Read Online Every Vow You Break by Julia Crouch - Free Book Online

going away for a night or two, she would find a home for everything. To an outsider, it might look like a housewifely habit, but it was only partly that for Lara. If things were organised, lined up in piles, serried in their ranks, then she could cope. The same love of order had drawn her to graphic design as a career. It was also why she found Marcus and his slobbish chaos so infuriating. If it weren’t for her, the children wouldn’t ever have clean clothes, food in their bellies, dentist appointments …
    She stopped that train of thought and instead applied her mind to getting the individual pills and creams out of the first-aid kit and lining them up on the shelf.
    Circumstances had forced domesticity on to Lara at an early age. When she was nineteen, her plan had been to go to drama school, to train to be an actress. But during her year off, when she was working as a barmaid at the Dirty Duck – the Royal Shakespeare Company actors’ watering hole in Stratford-upon-Avon – she met Marcus. Thirty-one years old, a proper actor, he seemed impossibly glamorous to her. He asked her out and in six months’ time they were married – a royal one in the eye for Lara’s staid parents, who had found her theatrical plans hard enough to stomach, let alone an older man taking her, their only offspring, for his child bride.
    Morrissey’s vocals and Johnny Marr’s jangly guitar pulled her back, as they always did, through the fabric of her past.
    She tried, as she placed the box of plasters next to the antiseptic lotion on the shelf, to recall the feeling of excitement she had experienced whenever Marcus came into her bar.
    It was hard to remember. A short while after their wedding – a while Lara tended to gloss over – they moved to Brighton and the twins were born. Marcus had to be available to go off to, say, Pitlochry, for, say, five weeks, at the drop of an agent’s phone call, and it would have been unthinkable for Lara to get a job when the twins were tiny. With no qualifications beyond her A levels in Art and Drama, she would never earn enough to cover two lots of childcare. So that was when the pattern was set: he went off and she found herself stuck at home with not enough pairs of hands to care for her two voracious infants. That was the end of any acting thoughts for Lara. She stepped off the ladder before she had even found the first rung.
    She wondered if that was the root of her current disgruntlement. Thwarted ambition. It was, she thought, like a maggot boring into an apple. Just one small hole, but the entire fruit ruined. Looking back over the first three years of the twins’ lives, she couldn’t recall any sort of interaction with Marcus. He was there sometimes, though. He must have been there.
    Perhaps that was when she began to shut down. But she knew it wasn’t. She could pinpoint that moment exactly, and it was even earlier. But she refused to let herself think about it any further.
    She lined Jack’s few toys up on a low, reachable shelf: Floppy Dog, Woody, Power Rangers, some Star Wars junk.
    In the end it was the Art A level that took her out of the house. When the twins hit three, they qualified for free day-care while Lara did a part-time Visual Communication course at the local college. Initially she had signed up as a way to regain her sanity after spending her early twenties up to her neck in baby paraphernalia. By the second year, she began to see its potential. She even managed to acquire real-world clients for some of her final-year projects. After she graduated with a distinction, she won a grant to buy an Apple Mac, scanner and printer, and set herself up in a corner of their front room.
    She didn’t earn much, but felt good bringing at least some pennies in. And she could fit around Marcus’s work, which was brilliant in theory, except he was going for months at a stretch without so much as an audition. This was useful for Lara, because she had become quite busy and she welcomed