A Close Connection Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m just telling you. Mother was privately educated, went to university, got her degree, taught for several years and speaks fluent Italian for one thing and there’s no surer way of feeling inferior than if you arestanding beside somebody who speaks the language and you haven’t a clue what’s going on.’
    ‘My mother may not have a degree—’
    ‘She doesn’t. And I didn’t mean anything by that either. Lots of very successful people don’t have degrees.’ She did not bother to add, though, that his mother was hardly the success of the century. Her patience was wearing thin and she felt the first surge of another bout of anger which would be a bad start to the day. She really needed to calm herself down. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured, putting her hand over his. ‘But you must not be so sensitive, sweetie. I like Paula. I like her a lot. She’s very sweet-natured.’
    He nodded, managing a rueful smile at that.
     
    She could murder the woman, she thought later, on the drive to work. She had told a lie, a white one, back there because sweet-natured was not the first thing that came to mind when she thought about her dearest mother-in-law. Well, all right, she was sweet-natured in that she was the sort of agreeable woman who didn’t have a bad word to say about anybody but that just made her boring as hell. Having an edge made people so much more interesting. Nicola liked people about whom you were never quite sure, people with a hint of mystery, maybe a dark side to them but she found open-natured people like dear Paula mildly irritating.
    It was a complete surprise when they met. She had no idea what she had imagined, what sort of person she had conjured up in her mind but Paula was nothing like it. How on earth could such a sparrow-like nothing of a woman produce a son as dashing as Matthew?
    Paula Walker was the sort of woman who made her cringe. She was too much of the little helpless woman, in every way, a bit wet, a bit inconsequential, the sort of woman who would be great as a film extra because she would not stand out in thecrowd. And she wore such nondescript cheap clothes, the sort that made her shudder; although that was just a matter of poor taste and she could be helped with that if she wanted.
    So her first impression of the woman who was to be her future mother-in-law was a big disappointment.
    Sometimes women like her, the petite variety, were little fireballs as feisty as you come, but that was not Paula and the way she looked up to Alan with that adoring gaze was not far short of nauseating. Did the woman have no opinion of her own? Did she have to defer to her man for every damned thing? Her own mother had an opinion about everything, sticking to it at that, even if she was wildly off the mark as she frequently was, and she was sure that she had only voted Lib Dem at the last election because her father always voted Tory.
    You could bet your life that Paula would vote the same way as her husband and worse, would not consider anything wrong with that. Nicola had no idea how Matthew voted although she could hazard a guess but, although they never argued about politics or religion – taboo subjects, both – she really didn’t give a fly’s fart about his political leanings because he would never influence her.
    The two leading ladies in her life were so far removed from each other it was almost comic. Poor Paula would die a thousand deaths if her mother subjected her to dining out in any of the exclusive dining establishments the Nightingales frequented, where she insisted on the best wine and so on, her mother in particular making the poor maître d’ work for his living. Matthew had told her about taking his parents out for lunch to a hotel over on Dartmoor and about how nervous his mother had been throughout, socially uncomfortable and not enjoying the ‘ambience’ one little bit, her anxiety managing to ruin things for him.
    However, Nicola had learnt something last night. Matthew