Walking Back to Happiness. Anne Bennett

for them. ‘In time, when things are easier, we might replace some of the furniture,’ she told Arthur on her first visit.

      ‘Hmph, yes, my dear,’ Arthur had said. ‘But you know money might not be so plentiful. I shouldn’t want to go into debt for anything. This hire-purchase scheme is not one I should like to get involved in.’

      Hannah, who’d never owed a penny in her life, agreed with Arthur’s sentiments. Gloria, when she told her, said it just showed what a sensible man he was, and wasn’t it just as well they hadn’t to buy even the basics before they could start married life, though she advised Hannah to buy if not a new bed, then certainly a new mattress.

      But that day, Hannah had more on her mind than a new mattress. She hoped Arthur would come to see that she had no alternative but to bring Josie home with her, without getting cross about it.

      He wasn’t the sort to rant and rave, but he could go very cold if he was displeased. And she knew this news would greatly displease him. He’d made his views adamantly clear in his last letter and would have presumed that Hannah would have carried them out.

      That was why Hannah had asked him not to come to the guesthouse that evening after he finished work, but go to the house instead where she would meet him as soon as she could get away.

      When she’d been a few minutes in the house, having told Arthur straight away about Josie, she knew she’d been right to come alone. He made no shout or cry of protest, but instead had gone very still, his mouth a tight line of disapproval, his nose pinched, his eyes coal black and sparking with anger, while a tic beat at the side of his temple.

      Arthur Bradley had looked forward to seeing Hannah again after a few days away. He didn’t love her – he’d never loved anyone but his mother, but he admired her.

      Before he’d had the house, his mother having died some years before, he’d stayed often at Gloria Emmerson’s guesthouse for he was more often in the Midlands area than anywhere else. For a start, the factory and head office he worked from was in Aston, just outside Birmingham. And then, Birmingham itself and the surrounding area being the home of light engineering, had many factories making the goods his firm needed to make the wireless sets they put together.

      Arthur disliked the travelling and staying at indifferent guesthouses. He’d done it for years and he’d been complaining to Gloria about it yet again one day when she seized her chance. ‘My boss, Mr Banks, is a family man himself, you see,’ he’d told Gloria. ‘He likes married men in the firm. Says you can rely on them. It’s all the married men who work in the offices and seldom have to go on the road.’

      ‘Maybe you should think about marriage yourself then?’ Gloria had suggested.

      ‘I never thought to marry,’ Arthur had said. ‘Anyway, I know no one suitable.’

      ‘What about Hannah?’

      ‘Hannah!’ Arthur had noticed Hannah of course, he couldn’t have failed to. Everyone who came to the place noticed Hannah.

      ‘Well, if you’ve got to be married, you could look further than Hannah and fare worse,’ Gloria had said. ‘She’s a well set-up lass.’

      ‘I know that all right,’ Arthur had said. ‘But I know my faults, none better. I’m a dull sort of chap for someone like Hannah.’

      ‘She’s not in the full flush of youth,’ Gloria reminded him.

      ‘I know that and I’m surprised. I thought someone would have snapped her up before now.’

      ‘Aye, well there’s been a war on, you know. The one who might have married Hannah never came back from it.’ No harm, Gloria thought, in telling him that much. ‘Ask her,’ she urged.

      She wasn’t worried about Hannah’s reaction. She’d already talked her round and she knew what her answer would be and hoped fervently that she’d done the right thing.

      Arthur was overjoyed that Hannah had agreed to marry him. In the early weeks of their courtship, however, Hannah had often doubted her decision, even with the house that Gloria saw as such a prize, and it was always the thought of one day having her own baby that held her on course. Arthur Bradley wasn’t a demonstrative man, nor one, as even Gloria was heard to say, to flash his money about overmuch.

      He seldom took Hannah out and whenever he did, even when they were alone, he was so respectful, he appeared aloof and cold. There had been no snuggling for them in the back row of the cinema the odd times they’d gone together. There were no stolen kisses in the entries in the darkening winter nights, or cuddling on the sofa in Arthur’s front room and taking comfort in one another. No further than that of course, but Hannah would have welcomed being held and caressed and kissed. That wasn’t Mr Bradley’s way, though, she told herself and anyway, she didn’t need such things, after all she was no lovesick teenager.

      A few weeks after their engagement, Arthur came to see Hannah in an ecstatic mood. He told her that they’d both been asked for dinner with his boss and his wife, Mr and Mrs Banks. Such a thing had never happened to him before.

      The evening was a success. They all got on remarkably well, so well in fact that the Banks insisted Arthur and Hannah call them Reg and Elizabeth. Arthur could see how Hannah had charmed his boss and his wife. In fact, Hannah and Elizabeth had seemed like old friends together.

      He knew some of his colleagues couldn’t imagine what Hannah saw in him. He’d seen the looks of puzzled envy on their faces when he’d taken Hannah to the annual dinner-dance, just after she’d agreed to marry him. He’d thought himself a lucky man. If he had to have someone looking across the table from him every day, then Hannah he felt could do the job better than most. Added to her looks, she was compliant, eager to please and had never opposed him in anything.

      And now … now she stood bold as brass and told him not only that she’d defied him and brought her sister’s child home, but that she was to live with them and that she’d promised her sister on her deathbed that she’d look after her.

      ‘You had no right to promise such a thing without consulting me.’

      ‘Arthur, she was dying,’ Hannah said, her voice rising in distress. ‘Not long after that first day, she was having so much morphine she didn’t know where she was and could recognise no one. Should I have asked her to wait while I wrote you a wee letter?’

      ‘Don’t shout, Hannah.’

      ‘I feel like shouting,’ Hannah snapped. ‘Have you no feeling, even for the child? How do you imagine she feels, her parents both dead, her brothers and sisters scattered to the four corners of the world? She is alone, Arthur.’

      ‘The authorities would …’

      ‘I wasn’t leaving her with any authorities,’ Hannah said. ‘How could you expect me to do that after promising my sister I’d see to her?’

      ‘Well, I don’t want her here and it’s my house.’

      ‘Then she won’t come and neither will I,’ Hannah said angrily, astounded at Arthur’s uncompromising attitude.

      ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’

      ‘Yes, I do. I won’t bring her here under sufferance,’ Hannah said. ‘She’s gone through enough. You were lucky to have your mother until you grew up. I never knew mine and without Frances and her abiding love for me, I would have been lost. I owed her so much and if you want to know I’m glad I have the opportunity to pay back some of it. If you can’t see it that way, you’re not the man I thought you were and maybe we’d better call the wedding off now before it goes any further.’

      She removed her ring as she spoke and laid it on the sideboard. She’d not removed her coat and hat and without another word she turned and left, slamming the front door behind her.

      On the way home, though, she wondered what she’d done. Gloria had agreed Josie could stay till the wedding, but she didn’t know if she’d want her staying there for good. And if she didn’t,