Another Mother's Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

children and about how the three of them would get on with their first days at new schools.

    It seemed surreal to Alison to be back in Farmington. Whenever she looked out of the windows of her bedroom and saw the gentle rise of the hills rolling behind the tree line, she suffered animmediate and unprecedented bout of agoraphobia. You knew where you stood in London, which was largely in the thick of it, shoulder to shoulder with the masses, each of you working through your daily lives trying to interact with as few people as possible.

    The Farmington of her childhood could not have been more different than the Farmington she lived in today. It had been a small rural town where everybody knew everybody else and felt as if they had some form of ownership over the lives of others. That’s why her mother especially had suffered so terribly when she and Marc ran away. It had taken Alison a long time, years actually, to see her parents’ side of her unexpected departure. What she had never been able to explain to them was that it wasn’t their fault that she had run away before she could take even one of the A levels she’d been studying for. Just as she couldn’t make them see that there was nothing either one of them could have done or said differently that would have kept her at home to live the safe, loving life her parents had always planned for her.

    The simple fact was that her love for Marc had eclipsed everything else. Even the fact that she had been pregnant with Dominic on the night she’d left with Marc had seemed incidental compared to the urgent need she’d felt to escape with him, to make him hers before anything could come between them. She hadn’t told him she was pregnant until two weeks later on an evening when he was drunk and angry and she was tearful and desperate.

    “I’m having your baby!” she had screamed at him. “Are you staying with me or what?” He’d decided to stay. That night Alison had been glad for the first time that she was pregnant, not because she wanted a baby but because she wanted to keep Marc.

    At least six years had passed before her mother said something that had finally given Alison an insight into the devastation her parents had experienced when she’d left. She and Marc and Dominichad visited them in their new home, in a small village about twenty miles outside of Farmington.

    “This is a nice village,” Alison had said as she set out her mum’s best china for tea, a sign that her parents had at last accepted her and Marc as a couple because the best china came out only for people her mum approved of.

    “It is nice,” her mother had said quietly. “It’s nice living in a place where people don’t know everything about you.”

    At that moment Alison realized how difficult it must have been for her parents to explain to their friends and neighbors what had happened to their daughter, why she had felt the need to run away from home for a life with a man she hardly knew. And now, sitting on her cellophane-covered mattress in her brand-new house after returning to the place where her name had once been the hot topic of gossip, her mother’s simple sentence gained a new significance.

    Alison had driven Dominic to school first, before the girls, negotiating her way gingerly around the familiar roads and streets as if she half expected her past to leap out from some dark corner and run her off the road. But the town was indifferently busy, caught up as it was in the midst of the school run, and Alison was able to relax as she realized her 4x4 was just one of many on the roads that morning. Although hers was perhaps the only one with a determinedly destructive puppy in the pack. Rosie, it seemed, could not be left alone in the house unless Alison was ready to sacrifice her real oak kitchen cupboards or specially carved banister rails. As large as the house was, Alison was fairly confident the puppy would be able to eat it in its entirety in just under a