The Tying of Threads Read Online Free PDF Page B

it any wonder she’d become what she had, growing up in Georgie’s shadow?
    Should have let her win that game of five hundred. Had Jenny known it was to be her last chance to do something for her, she would have let her win.
    You can’t know the future. It’s a blank page waiting to be written. And you can’t alter one day of what has already been written.
    She blamed herself – not for Margot’s death, but for how she’d grown. She and Jim had spent years attempting to sort out Raelene, but hadn’t spent one day trying to do the same for Margot. Back in the forties there’d been no one around to sort out kids’ heads. They either grew out of their hang-ups or they didn’t – anyway, all of those court-appointed psychologists and social workers hadn’t done one scrap of good for Raelene.
    Who sorted me out? she thought. Gertrude Foote, midwife, bush psychologist, font of all wisdom and Jenny’s beloved granny, that’s who – she’d stuck by her through thick and thin.
    Missed her. Still missed her so much.
    She pulled more weeds, pitching them onto the gravelled path behind her and remembering Armadale and Ray, who hadn’t appreciated her untidy style of weeding – or her kids or much else about her. She’d made many mistakes in her life, but marrying Ray had been her greatest.
    The only time she’d lived by clocks had been in Armadale, when the kids were at school – and now. Six days a week she opened that shop at nine though only for three hours on Saturday, and thank God today was Saturday. She’d make a start on the bridal gown this afternoon.
    She glanced at the new car they no longer parked in the shed. Too much trouble getting it in and out and Jim, celebrating its lack of a clutch, was on the road every day – while she was stuck in the shop. She rarely got a chance to drive it – and when she did, she still looked for its clutch and missing gearstick.
    The day they’d ordered it, they’d made big plans. They were going to drive it up to Queensland and stop off in Sydney for a few days to see what thirty years had done to the place. And what had they done since picking that car up? Made one fast Sunday trip down to see Trudy, and by the time they got there, it was time to turn around and come home. Someone had to open that shop.
    Jim had written a cheque for the full price of that car. He’d written another to pay for Margot’s funeral. He would have written a third for a tombstone – had Jenny known what to put on it. He had no respect for money. Those who grow up with it don’t know what it’s like to have none.
    Vern Hooper, worth a fortune when he died, hadn’t left Jim a brass razoo. His mother had. She’d placed her first husband’s money into a trust account for him when he’d been a tiny kid.
    Jim knew little about his mother’s first husband’s family, other than that they hadn’t been breeders. Norm Nicholas was the only son of Oswald Nicholas, who must have been a gambling man. According to the few details Jim had been able to dig up on him, back in 1885, old Oswald had gambled ten thousand pounds on shares in Broken Hill Proprietary then, before the depression of the 1890s, he’d sold the lot for what must have been a fortune back in those days.
    His gamble had set Norm up for life. He’d built the house Jenny now called home – or sometimes called home but more often called Vern Hooper’s house. He’d built the sawmill Jenny had known as Hooper’s mill. That mill killed Norm, leaving Joanne a forty year old childless widow. She’d married Vern Hooper in 1918, and Jim arrived less than a year after the wedding.
    He’d been six years old when his mother died, and worth in excess of a hundred thousand pounds, which he’d had no knowledge of until his twenty-first birthday when letters addressed to him started arriving from his mother’s solicitor.
    He’d gone off to war in ’41 then lost a lot of years in hospitals after the war. Not until ’59 had he