One Blue Moon Read Online Free PDF

concealed the pain of her aunt’s rejection beneath the facade of belligerent abrasiveness she had adopted as both shield and defence mechanism since the day her mother had been wrenched out of her life.
    ‘Your Uncle Huw is still living in Bonvilston Road,’ Elizabeth reminded her. Huw, Megan’s bachelor brother, was a policeman in the town and worked all kinds of unsocial shifts.
    ‘Perhaps I’ll go and see him. Is Will still working on Charlie’s stall?’
    ‘He was when he left this morning.’
    ‘As soon as I’ve washed I’ll go down and see him.’
    ‘I’ve cleaned all the bedrooms I intend to for today, and I’m certainly not going to traipse up and downstairs with any more buckets. If you want to wash you can use the washhouse. There’s no one to disturb you. You’ll find soap in the dish, and a towel on the top shelf.’
    ‘Thank you.’ Diana didn’t even attempt to keep the sarcasm from her voice.
    It was a long, cold walk down the Graig hill, made all the more unbearable by a cordial greeting from the Reverend Mark Price and his pretty young wife, who assumed that Elizabeth would be ecstatic to have her daughter and niece back home again. Pulling the collar of her sodden red coat high around her ears, Diana struggled to make civil replies to their polite enquiries after her own and Maud’s health, before trekking on, past the rows of dripping stone cottages. The downpour turned into a drenching torrent. Twilight became a dark and early night, but sentiment took precedence over reason, and she paused for a few moments at the junction of Llantrisant Road and Leyshon Street.
    She’d known it would hurt, and it did – more than she would have believed possible – but she couldn’t stop herself from looking down the narrow terraced road towards the tiny house that her parents had bought when they’d married. She and William had both been born there in the front bedroom, where, as her mother had told them with brimming eyes glittering with happy memories, they’d also been conceived. She’d never known her father. He’d died in the mud of the Western Front six months before she’d been born. Her mother had hung his photograph on the wall of the kitchen so she and William would at least know what he’d looked like, but the photograph had faded with time, until there was only a blurred face that looked remarkably like her Uncle Evan. Quiet, kind Uncle Evan who’d been led a dog’s life by Aunt Elizabeth for as long as she could remember.
    Tears mingled with the rain on her cheeks as she stared at the house that had once been her home. She closed her eyes, wishing with all her might that she could walk down the street, turn the key that protruded from the lock, and enter the house. But then it wouldn’t be the same. She didn’t even know who lived there now. William had written to say that he and Charlie had taken the best of their mother’s furniture across town to their Uncle Huw’s before the bailiffs had moved in, but that was all. Perhaps it was just as well. If it was an old friend or a neighbour she’d have an excuse to call, and the sight of unfamiliar objects within the familiar walls would be more than she could bear right now. Even from where she stood she could see strange curtains hanging limply at the windows. Made of green and gold artificial silk, they sagged a little lopsidedly. The front door had been given a new coat of paint as well. A grim, unwelcoming shade of dark brown so different from the vibrant sapphire blue Will had painted it at her mother’s instigation.
    ‘Lost your way, Diana?’ Glan Richards, a porter in the Graig Hospital, and the next-door neighbour of her Uncle Evan and Aunt Elizabeth, stood before her.
    ‘Glan! How are you?’ she cried out eagerly, sentiment causing her to forget the antagonism that had once existed – and for all she knew, still did exist – between him and her brother.
    ‘Better than you by the look of it.’ He thumbed the