If she had had the courage, she would have gone with Sophy, but she wasn’t made like her cousin. Nevertheless, she wasn’t going to settle for living here and being at her mother’s beck and call, just waiting to become an old maid. And that was what often happened to plain daughters like her; they were seen as potential nurses for their parents in their old age. Neither was she going to demean herself again like she had with Mr Travis, manoeuvring moments where she could speak to him and hanging on his every word like a lovesick fool.
She would find herself work outside the home. Her heart beat faster, colour staining her sallow cheeks. Thanks to her education at Miss Bainbridge’s Academy she wasn’t a total dunce, even if she’d never grasped higher arithmetic and the rudiments of French and Italian as well as Sophy. Perhaps she could apply for the post of a librarian or train to be a schoolmistress, and in the meantime, which would soften the blow for her parents at the thought of their daughter taking up employment, she could do voluntary work at the Sunderland Royal Infirmary or maybe the Eye Infirmary in Stockton Road. She had always been fascinated by what she had read about Florence Nightingale and the work she had undertaken in the Crimean War. Whatever, she wasn’t going to waste another day of her life. If Sophy could brave leaving Southwick altogether with next to nothing, then she could take this step. This day was a new beginning for them both.
The fire was now crackling and burning brightly in the heavily carved fireplace, Molly having long since left the room, and Patience walked over to the flames and held out her cold hands. But she wasn’t feeling cold inside. Suddenly she felt she had been presented with new possibilities, a direction to her life she would never have considered but for Sophy’s departure, and she wasn’t going to let anything or anyone change her mind.
The boys would back her. She nodded mentally to the thought. They knew full well what her mother was like and how miserable she’d been of late. Yes, they would speak up for her if necessary, but with or without them, she was going to do this.
The tall clock tower of Sunderland Central station could be seen from most of the town, and when Sophy set her eyes on it after crossing the Wearmouth Bridge, it drew her like a magnet. Suddenly she knew exactly what she was going to do, and excitement briefly banished the sick, lost feeling she’d felt since the day before. It wasn’t just the truth about her mother which had caused her to feel she was floundering in an alien world but the fact that the man she had thought of as her father – the tall, handsome Frenchman with amber eyes and black hair and a warm smile – had only existed in her imagination. Her mother had been unmarried and her father could have been any one of a number of men, according to her aunt; there was no way she could ever know, and the secret dream that she’d carried in her heart, that one day she would try and find her father’s relatives in France was over. She was illegitimate. ‘Scum’, as her aunt had called her. That’s what people would think if they knew the truth about her beginnings.
She was one of the first of the early morning passengers when she entered the station by the main entrance off High Street West just after six o’clock. She stopped on the left of an archway by the weighing machine, wondering how best to proceed. She had never travelled by train before or even entered the railway station, although she knew the great iron-framed glass roof was a marvel.
She had only been standing there for a minute or two when a young couple with a little boy came into the station, the child immediately declaring he wanted a turn on the weighing machine and then a gadget whereby you could stamp out your name and other details on a metal tag. The mother, who seemed somewhat harassed, gave in to the child’s demands without protest, and once the boy was satisfied, Sophy followed them and did what they did at the ticket office, where she was asked her destination by the cheerful little man with his peaked cap.
She took a deep breath and then spoke clearly and firmly. ‘London, please.’
Chapter 9
Sophy stood staring about her. The attic room at the top of the four-storey terraced house in one of the maze of streets in Holborn was dark and grimy, the only daylight coming through a tiny window which was so filthy it was impossible to see out. The bare floorboards were devoid of even a humble clippy mat, the open fireplace hadn’t been cleaned in years, and the pervading smell – a mixture of damp, age and old man’s pee – had her stomach turning. A single iron bed with a heavily stained flock mattress stood against one wall, a small square wooden table with two hardbacked chairs against another, and on the shelf above the table sat a kettle, a couple of pots and a frying pan, and an oil lamp. A piece of wood with a number of hooks nailed into it had been fixed on to the wall next to the window.
‘See that there.’ The landlady pointed to a large black hook which could swing out from the grate over the fire. ‘You can put your pots on that an’ cook for yourself if you’ve a mind, and the kettle boils in no time on the steel shelf at the back of the fire. The lav’s in the yard along with the washhouse an’ tap.’