The Lives of Women Read Online Free PDF Page A

in her hands. She was back then, lowering the tray, shaken but safe and far from defeated.
    Elaine pulled her eyes away from the room, up, up towards the yellowing ceiling. Four round vent holes cut into the uppermostcorner of the wall; four long fingers of sunlight poking through, lifting and trickling through the afternoon dust. She stared into it until the room had dessicated into a soft glittery spin.
    Far below, the sound of the two women sucking and blowing; their conversation compact and happy, like two little girls, she thought, who had learned how to smoke. Neighbours’ names strayed out from their chat – familiar names in unfamiliar circumstances.
    And here she realised the second big change: for the first time in her married life, or at least for as far back as Elaine could recall, her mother had started to make friends.

    She smells the cigarettes on the breath of the house the minute she walks through the door, and finds in every room long forgotten ashtrays. A cut-glass square in the hall, a marble slab on the kitchen windowsill and, in the sitting room, a chrome bowl perched on one leg. By her mother’s bed there is a souvenir from Paris and on the bathroom ledge another from London: mementoes from two ‘glorious’ holidays in the years before she married, when glorious holidays would become a thing of the past. The Parisian ashtray had a picture on the base of a slinky black cat smoking from a holder; Elaine can vaguely recall eating jelly babies out of it when she was very small.
    She walks through the house, remembering the rooms. Her mother is never far behind with offers of tea, toast and ice-cream. In between, she chatters to Elaine about all her new friends.
    They had stopped her out on the road. They had sidled up to her when she’d been paying the grocery bill in McKenna’s. They had paused at the garden wall while she was clipping the hedge. The more confident ones had marched straight up the driveway and rung the doorbell, often bringing a little gift in their hand – Mrs Hanley with her books, Mrs Tansey with her talc and bath-cube set and Mrs Townsend, who, as the doctor’s wife, presumably carried enough authority as it was, came with one arm as long as the other.
    Other women soon followed – most of whom her mother had hardly even spoken to beyond a nod and a smile delivered at a distance, a compliment on a freshly painted door maybe. At most, a goochy-goo into the pram of a new arrival.
    There had been get-well cards and a holy medal; a set of hankies from that Mrs Owens; a bottle of cologne from the woman with the funny teeth who lived next to the Prestons. Chats that had started at garden gates soon progressed into hallways and ended at kitchen tables. Teacups and cake crumbs had barely been cleared away, ashtrays barely emptied, dinners just about shoved into the oven in time for a husband’s return from work.
    At first her mother had been a little wary of all this attention. As Elaine well knew, she had always been torn between the desire to make friends and a fear of strangers knowing too much of her business. But really it had been out of her hands – in fact there’d been no need to make any effort at all on her part: there had been none of the usual anxiety about trying too hard, or indeed not trying hard enough. Everyone had been simply marvellous – except for Mrs Ryan next door, who had consistently let herself down by sticking her head over the back garden wall like alabourer’s wife each and every time her mother happened to go out to hang a few clothes on the washing line.
    Martha Shillman, on the other hand, never let herself down. Martha Shillman had outdone the lot from the start, calling in one evening when Elaine’s father was at an evening race meeting, with a bottle of wine in each hand. Coincidentally, it was the same night that Elaine’s fever had reached its crisis point.
    How her mother would have