Dreaming Out Loud Read Online Free

time to consider it.
    This had enabled her to suppress her outrage until today, when a photograph in the newspaper had succeeded in reviving it. She stared at the line of chorus girls, their smiling faces, their shapely limbs, their arms linked securely as they performed a high-kicking synchronised dance routine. She remembered how they always smiled no matter how long they had been rehearsing, no matter how hard Jack had driven them, no matter how exhausted and nearer to tears than laughter they had been. Once the curtain went up and the music started, they pinned on their smiles then tapped and kicked their way across the stage and back to the appreciative applause of the summer visitors, whose night out at the Pavilion Theatre was the highlight of their holiday.
    And nobody worked as hard or smiled as brightly as Lana did. Thelma studied the picture closely. Lana, with her lovely long legs, was slightly taller than the other girls and Thelma was fairly certain that she could identify her in the centre of the line-up. Lana Fontaine . . .
    Thelma clutched the newspaper tightly then, giving way to rage, tore the page from the paper, crushed it into a ball and hurled it on the fire. She gripped the arms of her chair and watched as the paper turned brown, then caught fire, blazing briefly before collapsing into ash. One or two burnt flakes escaped and drifted out to land on the hearth. Habit made Thelma rise from her seat, take hold of the fire irons, and kneel down to sweep the hearth clean.
    When she had done it she sat back on her heels and stared at the glowing coals. This was how Jack had found her that fateful day all those years ago. The day it began. Not in this room, of course, but in the room directly above. The room he was renting for the summer season. It had been a cold, rainy summer and Thelma’s mother had agreed to light the fires in her lodgers’ bedrooms so long as they were prepared to pay extra for the coal. It had been Thelma’s job to keep the fires burning.
    ‘So it’s you who makes sure that my room is as warm as toast,’ Jack had said when he came home after the show one evening.
    Thelma stood up and wiped her hands down her pinafore. ‘Who did you think it would be?’ she asked. ‘There’s only me and my mother here, and surely you don’t imagine she would see to the fires?’ She smiled at Jack. She knew that the paying guests, even Jack, were a little in awe of her mother and her overbearing manner.
    ‘Of course not,’ Jack said. ‘Nor does she wait on table or, I imagine, wash the dishes, or clean the house.’
    Wanting to be fair, Thelma said, ‘She does all the cooking.’
    ‘Nevertheless, I’ve seen how hard you work, Thelma.’
    ‘Have you?’
    ‘Why do you look so surprised?’
    Thelma felt herself blushing. ‘Well . . . I mean, why should you notice me?’
    ‘Are you fishing for compliments?’
    ‘Of course not!’
    ‘Now I’ve annoyed you when I only meant to be kind.’
    ‘Do you know how patronising that sounds?’
    Jack looked at her in surprise. Then he laughed. ‘Guilty as charged. The suave, debonair Jack Lockwood putting on his usual act to charm the impressionable little help, and instead finding an intelligent young woman who is not at all impressed and is prepared to put him in his place.’
    Thelma was appalled. She had not meant to talk back to him the way she had, and she could just imagine what her mother would say if Mr Lockwood complained to her. ‘Have I been rude?’ she asked him. ‘I have, haven’t I? I’m sorry.’
    ‘Please don’t back down, Thelma. I haven’t found you rude. In fact I find you utterly charming.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘No, I mean it. You must know how pretty you are. I noticed that the minute I walked into this house. Your blonde curls, your blue eyes and your pink and white complexion. A delightful English rose, I thought to myself. I have an eye for pretty girls, you know, and I know how to charm them. Well, most of