Read Online The New Breadmakers by Margaret Thomson Davis - Free Book Online

Stopes – Married Love was one. She couldn’t remember what the other was called, but neither seemed to fit the problem of educating two boys about sex.
    Slowly, as if reluctant to leave it behind, she walked away from the building in which she’d once enjoyed her brief spell of contentment. Not long after she’d passed what had once been ‘her close’, she felt one of her tension headaches developing. It was then she suddenly thought to herself, ‘I can’t go on like this for the rest of my days. I’ve got to get away and live my own life.’
    But how? Where could she live? How could she afford to pay a rent and keep herself and Andrew, who wanted to start his physiotherapy training soon? Fergus was due to leave Aberdeen College of Music and Drama and would also need money to survive. A sudden thought made her feel faint with apprehension. What if, by some miracle, she had enough money and they didn’t understand, didn’t want to stick with her? Andrew got on with his dad better than most people. And she wasn’t Fergus’s real mother, only his stepmother. She got on a lot better with him now than she used to when he was a child. He had been a terrible torment one way and another both to Andrew and to her. She had tried her best to be patient and understanding towards him, but he had been so very difficult to cope with that sometimes she’d lost her temper with him. Now he was older and, as far as she could see, had got over most of his personality problems, he seemed a much happier and better-balanced person altogether.
    Fergus had been through such a terrible time before she’d come on the scene. Catriona would never forget Melvin telling her how Fergus’s mother, Betty, had died of TB. She had lain on the settee in the living room, in the flat in Dessie Street. Betty had been alone all day with only baby Fergus beside her. When Melvin finished his shift in the bakehouse, he’d come upstairs to the flat and start cleaning it and polishing the floor. Betty, he said, always felt guilty and would try to get up and do it herself, but he always assured her that he would manage. She wasn’t to worry.
    Why was he worrying about the bloody floor? Why hadn’t he employed a housekeeper or a nurse or anybody while Betty was still alive and needed help? Why didn’t he put Fergus into a nursery?
    After Betty had died and a few years before Catriona and Melvin married, he had given Fergus to Lizzie, the horrible, neurotic next-door neighbour, to look after. By the time Catriona married Melvin, Fergus was five and already his character had been formed (ruined, in her opinion) by Melvin and Lizzie. He was a sly, devious torment of a boy. First of all he tormented her, then Andrew after he was born. She knew it wasn’t the child’s fault. She never gave up trying to undo the harm that Melvin and Lizzie had done. Eventually, she believed, it had paid off. He had still been a bit of a worry after he had started school – there had been complaints about him tormenting other pupils. However, when he reached his teens he became interested and then completely absorbed in music. It certainly kept him out of trouble, although Melvin had expected Fergus to follow him into the bakery business and eventually inherit and carry on ‘the good name of McNair’s’. To see Fergus, long-haired and dreamy-eyed, strumming at a guitar, made Melvin furious. ‘It’s all your fault,’ he accused Catriona. ‘You encourage him.’
    That was true in a way. Fergus had been in seventh heaven (not that he was a person who normally showed his emotions) when he had been offered a place in Aberdeen College of Music and Drama, and she had encouraged him to accept it despite Melvin’s opposition. Indeed, she had done everything she could to help him get there and it had meant fighting Melvin every inch of the way.
    Fergus had grown into a tall, skinny lad of nineteen with a pale, lean face and dark, shadowed eyes. He and Andrew seemed to rub