Read Wexford 18 - Harm Done for Free Online

Davina, sometimes by Griselda and Lucy, and now by Sylvia, were in a room on the top floor alongside Griselda’s tiny flat. Space was so precious that the other two rooms on that floor had been converted into bedsits for fugitive women, two single beds in one and three plus a cot in the other. It wasn’t ideal but it was the best they could do.
       There was no lift. Sylvia had to toil up three flights of stairs, from the ground floor where the living rooms were - the lounge and the television room and the children’s playroom and the kitchen and the laundry room - through the first and second stories, given over entirely to bedsits and bathrooms - more bathrooms were another priority when Lucy could get the funds - and up to the top where the phones were. Children were usually playing on the stairs. They weren’t supposed to, or to slide down the banisters, but when the playroom was crowded and it was raining, they hadn’t much choice.
       Sylvia worked at The Hide two evenings a week, not always the same evenings, up till midnight. Her husband was usually at home to look after the boys, and if he couldn’t be there, she knew they could go to her parents.
       She had taken on the job partly from the pressures of her social conscience and her commitment to women’s causes, and partly to get herself out of the house. When she was at home, she and Neil either sat in silence or addressed each other through the medium of their children or quarreled. Although she never talked about the state of her marriage to her mother or her father, she did to friends and she was fast making a friend of Griselda Cooper.
       Griselda shift ended when Sylvia took over, but some times she stayed on for half an hour or even longer to talk. She was a dozen years or more older than Sylvia, a single woman who had a lover who took her out and about, and away when she had a weekend off, an enviable lot. Sylvia couldn’t help being envious, though Griselda had no children and would now never have. One evening Sylvia told Griselda about her marriage, that she and Neil had married young and discovered too late they were less than well-suited.
       “Too late?” said Griselda, who had been divorced.
       “I couldn’t break up the family. If we split up, it would devastate my kids.”
       “That sounds like the sort of thing some of our callers say. He’s half killed her and he will again, and she knows he will, but she can’t break up the family.”
       The phone rang and Griselda picked up the receiver. “The Hide helpline. How can I help you?” She spoke in the calmest, warmest, and most comforting tone she could achieve, and that was very calm and warm and comforting.
       Sylvia could tell there was silence at the other end. There often was. Women lost their nerve or didn’t know what to say or, worst of all, the man of the house had come into the room where the phone was.
       Griselda waited, repeating her words, “How can I help you,” then, “We’re here to help you,” and “Won’t you tell me what your problem is? Anything you say will be in confidence.”
       After ten minutes’ perseverance she put the phone down regretfully. “I could hear her breathing,” Griselda said. “I heard her sigh. God knows, I hope she’ll call back. Maybe she will and you’ll take it.”
       “What you were saying just now,” Sylvia said, “before the call came, about a man half killing a woman but still she won’t break up the family, Neil has never laid a finger on me. And, d’you know, working here and listening to all this, hearing from these women and what they go through, has done me good. I mean, it’s actually done my marriage good.”
       “You’re joking.”
       “The other night I went home from here and it was the middle of the night, of course, and I went home and got into bed - oh, yes, we share a bed - crazy, eh? - and I got into bed beside him - he was asleep, sleeping so peacefully, like