Daughters by Elizabeth Buchan Read Free Book Online Page A

ear listened to her own breathing … soft, rapid breaths. And, then, the tap-tap sounds of the garden holding itself intact against the cold.
    ‘I didn’t know you had this side to you,’ she admitted at last.
    Bill stopped talking. ‘No, you didn’t.’ He touched her arm with a finger. ‘There were lots of things we didn’t know about each other.’
    ‘No,’ he had said flatly, when she told him she wanted a second baby. ‘Maudie is enough.’
    It hadn’t been easy having Maudie. The labour was long, Maudie the wrong way round (typical), and the delivery was nerve-shredding. None of that would have mattered – except that it had had an incalculable effect on Bill.
    ‘I couldn’t bear it,’ he had said, when he visited her the following day, ‘if what happened to Mary happened to you too.’ He didn’t add,
And it nearly did.
He didn’t have to. ‘I couldn’t bear it, Lara.’
    Battered and bruised, she had lain in bed looking up at him with a drip in her arm, sucking in the blood like a vampire, so eager was she to be up and to show how perfectly all right she was.
    Lara remembered now when she had changed from being a trusting girl into something else. The exact moment. She had been in the supermarket, helping herself to a bagof potatoes – English Whites, the best for roasting. A light clicked on in her head. Blood mounted into her cheeks and her knees forgot their load-bearing duty. At one moment, she was a mass of uncertainty, at the next, fully resolved.
    Now the wind whipped strands of her hair against her lips. ‘We never sorted it, did we?’
    ‘No. We didn’t.’
    ‘Bill, when Louis was born …’ He held up a hand as warning.
Don’t.
    After Louis was born, Bill had held him until they had taken him away.
    ‘Bill … we always meant to do something in memory of Louis.
Something.
I rather like the idea of a seat in a park so people can sit on it in the sun …’
    ‘I can’t talk about it, Lara. OK?’
    ‘Even now?’
    ‘Even now.’
    Why, oh, why had she said anything? Why stir up the memories of how drained and dead, barely alive, she had been at that time? Bill too … with his burdens of sorrow and fear. She knew then, as she knew now, that nothing else would ever be so cataclysmic. It was some knowledge to have on board before you were thirty, and its repercussions ran wide and deep.
    She anchored her hair back with both hands and pushed the conversation on to the practical, the normal, the non-threatening. ‘You’ll be occupied with the house. It’ll give you plenty to do. I’m glad you’ll be busy.’
    That amused him. ‘I’d hoped to be slowing down.’
    ‘No, you didn’t.’
    ‘You mean
you
wouldn’t.’
    ‘That’s it,’ she countered. The idea made her flinch. ‘Think of the days when you were forced to stop work at sixty.’ Her feet had made matching dark prints on the icy grass, companionable and humdrum. ‘Nor should you. Anyway, Maudie and Jasmine have a way to go before they’re settled. And there’s the wedding.’
    A rusting lawn roller had been abandoned by the paddock gate, and Bill used it as a convenient mud scraper. ‘You shouldn’t take so much on your shoulders. The girls will cope.’ He looked up towards the lawn where a figure was hurrying towards them. ‘Sarah’s coming.’
    ‘I hope you’ll be happy.’
    ‘I think we will.’ The roller emitted a thud as he banged his foot against it. ‘I hope we’ve got it right this time.’
    That hurt. She wanted to grab him and say,
We could have got it right
,
but she wasn’t quick enough.
    ‘Hi,’ said Sarah, out of breath. She glanced from Bill to Lara. In her haste, her coat had flapped open and mud speckled her skirt. ‘I was expecting you inside, Bill. We were all expecting you. Eve is beside herself.’
    ‘Darling,’ he slipped an arm around her, ‘sorry to keep you waiting. As usual, I took a detour.’
    ‘Good thing I know you, then.’ She was affectionate,