To Have and to Hold Read Online Free PDF

loaded up her trolley. People pushed past her, voices chattered behind the aisles, her watch was ticking loudly and she must hurry. She paid for her shopping and took the bags down the street to the car. It was not until she had driven a long way, right out into the countryside, that she turned to the back seat and saw it was empty. She had left the baby behind.
    She drove back, fast. She knew that Jonquil must be gone; someone must have stolen her by now. The supermarket had grown larger in her absence; it was in a different street, with trees outside. The aisles stretched for ever, the whisperings were louder, as if the packets of Persil were talking, and her legs were so heavy as she ran, and sometimes she heard mewlings and she knew now that babies must be there, not just Jonquil but other babies – she could hear them – but why did nobody take any notice? She tried to ask people but no sound came out of her mouth; her lips moved but people just stared at her as if she were mad; and as she ran her limbs were so heavy, as if her body was filled with sand, and just around the next corner she must surely find her. But there was nothing. No baby. Just aisles of shelves. And squashed amongst the tins, poking out like tongues, wedged here and there, she found plastic bags of knitting.
    Viv’s hair was bunched up on the top of her head and fixed with a child’s red plastic clip.
    â€˜Come in, excuse the chaos.’
    Ann followed her into the living room. ‘Looks the same as usual.’
    Though she only lived half a mile away she had not been to Viv’s house for several weeks, not since she had gone into hospital, and she felt the old reactions rise like a taste in her mouth. It was almost reassuring, in a world which had changed so utterly, to find some familiar feelings left. She gazed around with a mixture of awe, exasperation and a kind of bemused envy. It was a large room, the whole ground floor, with the kitchen at the back, overlooking the garden, and a bay window overlooking the street. ‘Lived-in’ could be one description; Ken called it squalid, but that was after he had once risen from the settee and found a piece of buttered toast sticking to the seat of his trousers.
    Breakfast had not been cleared away and the table was strewn with Sunday papers. There was a half-eaten croissant on the floor which Viv picked up and absentmindedly ate as she switched on the kettle. The walls were crowded with pictures – Indian hangings from Viv’s mystic sixties days and an explosion of children’s drawings: stiff-haired apparitions with spider hands, called Mummy and Daddy. There was a ripe smell of soiled sawdust from the hamster’s cage on the dresser, and the pegboard was covered with reminders to Ban Cruise Missiles, buy bog roll, and use the services of Dyno-Rod Plumbing and Emergency Drain Clearance.
    Ann started clearing away the breakfast plates.
    â€˜Sit down,’ said Viv.
    â€˜I’m not an invalid any more.’
    â€˜It’s not your mess. You’ve come to lunch.’
    â€˜I want to do it.’ Ann filled the sink. The windowsill was cluttered with plants, parsley in a jam-jar of yellowish water, and some lanky mustard and cress growing from a saucer of cotton wool. Through this she could see the garden. She thought of her dream, and Viv waiting for her in the countryside, and how years ago Viv had waited for her behind the potting shed, in the bright sunlight of their childhood. Then she thought quite distinctly, for the first time in actual words: I can give a childhood to nobody.
    â€˜Here, let me do it.’
    Viv was there, moving her aside and taking the brush. Ann had not started the washing up.
    â€˜Sorry.’
    â€˜You dry.’
    Ann said: ‘Where are the girls?’
    â€˜Mucking about outside.’
    â€˜Don’t you ever worry?’
    â€˜Worry?’
    â€˜That they’ll get lost?’
    Viv stopped, her hands in