Read The Favourite Child for Free Online Page B

it wouldn’t have been appropriate to make such a personal remark and no other sensible words came into her head, she remained silent.
    ‘I hope you aren’t off home just yet. I was looking forward to meeting you, once you’d recovered a little.’
    ‘Were you?’
    ‘Absolutely.’
    ‘Oh!’
    ‘Why don’t you join me for a spot of tea and sticky buns. It must be nearly four.’ He held open the door for her to precede him into the house and if he guessed she’d been leaving in a huff when really she looked like death walking, he gave no sign of it. ‘Do say you’ll join me, Jinnie. Can’t resist sticky buns, can you?’ And he smiled at her in that little boy way.
    If he’d asked her to stand on her head and count to a hundred, she would have done so. Jinnie’s heart was hammering so fast against her breast bone she was sure he must hear it. With a shy smile, she smoothed down the borrowed tweed skirt and walked regally back inside.
     
    Despite the obvious antagonism from Emily, Jinnie and Edward quickly became firm friends. Each evening when he came home from the mill where he worked as a clerk in the office, he would tap on her door and ask how she was. Then he would sit by her bed and talk, about anything and everything under the sun. He told her how at some place called the New York Stock Exchange they were now trading in foreign shares, which must be good for Lancashire cotton; and how he’d seen a brilliant young actor called Lawrence Olivier in a new play.
    ‘Eeh, we come from different planets you and me,’ And he’d laugh and say he was glad that she’d landed on his.
    Edward liked to discuss politics and world affairs about which Jinnie knew nothing and she loved to sit and listen to his gentle voice. He explained how women would soon have the vote and that she’d then have a voice to which politicians would be forced to listen. And in the next breath how two hundred Welsh miners who’d marched to London to protest about unemployment had failed to persuade the Prime Minister, Mr Stanley Baldwin, to meet them.
    ‘Doesn’t that just prove no one listens,’ Jinnie said with vigour. ‘None of them Toffs wants to know about our problems.’
    ‘Quite right Jinnie,’ Edward firmly agreed. ‘Is it any wonder the miners sang “The Red Flag”. It’s a miracle to me that Bella didn’t march with them. She’s far more knowledgeable than I am on politics but I do my best to take an interest, don’t you know.’
    It made her go all wobbly in her stomach just to have him sitting there, so fresh faced and attentive, chatting to her as if she were his equal.
    In her turn Jinnie was happy enough to answer his questions about life on the streets of Salford, some of them anyway. She’d talk of the old women clattering about in their clogs and shawls, of the struggle to find a bit of coal or a shrive of bread to keep body and soul together, the difficulties of finding lasting employment and the shame of being on parish relief. She never mentioned Billy Quinn, nor gave any further details of her so-called accident with Bella’s imaginary horse, nor why she didn’t go home, having now recovered from it. She rather thought Edward assumed that simply returning to live in squalor again would make her ill. Jinnie even confided something of how she’d been forced to fend for herself since she was twelve, when her mam died.
    ‘Didn’t you have a father to take care of you?’ Edward asked, appalled, to which she admitted that she hadn’t the first idea who he might be, or even if she and her brothers had shared the same one.
    ‘Mam never said owt about him, and I never asked. I reckon he died long since.’
    Fortunately Edward was more interested in the present than the past, and he would assure her that she was safe now, need never go back to that grinding poverty. ‘I keep worrying that you might dash off again and then I wouldn’t know where to find you.’
    ‘Why would I do that?’ Jinnie had