Another Mother's Life Read Online Free PDF

month.

    As she drove the children along High Street, she even felt a surge of affection for the old place, still so pretty with its Victorian shop fronts and medieval church. There was a Costa coffee and a Chez Gerard in situ now instead of the All Day English BreakfastCafé and the Italian restaurant her parents had always taken her to on her birthdays for a gigantic ice cream sundae.

    The grocers and the butchers had been replaced with several estate agents and nowadays there were a number of smart fashion boutiques that looked as if they were brimming with exactly the kind of clothes that Alison had far too many of, designer and expensive, the kind of top or dress that would only do for one season and then could never be seen in smart company again. The old co-op had been turned into an exclusive gym. Alison knew if she looked in the estate agents’ windows, it would be difficult to find even a modest house priced under five hundred thousand pounds, which made it a place where it was almost impossible for those on an average income to live. It was an exclusive town now; you could see that by the cars parked along the side of the road. In how many other places on the planet could you see an Aston Martin, a Porsche, two Mercedes, and countless BMWs all lined up nose to tail? The town she had grown up in had been middle class, suburban, and staid, where respectability was treasured and flashiness frowned upon. Back then it was a fusty maiden aunt of a town, prim and proper. Now it was a showy trophy wife, with diamonds on its fingers, a pair of gold leather sling-backs on its feet and a year-round fake tan.

    But Farmington’s apparent face-lift offered Alison little comfort; this was not the town that she had once fled, that was true. But it was also not a place that she wanted to come back to. Gentrified or not, this was still the scene of Alison’s darkest hour, the place where she had behaved in the most terrible way, leaving her parents in the middle of the night with only a note of explanation, and, worse still, betraying someone she had loved and who had trusted her.

    And although she tried to believe Marc’s all-too-rational comment that no one would care or even remember what had happenedback then, from the moment Marc had begun to move their lives back here it had been hard not to believe that somewhere amid the coffee shops and boutiques, her past was still lying in wait for her.

    While Alison had been putting on a brave face for the children and Amy had rallied, bravely stoical about the upheaval, Dom was openly disgusted. The thunderous expression on his face as she drove him to the school gates said it all. He was furious with his parents for bringing him here to this place he had already referred to as a dive and a dump on numerous occasions since they had moved in over the weekend.

    “I used to go to this school when I was your age, can you believe,” Alison said lightly as she pulled the car up to Dominic’s new high school. She had had to cover the shock of emotion she felt at being confronted with the building that she spent so many pivotal moments of her life in, forcibly reminding herself that it was just a building. “It’s a good school, Dom, you’ll make new friends really quickly here. And there’s Rock Club, don’t forget. Once you’ve started there you’ll be right at home.”

    Alison had been pinning all of her hopes of winning her son over on the flimsy promise of Rock Club. He was a dedicated guitarist, it was one of the few things he openly took pleasure in, and he had worked for two summers without complaint to earn half the two thousand pounds required to buy his dream guitar. When the head teacher had taken them on a tour of the school a couple of weeks before they had made the move, the news about Rock Club, run by a local music teacher, was the only thing he had shown any interest in despite his very best attempts to hide it.

    “This sucks,” he told Alison as he