In Falling Snow by Mary-Rose MacColl Read Free Book Online Page A

family on the Italian side of the French–Italian border and she and her husband had come to Australia to run an orchard. He’d been killed when he fell from a ladder five years earlier. After his death, everyone had expected Claire would go home. But instead she stayed on and engaged a manager to run the orchard. She and Daddy met when Daddy took our bull over to service her cows.
    I liked Claire instinctively, although I had no idea why they were there until they were taking their leave and Daddy put a hand to the small of her back to usher her out. “Do you hate it here very much?” she said to me in strongly accented English. “Would you rather be back home?” I nodded yes, unable to speak for fear of crying.
    The next week they married and the week after that, I was brought home.
    â€œI should have been grateful she got me a reprieve from boarding school,” I said to Violet. “And she worked so hard to win our love, Tom’s and especially mine, even after the twins were born. But for a long time, I just felt angry. I hated her.”
    Claire never tried to be a mother to Tom and me but she was kind and interested and we came to love her almost in spite of ourselves. I was worse than Tom, loyal to a mother I thought I could remember that he could never have known—she’d died of toxemia just after he was born. To her credit Claire ignored my seething anger. She played to my finer feelings and eventually dragged them out of me. When I think back, she was one of the most truly good people I ever knew, willing to raise someone else’s children and even to love them. I came to love her too. By the time I went back to boarding school, the twins, André and René, were born. It was so different for me to be a half sister rather than the child mother I’d had to be to Tom. Claire welcomed whatever help I offered but never made me do more than that. She taught me French and made me love the Paris she conjured for me. She also taught me how to sew and cook, which I never would have learned otherwise. I’d been blessed really and knew it.
    As Violet drove, I watched the snow fall lazily to earth in the beams of light in front of us. Something niggled at the edge of my consciousness, vague, indefinable, as though I was doing a jigsaw puzzle and I’d just put a piece in the wrong place. It hadn’t worried me at all, what Violet had said about remaining at Royaumont instead of going to Soissons. In fact, it made me feel valued. Of course, it should have worried me. I was young, so young, I think now, not yet an adult, not truly, but with an adult responsibility that had been mine since I was six, that of caring for my brother. And it wasn’t as if I was deciding to abandon Tom. I wasn’t deciding anything really. Violet was right. Royaumont was as good as anywhere to stay while I searched for Tom, and there was something about Miss Ivens that made a person want to muck in and help her. All those things were true. But as I look back, it was that point, the point I met Violet, so worldly and yet so welcoming, so convincing about how much fun it would all be, that was the point at which I went horribly horribly wrong.

Grace

    It was 2:36 a.m. on the bedside clock. She picked up on the second ring. “Grace, come now.” It was the night midwife, Alice Jablonsky. Grace was about to respond when she heard the click, the phone disconnecting. “Grace, come now.” Grace knew what that meant. Don’t ask questions, don’t have coffee, just get in the car. She pulled the sweats on the floor over her pyjamas, slipped on socks, sneakers, grabbed a toothbrush out of the bathroom, smeared it with paste, stuck it in her mouth, and chewed. David woke as she fumbled for her watch. “On call,” she said through the toothbrush. “Go back to sleep.”
    On the way out she went into the kids’ rooms. Mia wasn’t there; a moment’s