Lovers Meeting Read Online Free

the money in the cap, though his share was bigger than the others and he pocketed the watch. No one objected. His partners in crime then headed for a favourite pub, but Reuben set out for what passed for his home.
    This was a single crowded room in a tenement. He climbed several flights of stairs in darkness to reach it, his boots clumping hollowly on the wooden treads. He found his mother and his four sisters, all younger than he, sitting on stools around the small fire that burned in the grate. There was a table, bare save for a crust of bread and a knife. On the floor lay two mattresses. Reuben slept on one of them, the four girls on the other. His father lay in a corner on the only bed. He alternately mumbled, coughed, raved and gasped for breath.
    Reuben shoved through the half-circle formed by his mother and the girls to stand in front of the fire. He asked, ‘How is he?’
    His mother, sallow and dark-haired, shrugged. ‘Still hanging on.’ Her dress, like those of the girls, was old and greasy. She and her daughters stared listlessly into the fire. But then she looked up and asked, ‘D’ye get any money?’
    Reuben reached into his pocket, pulled out some coins and dropped them in his mother’s lap. She fingered them eagerly, counting. Reuben knew how much there was and how much remained in his pocket. He warned, ‘Don’t spend it all on gin.’ Then he shoved out of the ring around the fire and went to stand by his father’s bedside.
    The old man was skeletal, the skin drawn tight over his skull, his wispy beard tangled. His eyes were glazed and shifted wildly. When Elisha Garbutt was dismissed by William Langley he had already spent the money he had stolen and had saved nothing. The sale of the furniture in the house he rented in Sunderland had paid for him and his family to travel to Liverpool where he hoped to find work. Those hopes were soon dashed; without a reference he could get only badly paid menial work and little of that. Now he was at the end of a long year of starvation, illness and despair.
    Reuben listened to the old man’s mumblings but for most of the time they were incomprehensible. Only now and again did a few words come through clearly enough to be understood: ‘… Langley … damned Langleys … beggared me … Langley … damn them to hell!’ Finally Reuben could stand no more, turned and almost ran from the room. He strode the streets, not mourning but raging. He was sure who was to blame for the downfall of his father and hence his family.
    When Elisha Garbutt had managed the Langley shipyard he and his family had lived comfortably, members of a middle-class élite, and looked down on the people who served them. None more so than Reuben, who had strutted at his father’s side, disdainful of the common workmen. He had furtively mauled the young girls who worked in the Garbutt house and counted them lucky to have the experience. He had looked forward confidently to a lifetime of full pockets come easily. At the same time he envied the Langleys as owners of the yard and believed his father really did all the work. Then William Langley had sacked Elisha and Reuben found himself a penniless outcast, humiliated, jeered at by the girls he had lorded it over. During the past year his hatred of William Langley had built upon itself and now it had crystallised into a determination to be avenged.
    He returned to the tenement as the dawn was breaking and he heard the wailing as he climbed the stairs. He knew what it meant and did not need his mother to tell him as he pushed in through the door, ‘He’s dead!’ The dirty blanket was pulled up over Elisha Garbutt’s face. Reuben stood over the body, silent, his head bowed, but not in prayer. Inside he was cursing the Langleys, man, woman and child, and swearing to make an end of all of them – one day. He flung himself out of the room again, shoving his mother and sisters out of the way.
    Garbutt’s gang was not the only one following his