The Breaker Read Online Free PDF Page B

youngsters, eyes watering, squinted into the burning sun to make out the black, bobbing shape behind them. "It looks like one of those big oil drums," said the elder.
    "Jesus wept," growled her father. "Whoever let that wash overboard deserves to be shot. It could have ripped us open if we'd hit it."
    His girlfriend, still twisted around, thought it looked more like an upturned dinghy but was reluctant to voice an opinion for fear of attracting any more of his beastly daughters' derision. She'd had a bucketful already that day and heartily wished she had never agreed to come out with them.
 
    "I bumped into Nick Ingram this morning," said Maggie as she made a pot of tea in her mother's kitchen at Broxton House.
    It had been a beautiful room once, lined with old oak dressers, each one piled with copper pans and ornate crockery, and with an eight-foot-long, seventeenth-century refectory table down its middle. Now it was merely drab. Everything worth selling had been sold. Cheap white wall and floor units had replaced the wooden dressers, and a molded plastic excrescence from the garden stood where the monks' table had reigned resplendent. It wouldn't be so bad, Maggie often thought, if the room was cleaned occasionally, but her mother's arthritis and her own terminal exhaustion from trying to make money out of horses meant that cleanliness had long since gone the way of godliness. If God was in his heaven and all was right with the world, then he had a peculiar blind spot when it came to Broxton House. Maggie would have cut her losses and moved away long ago if only her mother had agreed to do the same. Guilt enslaved her. Now she lived in a flat over the stables on the other side of the garden and made only intermittent visits to the house. Its awful emptiness was too obvious a reminder that her mother's poverty was her fault.
    "I took Jasper down to Chapman's Pool. A woman drowned in Egmont Bight, and Nick had to guide the helicopter in to pick up the body."
    "A tourist, I suppose?"
    "Presumably," said Maggie, handing her a cup. "Nick would have said if it was someone local."
    "Typical!" snorted Celia crossly. "So Dorset will foot the bill for the helicopter because some inept creature from another county never learned to swim properly. I've a good mind to withhold my taxes."
    "You usually do," said Maggie, thinking of the final reminders that littered the desk in the drawing room.
    Her mother ignored the remark. "How was Nick?"
    "Hot," said her daughter, remembering how red-faced he had been when he returned to the car, "and not in the best of moods." She stared into her tea, screwing up the courage to address the thorny issue of money, or more accurately lack of money, coming into the riding and livery business she ran from the Broxton House stableyard. "We need to talk about the stables," she said abruptly.
    Celia refused to be drawn. "You wouldn't have been in a good mood either if you'd just seen a drowned body." Her tone became conversational as a prelude to a series of anecdotes. "I remember seeing one floating down the Ganges when I was staying with my parents in India. It was the summer holidays. I think I was about fifteen at the time. It was a horrible thing, gave me nightmares for weeks. My mother said..."
    Maggie stopped listening and fixed instead on a long black hair growing out of her mother's chin which needed plucking. It bristled aggressively as she spoke, like one of Bertie's whiskers, but they'd never had the kind of relationship that meant Maggie could tell her about it. Celia, at sixty-three, was still a good-looking woman with the same dark brown hair as her daughter, touched up from time to time with Harmony color rinses, but the worry of their straitened circumstances had taken a heavy toll in the deep lines around her mouth and eyes.
    When she finally drew breath, Maggie reverted immediately to the subject of the stables. "I've been totting up last month's receipts," she said, "and we're about two