‘Like finding a job.’
The minute the words were out Sally regretted them, but it was too late, they were said. She watched Joel’s face close up and his mouth grow bitter.
‘What job?’ he demanded. ‘There are no jobs, Sally.’
She knew that; after all, she had had to listen to him saying it often enough over the last few weeks.
Guiltily she tried to smother her frustration. It wasn’t Joel’s fault that he was out of work, after all, even if Daphne seemed to think differently.
Thinking about her sister reminded her of something else she had said.
‘No jobs, maybe,’ she retorted now. ‘But there is work. Daphne was saying only the other day that she knows dozens of people looking for someone to do a bit of gardening or decorating and she’s right, Joel. Sister was saying only last week that she’s been trying to find someone to paint the outside of her house. Surely you could…’
Joel couldn’t listen to any more.
‘I could what?’ he exploded. ‘Go cap in hand to the likes of your sister and her posh friends begging for work?’ Angry colour flared across his cheekbones. ‘She’d love that, wouldn’t she? She’d…’
Sally pushed her hand wearily into her hair. She had just come from a ward where a patient whose life they had been fighting for for over a week had just died; she was mentally and physically exhausted with the strain of working full-time and trying to run things at home as well. ‘Well, at least it would be work, and there’d be some extra money coming in,’ she told him bitterly.
Did he have any idea what a struggle it was for her to manage? She knew how upset and worried he was about losing his job and she’d done her best to cope and not to add to his worries by admitting that her money just wasn’t going as far as she’d hoped, but he knew how much she earned compared with what they’d been bringing home; surely he could see for himself how much she was struggling?
She frowned as her attention was caught by the magazines on the floor beside his chair: two angling ones and one of them was an expensive one, she recognised as the tension and anxiety inside her suddenly exploded in a ball of tight, frightened anger.
‘Joel, how could you?’ she demanded as she picked them up. ‘How could you waste money on these when you know…?’ Her voice shook as she threw them down on the floor. ‘If you think I’m going out to work, half killing myself, so that you can waste money on stuff like this…’
Joel’s face went white. ‘They cost three pounds eighty, less than you give the kids for spending money,’ he told her with quiet venom.
His words struck at her conscience like physical blows, but Sally was too angry to back down.
‘They earn that money,’ she told him sharply.
When Joel came towards her, for one awful heartbeat of time she actually thought he was going to hit her—Joel, who was the least violent human being she knew. Instinctively she shrank back from him, her eyes widening with fear and shock.
Joel looked shocked too. Shocked and something else, something she couldn’t put a name to but which brought a lump of painful aching emotion to her throat as her senses suddenly relayed to her what her eyes had refused to see: the way his shoulders were hunched, the brooding, bitter, defeated look in his eyes.
She wanted to run up to him and fling her arms round him, to tell him that she was sorry… to explain that she was tired and confused and very, very frightened; that she hadn’t realised just what it would mean to have the full financial responsibility of their lives resting on her shoulders; that she ached sometimes for him to take hold of her and tell her that she wasn’t to worry, that he would sort everything out, even though she knew that wasn’t possible.
She felt so alone, so afraid, but Joel just didn’t seem to notice or care.
Other people did, though. Daphne had commented the last time she had seen her on how tired she looked.
&n
bsp; ‘You’d think Joel would find some way of earning something,’ Daphne had told her. ‘After all, it’s not as though he couldn’t… not with his upbringing.’
Sally had had to avoid looking at her. It would be a betrayal of Joel to tell her sister how he felt about the life he had led as a child, about the fact that his father had never had a regular job and had had to scrape a living where he could.
Joel had once told her that without the allotment he’d worked on with his father they would often have gone without proper food.
‘Jack of all trades, master of none, that was him,’ Joel had told her bitterly. ‘People used to treat him like dirt: he should never have married my mother… He ruined her life as well as his own… and ours…’
Sally had winced as she’d listened to him. As a girl she had thought his background, his gypsy blood romantic, but Joel had shown her a different side of that inheritance when he’d revealed to her the taunts he had suffered as a child, the determination he had developed never, ever to be like his father.
And yet Sally had liked the older man. He had been very like Joel. He had been kind and gentle, patient, and Sally knew how much it had hurt him that Joel had rejected him.
‘There aren’t the jobs,’ she had said quietly, deliberately misunderstanding her sister as she’d added, ‘Not for someone with Joel’s training…’
Daphne had given an exasperated sigh. ‘You’re too soft on him,’ she had told her. ‘And you’re letting him take advantage of you. You should be careful, Sally… after all, what’s in the blood…’