4

      Marjorie sat up in bed trying to read her library book while waiting for Philip to return from taking his parents home. What a ghastly evening it had been. Normally she would have been halfway through her latest thriller by now, but with the day’s events blotting everything out she was stuck on page three and had no idea of the plot. She kept staring up at the wallpaper, not seeing it. But all she could think of was Bristol.

      Bristol? Oh, no, no, no. Not now. Not when she was on the verge of an exciting new challenge in her life – one that she needed with increasing desperation the more she thought about it all.

      After years of looking after Phil and the girls – enjoyable though that had been – she yearned to exercise her brain, to use her skills, and to achieve, in doing so, a degree of personal satisfaction. More than that: she had a deep-down need to assert herself and prove to Phil that she wasn’t as dependent on him as he’d always seemed to think, that she was an equal partner in the marriage with independent ideas and a life of her own to be lived.

      But of course he knew nothing of her recent way of thinking, so as soon as he came back to the house she would try to explain. Would it make any difference to his plans, though? Could she get him to change his mind? He’d seemed so adamant that they had to go to Bristol, but even now she could hardly believe he was serious. They had lived in London all their lives.

      To be honest, their suburb was no longer the place it had been – in fact it had changed almost beyond recognition like most of suburbia had done – but it had always been their home. How could Phil think of moving away? The matter of the shops aside, how could he expect her to leave Becky when she was about to have her first baby? How could he expect her to abandon this house with its comforting familiarity, their relatives and friends. Moreover how could he take her from her much-loved garden? If nothing else occurred to him, surely he must realise how much that meant to her?

      Why, only that afternoon, inspired by Sheila’s gardener and urged on by the glorious sunshine she had hurried home to give the grass its third cut of the season. There would just be time, she’d surmised, to fit it in before her in-laws arrived. Their meal had already been taken care of: she had one of her home-baked pork pies lined up in the fridge, and the pastry had turned out deliciously golden and buttery – exactly as Philip liked it. With a salad prepared and new potatoes waiting to be boiled there had been practically nothing left to do. She’d only hoped that the subject they would be discussing would not spoil everyone’s enjoyment of it.

      Marjorie turned back two pages, wondering how many words her eyes had travelled over without her brain making any sense of them. Pork pie, indeed! If she’d only had the success of the meal to worry about!

      Although the garden had slipped into shadow and was rapidly cooling to a chill, the sky remained light and high. A peacefulness lay over everything, save the odd bird flapping from tree to tree and chattering to its mate. She would have loved to carry on pottering about on what promised to be a heavenly evening, but Philip was due home any minute.

      She’d opened the garage door in readiness for him, hurried into the house, and checked that his slippers were by the back door – this last duty being performed with a guilty glance over her shoulder, as though her daughters were in hiding, watching.

      ‘Mum!’ they would have chorused had they been there, raising their eyes at each other. They agreed on very little, being opposites in character, but on one thing they did concur: their mother was a hopeless case.

      ‘This has nothing whatever to do with feminism,’ Marjorie had vainly tried to advise them whenever they bemoaned the way she lavished attention on her man. ‘It’s simply a matter of common courtesy.’ At which the girls would giggle behind their hands until their mother went on to remind them that she had carried out much the same little acts of loving kindness for them as well throughout their childhood, and didn’t they intend to do the same for their families when they had them? She sincerely hoped they would.

      Marjorie had often fretted after these exchanges, wondering what selfish little monsters she had brought into the world. Had she failed in her duty as a parent?

      But, back in the kitchen and arranging the salad in a bowl, she’d consoled herself that the girls seemed to have turned out well enough after all: Becky had found herself a husband, in spite of her dreadful bossiness – a trait that she had unfortunately inherited from her grandfather. And Em, eighteen months her junior, had astonished them all by plumping for a ‘caring’ profession. She whose favourite back-chat throughout her teens had been ‘see if I care’, had suddenly decided to do precisely that. She was now in her final year at nursing college.

      Marjorie crushed a sliver of garlic and whisked up a vinaigrette dressing, her thoughts suddenly changing track. Why hadn’t Philip told her about Spittal’s closing? She was sure he must have known before the local media got hold of it. Why had he kept it to himself?

      Well, all right, she had kept her little secret from him, as Sheila had reminded her, but she didn’t think him capable of doing the same. How well, though, could you ever know someone – even someone you had lived with for nearly twenty-five years? It was a disconcerting thought. She was still frowning when Philip’s car swooped on to the drive.

      It was soon apparent, by his slackened tie and the whiff of rotten apples on his breath, that he was guilty of something he rarely did: he’d been drinking on the way home.

      ‘When did you find time to do that?’ she asked, nodding toward the wrought iron clock above the kitchen table. The clock was in the shape of a sunburst and had jerked out the seconds for them with its distinctive throaty rasp since the day they’d moved in. Like the contents of the rest of the house it had a dated look about it, Phil’s early distaste for materialism having stayed with him. Nothing was ever replaced in this house unless it fell apart – and even then Phil thought twice about it.

      Marjorie