Read Online Something Good by Fiona Gibson - Free Book Online Page B

the advent of loyalty cards—“Do these people really think they can bribe me, Jane?”—shopping instead at local butchers and greengrocers and lugging her purchases home in numerous disintegrating shopping bags.
    At sixty-seven years old, Nancy still maintained the clippings library that she’d run for over three decades. She’d come up with the idea the week Jane had started at primary school. Other mothers, giddy with freedom, had launched into a convivial round of coffee mornings and charity committee meetings. Nancy wasn’t one for baking brownies or manning a Guess the Knitted Scarecrow’s Birthday stall. She read voraciously, stored information in her brain like a primitive but remarkably effective filing system, and had put her talents to work. Articles about actors, musicians, artists, the royal family—anyone with the merest smidgeon of interest about them—were snipped from newspapers and magazines, filed and sent on request to journalists and researchers.
    The smaller downstairs room—it had once been a dining room, Jane vaguely remembered—was lined with looming filing cabinets and tea chests piled high with dust-strewn files. On top of the cabinets were stacks of ancient jigsaws that Jane and her mother—then, later, Nancy and Hannah—had pieced together on the threadbare carpet. As a child Jane had tried to avoid going into the clippings room. She’d feared that, if she had so much as touched one file, the entire library—years’ worth of painstaking work—would come crashing down all around her.
    Nancy piled the fruit into three bowls and sploshed Rose’s Lime Cordial over the top “to make juice.” She and Jane carried the bowls into the living room where Nancy snatched the remote control from the sofa. “ Gran, ” Hannah protested as Nancy flipped from the music show to a documentary about wildlife in the Scottish Highlands.
    Jane squeezed on to the worn sofa and nibbled a chunk of brownish apple. On TV a stag was posing on a hillside while a doe emerged from a nearby forest. With its wide eyes and tremulous legs, it reminded Jane of Veronica. The doe stepped gingerly toward the stag and nuzzled around him.
    â€œYou might learn something, Han,” Nancy teased. “I know what you girls are like with your heads full of boys.”
    â€œI’m not you girls, ” Hannah retorted. “I’m me. ”
    Nancy’s face softened. She slid a chunky arm around her granddaughter’s shoulder and said, “I know you are. You’re my wonderful girl and you’re to tell your mother to give that business of hers a kick up the backside.”
    Jane glanced at her mother: an infuriating woman who wrecked perfectly acceptable fruit by dowsing it with cordial, refused to call in tradesmen and had stood by her husband—despite his perpetual philandering—just to prove that she was tough enough to handle that, too.
    Â 
    They left Nancy’s road with the windscreen wipers flapping urgently. Nancy’s was one of the few places Jane drove to. She’d bought a car only when it had become apparent that she’d need transport to bring equipment into the studio, to pick up supplies of glass and deliver finished panels. She drove a metallic green Å koda that Hannah had nicknamed “The Embarrassment”, but otherwise she preferred to walk or cycle. Jane’s bike was a lumpen no-frills model—a cart horse with crumbling joints compared to Max’s nifty gazelle—and was currently nursing a puncture back in the hallway.
    â€œKate from work said she saw you last night,” Jane said, casting Hannah a swift glance.
    â€œYeah?” Hannah murmured.
    â€œShe said you were in some bar-restaurant place near the canal, couldn’t remember its name. Some new place.”
    â€œWe just went for something to eat.” Hannah released a small sigh.
    â€œAnd