Read Online A Winter Bride by Isla Dewar - Free Book Online

be tired.’ He said he’d better let everybody know there was a new little girl in the world.
    Watching him go, Carol knew then she’d married the wrong brother.

Chapter Six
    What’s in the Green
Cupboard?
    By the time Carol and Johnny became parents Nell had been dating Alistair for almost a year and a half and was a regular at the Rutherford home. ‘You’re one of us,’ they told her. ‘Part of the family.’ She stayed over at the weekends and often went to their house straight from work on weekdays. Compared to the Rutherfords, the McCluskys were dowdy.
    Everything in the McClusky house was old. The meals, nourishing but bland, were eaten in silence. Nancy’s culinary repertoire extended to ten recipes – one for every day of the week, one for birthdays or for when visitors appeared, one for Christmas and one for New Year’s Day. The family loved one another. They just didn’t show it, or mention it.
    The Rutherfords were different. New things appeared in the house – kitchen gadgets, towels, lamps, bed linen – almost on a weekly basis. Their meals were lavish. May was a messy, flamboyant and extravagant cook. She presented Nell with food she hadn’t known existed: stroganoff; chicken curry; pork cooked in milk. She used ingredients that were strangely new and mysterious to Nell: tomato purée; garlic; turmeric; herbs. May crushed, pounded, chopped, stirred, and flambéed with gusto. Hair tumbling out of her bun, face glistening with sweat, she’d expound to Nell about the state of the world, the battle of the sexes and the wonderful weakness of men.
    ‘Women,’ May declared, ‘operate from here and here.’ She thumped with clenched fist her heart and her stomach. ‘Heart and gut. It’s all intuition and feelings. Men operate from here and here.’ She tapped her head and pointed to her groin. ‘They use their minds and their cocks. Nothing more. And they’ve the cheek to laugh at us women and call us fragile. Hah.’
    Nell was dumbfounded. She didn’t know that people over the age of twenty-five talked about such things; certainly her mother didn’t.
    The Rutherfords gathered every evening round the table in the dining room, toasted the back lot, ate, drank, laughed and told exaggerated stories about the day they’d just lived through. Like the McCluskys, they loved one another but the difference was that they showed it. They touched. They hugged. They called each other love or darling or honey. They took Nell’s breath away. She wasn’t sure if she loved Alistair, but she was infatuated with his family.
    She first visited the Rutherfords in the November after she’d started dating Alistair and had been overawed. ‘Ma wants to meet you,’ Alistair had said. ‘You’ve to come to dinner on Saturday.’
    She’d said she would. But when Alistair had advised her not to wear anything silly – ‘You know, like that jumper that slides off your shoulder’ – she’d suspected that this wasn’t an invitation. It was a summons. May Rutherford liked to inspect any girlfriends that lasted longer than six months. At the time Nell and Alistair had been together for almost eight.
    Nell had gone straight from the shop and had changed out of her working outfit into a simple red dress and black patent leather shoes in the cloakroom before meeting Alistair. ‘Good meeting-the-boyfriend’s-mother outfit,’ he said. ‘You’ll be fine. Just let her boss you about and she’ll love you.’
    Nell said she wasn’t awfully keen on being bossed about.
    ‘But my mother is good at it. It’s her calling. She was born bossy. She bosses everyone and everything. She bosses the plants in the garden, wags her finger at them and dares them not to grow. She’s a maestro. Bossing is her art form. People feel privileged to be bossed by her. In fact, if you are in her company, and she doesn’t boss you, you feel left out, sort of neglected.’
    May had barged up the hall, arms spread. ‘Nell, here you are.