, Ellie began mixing a touch of white and blue together on her brush. Reaching out, she laid the contents thinly under what would be the shadow beneath the smooth chin. It went on far too thick.

Damning her folly, she angrily scraped off the offending effort. Forcing herself to calm, she slowly and painstakingly reapplied the paint.

It seemed to work this time, but after a couple more efforts she put her brush and palette down. Something was missing inside her; there was no feel for what she was doing, just sadness – against the tricks that life can play on people, a man that a girl could love was someone beyond her reach. The one he cared for – not the one he’d casually embraced in a miasma of opium and alcohol at the New Year party, but a loving and steady partner – had all the affections she wished she had.

She somehow felt that this portrait of Felix would never be completed, but there were no other ideas in her head at all and there was no point in forcing herself.

Ellie turned away from the unfinished work and instead proceeded to brew a pot of tea. She’d not eaten, but didn’t feel hungry. Sipping the mug of tea, she went over to the picture that she now saw as that of her father, still with its face to the wall, and turned it round towards her.

The sight of it was as good a cure as anything for taking all else out of her mind. As she gazed at it there came the thought that she must go and see Dora. But first she would drop in to visit her old neighbours. They’d be surprised to see her. And she did need something solid to hang on to – real people with their minds on living as best they could. It was probably the tonic she needed to get her feet back on the ground.

That Sunday morning Mrs Sharp opened the door to her