The Changeover Read Online Free PDF Page A

skin of her little brother's hand.

3 A Guest for Supper
    After Laura's father had left them Kate had taken a job as assistant in a bookshop and when the new Garden- dale branch opened she had been promoted to shop manager, though she was not paid any extra for the privilege of being called by a grander title.
    "We'll just give it a whirl, dear, and see how you go," her boss, Mr Bradley, had said, and they were still whirling and seeing how it went a year later.
    "Not to worry," Kate declared. "Wait until I've passed my bookseller's course. He'll have to give me a rise in pay then or I'll speak out in no uncertain terms!"
    Kate did her course on one side of the table at home while Laura frowned over her homework on the other. Kate had a calculator to work out mysterious discounts and Laura was sometimes allowed to borrow it, although she was good at maths and could make figures behave themselves and give up their hidden secrets. It was cheerful to have someone to work with, and to have time alone with Kate when Jacko was washed and read to and tucked up in bed. Sometimes, late at night, Kate looked tired and rather old. But she was still pretty in her own special way, her fair hair shining and her long lips curved in a smile so that Laura found it hard to believe her father could have wanted to live with someone else — a younger woman, quite nice, but not nearly as nice as Kate.
    "You're too kind to me," Kate said when Laura mentioned this. "It's best the way it is. We liked too many different things and I thought I'd change him to my way of thinking and he thought he'd change me to his. Well, we worked on one another for years and years and we both stuck half way. I miss him, but a lot of the time when we were together I just wished he'd go away." These were true things, Laura knew, but they were only part of the truth which was something less orderly than Kate made it sound. Some parts of the full, disorderly truth were lodged in Kate and Laura like splinters of corroding steel. Their feelings had grown around the sharp, wounding edges which didn't hurt any more but were still there, fossils of pain laid down in the mixed-up strata of memory.
    "He was a better housekeeper than I was," Kate once recalled, smiling across the table at Laura. "That was mean of him. He used to polish your shoes each night— you always had polished shoes in those days— and he'd help with cleaning without being asked, but then he had a miserable, long-suffering way of pushing the vacuum cleaner around our sitting room that really got to me after a while. It's funny to think that fifteen years of marriage— for that's what it was, you know— could come to grief because your father vacuumed the carpet as if he were St Peter being crucified upside down. Not just that, of course, but things like that. However, I must say he always loved you, Lolly. Write him a letter, or go and stay with him in the school holidays. I'd miss you, but I wouldn't mind."
    "You sound all reasonable, like a children's book on divorce," Laura complained. She had been given such books to read and despised them, because they tried to be kind and sensible and Laura thought it was like being kind and sensible to a sacrificed Aztec whose living heart was being held up for all to see.
    In the bookshop, wearing her round glasses (her intellectual glasses, as she called them) Kate managed to look quite dashing, even though her clothes were not very new. She took people by surprise because a lot of them did not expect her to be a keen and clever reader, as if reading were only something people went in for when they were particularly plain. Kate enjoyed talking about books to anyone who asked and spent quite a lot of time listening to other people describing books that they had enjoyed. Every evening Laura would ask about the day's takings, and they were compared with the same day last week or last month. Increased sales were always celebrated, but if they had fallen off in any