Read Online A Dark Dividing by Sarah Rayne - Free Book Online

isolated.’
    â€˜Simone and Sonia,’ said Mel, suddenly aware of the inner delight again at remembering the girls’ names. ‘We’re going to call them Simone and Sonia.’
    â€˜Nice,’ he said, giving her the sudden smile. ‘Simone Anderson and Sonia Anderson. I like that very much.’

    Joe thought Mel was being morbid, reading up all those accounts of joined twins. Dear goodness, he said, why must she bury herself in the lives of all those sad grotesque creatures, most of whom had lived in the days before medical science was really developed? To his way of thinking it was downright dismal; his mother had said exactly the same thing as a matter of fact. Nature had a way of taking care of things, Mel would see. They would wait for the birth, and the chances were that everything would be all right.
    â€˜But it can’t be all right,’ said Mel. ‘All the scans and the tests show that the twins are definitely joined. They aren’t going to become unjoined.’
    But Joe had no opinion of scans and tests, and he had no opinion of clever young doctors who frightened people half to death. What Mel needed was cheering up, he said. Would she not like a little shopping trip to one of the big department stores for baby outfits? They might go along this very morning. Marks & Spencer, or British Home Stores. They would have a bite of lunch in the BHS coffee shop.
    Mel looked at him, and thought, I wanted a soul-mate, a sensuous impetuous lover: someone who would plunder the love-poems of the centuries and quote rose romance verse to me by passion-filled firelight, or whisk me away to Paris’s Left Bank or Samarkand or the Isles of Avalon at a moment’s notice. What did I actually get? Joe Anderson, who gives me verbatim reports of town planning meetings, and thinks the height of dissipation is lunch at British Home Stores.
    She said, ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather stay here, I think.’
    Even if she had wanted to fight Saturday-morning shopping crowds she did not want to go shopping with Joe, who was apt to be embarrassingly bluff with shop assistants, and tell them his name with unnecessary loudness in the hope that they would recognize him as a prominent member of the local Council. What she really wanted to do was to stay in the warm, well-lit study, and read the books she had borrowed from the local library about all those other twins who had beaten the odds. She wanted to try to visualize them, and to imagine how their parents had felt and behaved and reacted.
    â€˜I do wish you’d read some of this for yourself,’ she said. ‘It’s very reassuring. A lot of those twins managed to lead really interesting lives—remarkably so—and most of them adapted in extraordinary ways. It’s only comparatively recently that medical science has been able to cope with this condition, of course, so most of them had to stay joined. But there were twin girls who appeared in films in the twenties in America: Daisy and Violet Hilton they were called. They were put in freak shows as children, and they had a dreadful life until they managed to escape from their guardian. And Chang and Eng Bunker—those are the really famous ones, of course. The real Siamese ones. They married two sisters, and fathered several children. And then in the twelfth century there were the Biddenden Maids. They were quite rich and they did masses of good works, and there are cakes baked depicting them even today, apparently.’
    But Joe did not want to hear about the Biddenden Maids, and he did not want to hear about Daisy and Violet Hilton or any of the other conjoined twins who had managed to lead almost-normal lives. He did not, in fact, think that Melissa should dwell on these cases and he was rather surprised at this man Brannan encouraging it. In fact his mother had said only yesterday—
    â€˜But doesn’t it make you feel better to know that our