Puppies Are For Life by Linda Phillips Read Free Book Online

grinned. It was the best news she’d had all day. At least her Uncle Bert had lived a little. An image came to her mind. ‘There was an old dear at the back of the chapel today. I thought she’d got left behind by mistake. But I suppose it could have been her.’ She looked down at the will again and couldn’t resist rubbing salt into her father’s wound. ‘Did you see I’m to have five hundred pounds and the card table? Perhaps I’ll spend the money on air tickets for the family so we can all fly out to see you and Jan in your lovely romantic farmhouse. You must have finished all the renovations by now, surely? When would you like us to come?’
    But they both knew she was only bluffing; Susannah would not voluntarily spend
any
amount of time in Jan’s company. Jan – a teacher at the same school as her father – had never been forgiven for befriending him and eventually taking her mother’s place. Even though her mother had been dead for several years by the time Frank and Janmarried and Susannah then eighteen, she hadn’t been able to understand how her father could be so disloyal as to go after another woman. She still couldn’t.
    The phone rang and rang in the empty cottage. Simon put down his receiver in disgust. Where had his mother got to? She hadn’t been at work – the guy who’d picked up the phone there had no idea where she was – and she wasn’t at home. But he badly needed her advice. He had no idea what he was going to do.
    Reluctant to leave the comparative warmth of the phone booth, even though it smelled disgustingly of urine, he slumped against the Perspex wall. But his eyes fell on the baby buggy outside and he knew he ought to get moving. He would in a minute, he promised himself; right now he felt safe from the world.
    Justin would be OK out there for a while. He was protected from the cutting wind by his plastic bubble and was fast asleep with three fingers in his mouth, blissfully unaware of his mother’s defection.
    Simon made a fist and thumped the side of the booth. How could Natalie do this to her own child? How could she do it to
him?
Spurred by anger, he rolled out of the kiosk, grabbed the buggy, and set off down the street, hunched in his anorak and hoping no one would recognise him.
    ‘You aren’t normal!’ he’d flung at Natalie twodays previously as she’d struggled out of their flat with a suitcase in one hand and a typewriter in the other.
    ‘Not all women are born mothers,’ she’d growled back. ‘I didn’t want him. And it was your fault we had him in the first place. So you can jolly well look after him.’
    She humped her things down the stairs.
    ‘Oh, don’t keep dragging all that up!’ he groaned. ‘It wasn’t my fault the wretched thing burst.’
    ‘They test them to destruction, you know. Blow them up on machines. You just handled it wrongly.’
    ‘Well, there’s no point going over it again. It happened and we have to live with it. You should be thinking of Justin, not your stupid career.’
    Simon couldn’t understand it. Justin was so cute and smart and lovable; a great kid. Nobody could not like him. How could his own mother be so set against him?
    He had glared into the car that came to pick Natalie up. That friend of hers – Lara – had something to do with it, he was sure; she’d been putting all sorts of ideas into Natalie’s head, bit by bit. Feminist ideas. Ideas about independence and dedicating oneself to one’s career.
    Of course, Simon acknowledged, jerking the buggy up a high kerb, feminism was nothing new to Natalie – she’d been brought up on it, after all – but she hadn’t pursued it so avidly before. Not until Lara had come on the scene. And everything had gone downhill from then on.
    Losing his job had been the last straw.
    ‘Well, at least you can look after the baby now,’ Natalie had told him when he’d come home and broken the news. That was all the sympathy he’d got. ‘It’ll save me having to keep