Read Online The New Woman by Charity Norman - Free Book Online

skipped around an eighteen-hole golf course three times a week, rain or shine, pulling her clubs behind her.
    ‘Now,’ she said, rubbing her hands as she got up and led the way into the kitchen. Lunch was ready, the table laid. ‘What can I do?’
    ‘Nothing. Kate’s been helping me. Just have a drink.’
    I was opening a bottle of wine when Kate’s face appeared over the gallery rail. ‘Granny!’ she yelled, her footsteps clanging on the metal staircase. ‘Thank God!’
    ‘This is a lovely welcome,’ said Meg, as a human whirlwind shot off the last step and enveloped her. ‘Nearly knocked me down, you hoodlum. Let’s have a look at you—ah, Kate, love!Why all this morbid black? It doesn’t suit you. And take that thing out of your nose, it makes me feel queasy.’
    ‘And what’s this?’ Kate plucked at her grandmother’s shirt. ‘Shocking pink! On a woman of your age! A dowager should dress more seemly and sober.’
    Two days earlier, I would have laughed to see the generations sparring so amiably. But now their pleasure in one another intensified my sense of nightmare. These two women had no idea of the horrible truth; no idea at all. The father of one, the son of the other . . . How would they bear it?
    Blinking rapidly, I handed Kate the bottle. ‘Could you just—’ My voice petered out. ‘Sorry, sorry, something stuck in my throat. Um, could you look after Granny? Grab some olives out of the fridge.’ Those wretched tears kept coming. I spun around, shot out of the kitchen and headed for the cloakroom. ‘I’ll only be a minute . . . Sorry, upset stomach, just got to nip—’
    I fled into my sanctuary.
    Kate
    The cloakroom door slammed and was locked. Kate and her grandmother looked at one another, their eyebrows raised.
    ‘What on earth?’ whispered Meg.
    Kate picked up the bottle and glasses, jerking her chin towards the open doors. ‘Come outside. She might be able to hear us in here.’
    They made camp under the honeysuckle.
    ‘That girl’s in quite a stew,’ said Meg.
    ‘The pair of ’em!’ Kate was sloshing out two glasses of wine. ‘She won’t even look at him. He slept in the study last night, made some stupid excuse about both of them having a cold, and he must think I was born yesterday, because (a) I haven’t heard so much as a sneeze, and (b) I can never, ever remember them sleeping apart. Never. Not even when she had meningitis that time. They just don’t do it.’
    ‘Heck.’
    ‘D’you think one of them is screwing around?’
    Meg chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘Can’t imagine that, can you?’
    Kate thought about it. Her father was in good shape. He wasn’t especially tall, maybe five-nine or -ten, but he had great posture and there wasn’t a hint of a beer gut or jowls. He had lots of hair, and he wore it a bit longer than those other stuffed shirts at his work did. Even the streaks of silver suited him. If he added a beret he’d look like a French artist, with his dark brown eyes. Kate wished she’d inherited the Livingstone eyes.
    ‘Dad’s still an attractive man,’ she said.
    ‘True. He’s got the looks, all right, but he’s never been a womaniser. He’s a one-woman man, and that woman has always been your mum. Anyway, he’s too bloody honest. He couldn’t manage all the fibbing.’
    ‘Mum couldn’t, either.’
    ‘Nope.’ Meg chewed her cheek again. ‘She’s got everything to lose. She loves this house, she loves her job, and I’m quite certain she loves your dad. She’s planning her anniversary knees-up and the big Italy trip next year. Why would she throw all that away?’
    They lifted their glasses in unison. We must look like a comedy duo, thought Kate: a skinny, hungover student in Doc Martens and an eighty-year-old widow in a jaunty blouse and salon-set hairdo. The two of them had always been as thick as thieves.
    Meg’s father had been a miner in County Durham. She left the north at the age of eighteen, when she married Robert