Full Circle by Connie Monk Read Free Book Online Page B

end of the working day, the vinegary smell from the much smaller factory where sauce was made, the swish of the trolley buses which had replaced the old tramcars whose tracks had been just the width to trap her bicycle wheel when she’d been a child. In her last week she’d become aware of all the sights and sounds and smells she had lived amongst and hardly noticed.
    But as the train shuddered into life and pulled away from the station, she had no feeling of nostalgia. Ought she to be scared of what the future held? Perhaps she would find no one wanted to entrust their accounts to a woman! Well, if that were the case she would do something else. Her life had been orderly and unchanging, just as she’d taken for granted it would continue. Now, instead of being frightened of the uncertainty of what lay ahead, it brought a challenge that was the most exciting thing that had ever happened. It was up to her to make a place for herself in Lexleigh, just as it was up to her to become recognised in her profession.
    She had closed the door on The Retreat on a windy Monday morning at the end of March; she turned the key in the lock and took her first step into her own home on the first day of July. Her portmanteau wouldn’t be delivered until the following day so all she had to unpack from the weekend bag were the necessities for one night, food for the evening and toiletries. All this was now officially hers. Tomorrow she would look in all the drawers and cupboards, not prying into someone else’s life but knowing that she owned every stick and stone of it. And tomorrow, too, she would walk up to the farm and tell Mr Carter that she was living here now. Perhaps she was being fanciful, she told herself, but because he and Violet had been so close it made her feel that already she had fitted into a slot here.
    So next morning that’s what she did, seeing Ridgeway farmhouse for the first time.
    A middle-aged man came across the yard to meet her as she approached, touching the peak of his battered trilby hat as he spoke.
    â€˜â€™Morning, ma’m,’ he said, seeming to scrutinize her as he came nearer. ‘Can I be of any assistance?’
    â€˜Good morning. Yes, please, you can if you can tell me where I can find Mr Carter. Would he be in the house or in the fields somewhere?’
    â€˜You’re a week too late. His son took him off to have a break with him and his wife. Offhand I can’t tell you his address, but if you like to bang on the door of the cottage, the one with the well in the front garden, my missus has got it written down.’
    â€˜No, never mind. I’ve just moved into The Retreat.’
    â€˜Well, I’m damned. But I might have guessed. One look at you and I might have guessed.’
    â€˜Mr Carter said I looked like my aunt, but you can never see resemblances yourself, can you?’
    â€˜You’ll know him quite well, I suppose, after all the years they …’ the sentence trailed into silence.
    â€˜No, not that well.’ Today Louisa might have left her old life behind her but her new-found freedom didn’t stretch to discussing with this stranger the evening she had met Harold Carter. But, hearing the tone of her reply as curt, she added, ‘I’ve met Bella. Do they come often?’
    â€˜They did, in the early days after it happened …’
    â€˜After Mrs Carter died so suddenly, yes, Bella told me about that. She said they tried to get here at the weekends. But of course that left him alone all through the week. So they’ve taken him back with them. And you’re looking after things here?’
    â€˜Ay. You could say that, I suppose. They’ve been trying to carry him off with them every time they came, but he couldn’t be persuaded. What the difference was this time I can’t tell you but he went off like an obedient child. I dare say he realized that Bella’s time was getting closer and feared they