Daughters Read Online Free PDF Page A

fro-ing across a chaotic kitchen and hallway.
    When the girls were gone, they faced each other across the littered breakfast table.
    ‘Is there someone else, Bill?’
    He sighed. ‘There wasn’t but … It’s more of a friendship. She …’
    ‘She what?’
    ‘She’s a comfort.’
    ‘And I’m not?’
    He turned away. ‘Listen to us, Lara.
Listen.
’
    She observed his back. What could she read into it? Nothing she wished to read, and she stood for a while in the kitchen, waiting to touch base with the normal sounds. But there was silence. Why didn’t the boiler thump? The pipes rattle?
    She went upstairs and shut herself into the bedroom. She needed to look at Bill’s things. There were his shoes stuffed into the cupboard, the jackets (all similar) exuding whiffs of aftershave and sweat. There was his dressing-gown in blue paisley. Handsome.
    She tried pretending that she hadn’t heard what had been said. (‘I’m selectively deaf,’ her grandmother used to say. ‘You’ll find it a useful condition.’)
    At that time, her ambitions had centred on peaceful interiors that smelt of ironing and fresh bread. Of transporting children, of family outings, of visits to the cinema with popcorn, and Sunday roasts with properly crisped potatoes.
    Now what?
    Hours later she emerged to discover Bill sitting on the top stair. ‘Shouldn’t you have something to eat?’ He touched the place where her hipbone jutted through her jeans.
    Her head pounded. ‘Why would you care?’
    ‘I may be leaving you,’ his voice drifted in from a long way away, ‘but I’ll make sure you’re OK.’
    She could see the scene clearly. To the onlooker, it was him and her having a – more or less – civilized conversation. But, at her hidden centre, she was molten with rage and pain. ‘You’re not taking the children,’ she said, proud of keeping her voice steady. ‘Don’t think it.’
    ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’
    ‘Yes, I do.
My
children … I won’t lose my children.’
    At that, he appeared uneasy. ‘As it happens, Violet isn’t … keen.’
    She rallied her forces. ‘Bill, you don’t have to do this. You have a choice.’
    He stared up at her. ‘I don’t think so.’
    The look on his face reminded her so vividly of times past – times when it had been all right between them and they had been happy, more than happy – that her defences crumbled. She heard herself blurt, ‘It would be easier ifyou were dead,’ and had the satisfaction of seeing him pale.
    It was true. If Bill had died she knew she would have coped better. The refuge and decorum of widowhood was so much easier an option than that of the abandoned wife.
    ‘Stop it.’
    ‘Why aren’t you dead instead of Louis?’ she blazed at him.
    Uneasy and shocked, he followed her down the stairs into the kitchen. ‘Lara … can I ring your mother?’
    ‘Don’t talk to me.’
    Pain was a protean thing. The pain of childbirth, seemingly unbearable at its worst, was, Lara discovered, bearable because it was forgotten. The pain of a collapsed marriage? Different again.
    The pain of bereavement? That was of another order.
    The two together?
    ‘At least, the agony cannot grow any more,’ she wrote in the notebook, after Bill had left. ‘It is just there, a poisoning thing, anchored and immutable, and I’ve got used to dealing with it. What I can’t handle is waking up in the morning, all clean and washed with sleep and revelling in those seconds of unknowing, only for it to hit me …’
    If Bill’s going hurt, the struggle to subdue pride and rage and maintain a civilized face in front of the girls was almost worse. This would be a lifelong discipline – as tough as taking religious vows. She pictured herself as a figure in a classical painting kneeling in front of an infant Christ or a saint, promising silence and obedience, however hard. Lara’s lawyer advised, ‘You
have
to negotiate.’ True, cutting herself off and sending