Read Online This Way Out by Sheila Radley - Free Book Online Page B

‘I finished making these new curtains this morning and I wanted to get them hung before you came back from the conference. Do you like the colour?’
    â€˜Yes, it’s fine … but why on earth couldn’t you have waited for me to hang them? Come down this minute, Chrissie, and let me finish the job. You’ll hurt yourself if you stretch up like that.’
    â€˜No I shan’t. I have to do stretching exercises to strengthen my shoulder, so I might as well be productive about it. If you want to help, you can put the hooks in that other curtain for me.’
    Derek had always reckoned to do his fair share of the routine household work. He’d had plenty of practice during the long years when they were training Laurie to feed and dress herself, and again since Christine’s operation. But putting hooks in curtains had never before come into his province, and he hated jobs that were self-evidently fiddling. Besides, he wasn’t sure how the hooks fitted into the tape, and masculine pride inhibited him from asking for instructions. And anyway, his right hand was still painful.
    â€˜Sorry, darling. I’ll have to leave that to you, my fingers are a bit swollen. I managed to shut my hand in a door.’
    â€˜Honestly, Dee …’ Christine scolded him affectionately, leaving the curtain half-hung while she sat down on the steps to take a rest. She looked tired, as she so often did now, but unusually cheerful. ‘How did the conference go?’
    â€˜Fine,’ he said brightly.
    â€˜And how was the hotel? The Haywain?’
    Derek assured her that the hotel had been fine, too. He couldn’t hope to put the place and its alarming new associations out of his mind, but he had no intention of talking to her about it. ‘And how have you been, my love?’
    â€˜Oh, such a wonderful thing has happened!’ Christine’s news was obviously of more interest to her than the hotel. ‘I’ve met someone else in the village who’s had a mastectomy. I don’t suppose you know her – Sylvia Collins from that thatched house on Church Hill. I only knew her by sight, and I had no idea she’d had the operation. But we started chatting yesterday morning while we were waiting for the library van, and then she invited me to tea.’
    â€˜That’s good,’ said Derek, genuinely pleased for his wife but finding it difficult to sound enthusiastic when his own new acquaintance was so alarmingly on his mind. ‘Nice for you to make a friend who’s in the same situation.’
    â€˜It’s more than just “nice”!’ Christine’s eyes were brighter than he had seen them for months. ‘I can’t tell you what a relief it is to be able to talk to someone who knows all about it. Sylvia had her operation two years ago, and she’s feeling really well now. She’s encouraged me to join the Mastectomy Association – I was given all the leaflets about it before I left hospital, but I just didn’t want to know at the time – and we’re going to work together to raise funds for the Yarchester Hospital scanner appeal. Oh, you can’t imagine how wonderful it is not to feel isolated any more! Not to feel desperate about being a lop-sided freak …’
    Derek reached up to her. ‘My dear stupid girl – come on down from those steps, you’ve done quite enough for today.’
    He caught her carefully in his arms and held her close; deliberately close, so that she couldn’t see his expression. Absurdly, perhaps, he felt injured by what she had just said. It was the first time, in the whole of their married life, that Christine had suggested that they were not an emotionally self-sufficient couple.
    He was well aware that it was only the warmth of his wife’s affection that had kept him going, through the daunting years when they were bringing up their handicapped child. In loving return, he