Читать книгу Round the Bend онлайн

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I went in at the street door that opened straight into the living-room and there was Ma laying the table for tea; it was getting on for five o'clock when Dad would be knocking off at the docks. I put my suitcase down. "I'm back, Ma," I said quietly.

She said, "Oh Tom! You're looking so brown!" And when she'd kissed me she said, "We know about poor Beryl, Tom. We're all ever so sorry."

"How did you get to know?" I asked.

"Mrs. Cousins wrote and told us," she replied. "There was a bit about it in the paper, too. It's been a sad homecoming for you, boy."

"That's right," I said heavily. "Nothing to be done about it now, though, and the least said the better." She took the hint and she must have dropped a word to Dad, because they never bothered me with questions.

We had plenty of other things to talk about, though, specially when Dad came home. I'd written to them regularly while I was away, and they'd got young Ted's school atlas and marked on it all the places that I'd been to, and it made a sort of spider's web all over the Near East. I had some photographs that I'd collected from time to time, and after we'd done the washing up I got these out and showed them and told them all about it, and my sister Joyce came in with her husband, Joe Morton, who kept the greengrocer's shop in Allenby Street just round the corner, and he brought a couple of bottles of beer in, and I sat talking and telling them about it all till nearly ten o'clock.