Snow Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

lemonade.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know. Clothes, perhaps, or hats.’
    ‘It isn’t respectable. You’re young and unmarried.’
    ‘Lots of women do.’
    ‘Not women like us.’
    ‘I’ll have to do something and soon.’
    ‘Why?’
    Rhoda looked everywhere but at her friend.
    ‘Why, Rhoda?’ Abby insisted.
    Rhoda looked fiercely at her.
    ‘You don’t know what it’s like with two brothers, the baby screaming and – and him! My mother … she can’t see anything wrong in him. I have no place there. I want to be away.’
    ‘I’ll introduce you to a nice young man at the party,’ Abby said, trying for lightness.
    ‘There are no nice men. They’re all horrible.’
    ‘You didn’t used to think that of your father.’
    ‘I was a child then,’ Rhoda said sadly, and Abby thought of her own childhood when nothing seemed to change. The days went on for ever and her parents were always there, her mother teaching her at home, joking and laughing with her, buying her pretty things, making the house light and warm as it had not been since. The best time of all was in the late autumn, when darkness fell across the streets and lights appeared beyond the bay windows. The leaves were off the trees so that the branches looked like long fingers in the gathering dusk; the wood fire gave off its bright flame; the kettle sang; the tea was made; one of her mother’s rich fruit cakes and the pretty pink and white china were laid out with a cloth. They would sit there together, sure in the knowledge that her father would be coming home to them. There would be dinner and closed curtains against the draughts, and the round globes of the lamps would take the mystery fromthe corners of the rooms. They would read and talk and her father would relate his day. They would talk of people they knew and of Christmas to come and they would make plans. Later, Abby would curl up in her warm, soft feather bed. From there she would watch the fire die down and, as it did so, she would close her eyes in the knowledge that everything was right with her world and Christmas would mean all the special things that it had always brought. They had been so happy then. Why did it happen like that: to know that everything was all right and then to watch it taken from you? To know such happiness and to lose it was cruel. Her mother was dead and so was Rhoda’s father and there was no hope for the future. Childhood was long gone and all the lovely, endless days would never come again.

Chapter Two
    That summer changed everything. It was funny, Gil thought, how you kept on believing that things were going to get better. He had had the feeling all his life that there had been some kind of mix-up and he had been born into the wrong family. His father was little and dark and dumpy and blue-eyed; his mother was little and fair and not quite so dumpy, and so was Edward, whereas he grew tall and dark eyed and it was always known in the family that he looked just like his grandfather Collingwood. This was not a good thing to be.
    Gil could remember his grandparents, and with affection, from when he was very small. They lived in a dark narrow street in a terraced house in Amble and his grandfather built boats for the local fishermen. His grandmother had no servants. She had a big oven with a fire and there would be bread set to rise on the hearth. She always wore a pinafore. Her house was clean; the brasses sparkled; she made soup and in her kitchen was a big table at which she seemed always busy.
    His grandfather had a workshop and a yard some way from the house on the edge of the village towards the estuary, with Warkworth Castle in the distance. The workshop had a floor thick with wood shavings and the smell was sweet. His grandfather built cobles, without plans or any help, two a year at least. And he had his own coble. Gil could remember pushing it off thebeach into the waves when they went to see to the lobster pots and sometimes his grandfather took him fishing