Read Whatever Happenened to Molly Bloom? for Free Online

and Mummy but Mummy had said, no, two would be enough, no point in wasting money. Mr Boylan had laughed and said ‘Game ball, Molly,’ whatever that meant, and had promised he would drop by the shop next time he was down in Westmeath, which would be in April for the Kilbeggan Handicap Cup in which he hoped to have a horse – half a horse, he said – running.
    She’d seen Hugh Boylan once since then, up in Dublin in December. Mummy had been singing ‘There is a Flower that Bloometh’, from Maritana, at the Traders’ Association Christmas concert in the Belleville Halls. Half way through the song Papli, for no reason, had burst into tears. On the steps outside, after the show, Mr Boylan had patted Papli on the shoulder and had said something that had caused her father to leave hurriedly without waiting for Mummy or her.

    She might have paid more attention to what was going on between Blazes and her father – who had never liked each other anyway – but she was still seething about the thing that had happened two nights before when her beau of the past year, Alec Bannon, and his so-called bon ami , Buck Mulligan, both drunk as lords, had tried to take liberties with her in a cab after a party at Kitty Loughlin’s house, a party she shouldn’t have gone to in the first place.
    Mulligan had held her against the leather with his forearm while Alec had put his hand up her skirts and touched the front of her bottom and had said now was the time to see if she really had hair on it, saying, ‘Stop bloody wriggling, Milly, and open your legs.’ He would have stuck his finger inside her, too, if she hadn’t screamed at the top of her voice and the jarvey hadn’t stopped the cab, leaned down and asked if everything was all right down there. Mulligan, coarse brute though he was, had pulled Alec off and bundled him out of the cab and had paid the cabman to take her home, while Alec had staggered about on the pavement and called her filthy names, still shouting filthy names even as the cab had rolled off.
    She’d been very upset by Alec’s lewd behaviour and had longed to tell Mummy what had happened and ask her advice on what to do if he tried the same thing again. On arriving home, though, she’d walked in on one of her parents’ rows. It took Papli all his time to open the front door and – shirt hanging outside his trousers – shuffle back along the hall into the bedroom and slam the door while she stood, trembling, in the hall.
    When Pussens had crept upstairs to see what the fuss was about she’d carried the cat into her room and had told her all her troubles while the voices across the hall rose and fell, criss-crossing each other endlessly. Eventually, long after midnight, her father had blundered out of the bedroom and had gone downstairs into the kitchen to rattle pots and pans and, she imagined, console himself with toast and cocoa.

    In the morning nothing had been said. When Papli had brought her tea in bed and had asked if she’d had a grand time at the party she’d said it had been fine, very nice, and had managed a smile, though he’d been on the way out of the door by then and hadn’t even noticed.
    It had been a relief to return to Mullingar, back to serving customers and filling in the negative book, which took great concentration, and be instructed in the mysteries of the camera and shown how to calculate exposure times.
    She’d heard not a word from Alec Bannon, though he had family in Mullingar, out beyond the tennis ground, and when she’d bumped into his snooty cousin, Gladys, she was given the coldest of shoulders. She honestly didn’t care if she never saw Alec Bannon again. She was too busy learning a profession and enjoying what the town had to offer and, now she was approaching sixteen, flirting freely with the boys in the cycle shop and giving sauce to Mr Coghlan who, within reason, didn’t seem to mind. He called her an imp or his little minx, and upped her salary to twelve