Daughters Read Online Free PDF

violent messages viasilence was more disturbing than being vocal, but, said the lawyer, it was not an option.
    ‘Why did he go?’ asked Lara’s mother. (She was a persistent woman and wouldn’t countenance Lara’s attempts to fob her off.)
    ‘I got pregnant with Maudie, then Louis, and that began a whole long story,’ she said. ‘You know the rest.’ To counter the tragedy, a traumatized Bill had taken refuge with Violet. The Shrinking V., slim and gleaming with desire, raising her thin arms and crying for more of him to the exclusion of anyone else. Who could blame her? Who could blame him?
    Thinking, Children’s lunch, Lara had taken a knife out of the kitchen drawer and Bill had backed away. He looked at her with dawning incomprehension – her lovely husband, who couldn’t cope with his grief and its repercussions any longer.
    ‘Go to Violet.’
    ‘Lara …’
    She raised the knife. ‘
Go
.’

Chapter Three
    A large white envelope fell on to the hall floor.
    Lara was on her way out to work but she picked it up. ‘Lara’ – Sarah’s handwriting.
    Sarah never gave up.
    Inside, there was a sheaf of paper and a note. ‘Please take a look.’
    The first document was a photocopy of an entry in
Country Houses
and Their Importance.
‘Built
c.
1751 by disciple of Robert Adam. Property of the Coates family until 1962. Thereafter property of Gurley Smith. The house, a small-scale commission, reflects early Adam characteristics and preoccupations and it is said that Adam himself insisted on designing fireplaces and pediments. The result is work that has a sense of overall unity, or flow.’
    The second was from a garden gazetteer, dated the previous year. ‘Once superb, Membury House gardens have fallen into neglect. However, if on Open Days visitors are prepared to look beyond the pedestrian planting and lazy maintenance, they can find the odd gem, including a fine example of a Roman myrtle tree, said to have been planted by Jane Austen’s great-nephew.’
    The third gave a short history of the Coates family, who had grown rich on the manufacture of imported cotton from the American colonies. Josiah Coates had hadthe foresight to back the new flyer-and-bobbin system for drawing cotton in the late 1750s and had never looked back. Eventually the family had died out, owing, the writer speculated, to a genetic problem that appeared to have invaded it. As a result, only one out of three children survived, the last dying in 1961.
    Now Sarah took up the story, penning in her neat hand: ‘My great-uncle Gurley bought it from the Coates executors and occupied it for over forty years. He never married.’
    Finally, Lara picked up some printed pages, which had been torn out of a book – by the look and feel of them a cheap paperback. Again, Sarah’s writing along the top margin: ‘My mother told me that she was sure that the novelist, whose name was Matthew Banks, had modelled the house in the book on Membury and the village.’
    Coat shrugged on, bag in hand, she stood in the hallway and began to read.
    The writer was impassioned by his subject – and, possibly, a little overwrought:
Montford House was situated to the west of Middleford. Running between fields, which in summer were bright with poppies, corncockle, charlock and mayweed, the road through the centre of the village wound down towards the old London road and Alton, and took in the house on the left.
    At ploughing time, the rooks rose above the ridge where the plough teams had danced on the turn of theland. On cold days, the ground rang with the sound of hoofs, and the air echoed with the swish of the muck-spreading teams as they moved in lines across the fields, and the cries of workers harvesting cabbages. At dusk, the teams plodded home to the rattle of chain and harness. In summer, the flies rose in clouds above the crops and the herb-rich meadows. Pigs rooted in grasslands, poultry foraged, and the streams feeding the watercress beds, for which the