Country Wives by Rebecca Shaw Read Free Book Online Page B

she’s been in an orphanage somewhere, is it? She’s had you all her life and then me since before she can remember. She’s never been without family.”
    He pleaded with her, “You tell her, Mia, for me. Please.”
    “I’m sorry. I’ve done all that for her myself over the years, all the birds and the bees stuff and the like. But this time, Gerry, it’s you who has to stand up and be counted.” She wetted the corner of her handkerchief on her tongue and rubbed at a mark on the roof of the signal box. “Hiding in here won’t make the problem go away; and I can’t tell her, can I? I wasn’t here. Please, Gerry, explain to her.” A bush had got crushed by the accident, and she plumped it straight. “If you don’t, she could well go looking for her; and you wouldn’t like that, now would you?”
    Gerry’s head came up with a jerk. “She wouldn’t, would she?”
    “Why shouldn’t she? You couldn’t stop her if she did decide to.”
    Gerry placed the Flying Scotsman gently back on the rails beside the platform, pressed the “go” button and off it went, with his eyes following it anxiously. “No damage done.”
    Mia deliberately misunderstood him. “There will be if you don’t speak up.”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    “You’ll do more than think because if you don’t do it voluntarily, one day I shall broach the subject myself in front of her; and then you’ll have to tell, and you won’t be prepared and you’ll make a mess of it. I mean it.”
    Gerry looked shocked. “You wouldn’t.”
    “I would. And when you tell her, you tell her
everything
.”
    “You wouldn’t go against my wishes.”
    “Try me. It will be painful for me, and I know it will be very painful for you, but she has a right.”
    “She hasn’t. It happened to me, not Kate; she was too young to know.”
    “That’s nonsense and you know it. You’re burying your head in the sand.” Mia put an arm round his shoulders. “Kate’s made a pot of tea. Come down.”
    “In a bit.”
    “I love the pair of you, you know. Not just Kate. I do understand, but it has to be faced. She’s not to blame.”
    Gerry finished dusting the passengers and regrouped them on the platform. Mia pointed to a dog laid on its back between the rails. “Look! The dog’s fallen on the line, the poor thing.”
    “So it has.” He dusted it off and stood it beside a little girl. “When I made this little girl, I thought of her as Kate.”
    “Well, unlike that girl, Kate has grown up; remember that when next you play with all this.” She waved an arm at the layout.
    “Play? Play!
I don’t play. I
operate.”
    Mia laughed. Standing at the top of the attic stairs she said, “Cup of tea ready if you want it.” From the third step she paused to add, “I meant what I said.” She went down, looking forward to a cup of tea and watching television with Kate; but Mia drank her tea alone, for Kate had gone to her room to work.
    T HE next day began badly for Kate. The everlasting roadworks which appeared to have been disrupting Barleybridge for the last decade had caused even more chaos than usual, in consequence of which she was fifteen minutes late for work. Gratefully she saw that Letty’s little Mini wasn’t in the car park and heaved a sigh of relief; at least that meant she wouldn’t have her wrath to face, though it also meant there’d been no one on the desk for the first fifteen minutes of the morning.
    Leaping out of her car, she raced through the back door, flung off her coat and gloves, grabbed her uniform, put it on in record time and dashed into reception.
    “You’re late!” Letty glanced at the clock behind her. “Fifteen minutes late. It’s not good enough when we’re shorthanded. You’ll have to work an extra fifteen before you go for lunch.”
    Kate held up her hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Fine, it’s the blessed roadworks still. One day I expect they’ll have all the new sewer pipes laid, and then I shan’t be