A Silver Lining by Catrin Collier Read Free Book Online

the sodden, muddied grass of the mountainside. The hailstones had turned to an icy rain that teemed down relentlessly, soaking through his worn mac into the wool of his sweater. He didn’t care. He looked up. The rock the Graig children called the slide gleamed, shining and grey on an outcrop of stone spattered mountainside ahead. He resolved to walk there. Sit on it for a while and think.
    He and Laura had been married for three months, and already she’d had three disappointments. She wanted a child much, much more than he did. He was happy with things the way they were and only wished she could be as content with him as he was with her.
    Change, as Andrew and Bethan were undoubtedly learning, was not always for the better. And there was no guarantee that a child born perfect would remain so. He’d never forgotten the pain of watching his sick, worn-out mother nursing one of his younger brothers through the final stages of meningitis.
    His feeling of helplessness then had been the driving force that had sustained him through the lean, and often lonely, years when he’d studied medicine alongside those born better heeled and better connected.
    He sat on the rock and looked over the town spread out below him, but his thoughts remained with Bethan. Was she lying in a hospital bed this very minute, blaming herself for her son’s misfortune? Knowing Bethan, she would be. Punishing herself by recalling every mouthful of every bottle of brandy she had drunk during the early stages when she didn’t know she was pregnant and believed that Andrew had abandoned her.
    Reliving every blow she had taken when she had fallen down the steep stone staircase of the maternity block of the Graig Hospital in a drunken stupor. Would Andrew have the sense to take her hand, hold it, look into her eyes and tell her –sincerely –that it would have happened anyway?
    That her son’s flaws were none of her doing?
    Trevor made a fist and slammed it impotently and painfully into the rock face beside him. Nursing his bruised fingers he stared at the grey waterlogged sky, tears mingling with the icy raindrops that fell on his cheeks.

Chapter Three
    ‘Alma. Are you up there?’
    ‘Yes. I’ll be down now, Mam.’ Although she hadn’t slept, Alma was reluctant to leave her bed. Despite the chill in the air, it was warm beneath the quilt and coat.
    The pain in her stomach had subsided while she’d remained quietly curled in the foetal position on her mattress, but the memory of the agony remained, and she was wary that movement would precipitate its return. She crossed her fingers tightly, hoping that news hadn’t travelled out of Goldman’s about her losing her job. She didn’t want to tell her mother, not yet. And not until she had to. Her mother already lived in terror of the paupers’ ward in the Graig workhouse.
    Better she leave the house every morning as usual and use the time to hunt for work. The unemployment register in the town was overflowing with girls her age only too willing to take any job they could get, but armed with a reference from the Ronconis she might pick up something if she wasn’t too fussy about money.
    She put one foot on the floor, wincing as the pain returned to knife viciously at her stomach. Doubled up in agony she looked down at her skirt and saw, even in the half-light of the street lamp that filtered through her window, that it was hopelessly crumpled. She pulled down hard on the hem, smoothed the front panel with her fingers and checked the buttons on her blouse. Picking up her mac from the bed, she felt in the pockets for her comb.
    After tugging it blindly through her curls she poured water from the jug into the bowl and splashed her face, dried herself hastily with the towel that hung on the back of the chair and made her way downstairs.
    The first thing she noticed when she entered the kitchen was that the stove was lit.
    ‘We have a visitor.’ Her mother stood nervously in front of the dresser,