Risking It All by Ann Granger Read Free Book Online Page A

satisfying clank and gave my toys rides on it. I pulled open the little wooden drawers in the table, stuffed with coloured silk thread, buttons and lengths of something called bias binding which stretched if you pulled it. (Though that was strictly forbidden, as it rendered it useless.)
     
    Grandma had bought that machine in a junk shop soon after her arrival in England in the fifties. She’d used it to set up a little dressmaking business. At one time, she’d got quite a reputation for wedding dresses. She still got the odd request for a wedding dress when I was a kid. I have memories of yards of white satin pinned on a headless, armless canvas torso on a single polished wooden leg. I acted out little plays in which I had the title role and that dressmaker’s dummy was my leading man. There were other materials connected with weddings. Silk which rustled, shot taffeta which changed its colour as you moved it. That was generally for the bridesmaids’ dresses. My favourite was mauve. I longed to be a bridesmaid so I could swank in shot taffeta, but no one ever asked me. Needless to say, no one asked me to marry them, either, so I didn’t get to reign over all in ballooning skirts over stiffened gauze petticoats. I imagined Grandma’s brides floating down the aisle looking like the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, the one who travels by bubble and floats in to help out Judy Garland.
     
    I’m still unlikely to walk down the aisle. But if I did, it wouldn’t be in a white dress, and not only because now I’m older, I’m less keen on ballooning skirts and tinselly glitter. I wouldn’t wear a wedding gown of any design for the simple reason that Grandma isn’t here now to make it for me. I wouldn’t want one made by anyone else.
     
    One thing was for sure. I could never have learned to sew for myself. Grandma tried to teach me to use the treadle, but every time I started rocking the footplate, the whole tabletop machinery ran backwards, sending the material towards instead of away from me. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps it was trying to tell me something about my future.
     
    Now, with all these memories flooding back for the first time in years, I wanted to cry. I felt that desperate. But I couldn’t cry. I needed to say something but could only think to ask her how she was feeling. Even that seemed an impertinence. She was dying.
     
    ‘Not too bad today,’ she said, and added, ‘it must have been a shock when Rennie Duke found you and told you about me.’
     
    ‘Yes, it was a bit.’ The image of Clarence Duke came to me and I asked, ‘How did you choose him? Did he advertise?’
     
    ‘Oh no, that is, he does advertise sometimes. But I know him of old. I worked for him for a while. That’s why I chose him, I knew he was good.’ She smiled. ‘And he wouldn’t charge for his services, for old times’ sake.’
     
    ‘That’s nice of him,’ I said lamely. It seemed un-Clarence-like, the image of loyal friend not squaring with the seedy little character I’d met.
     
    ‘I expect you didn’t like him much.’ She had a way of going to the heart of things. Perhaps approaching death gave you insight. ‘Don’t be put off by Rennie. He isn’t all bad. As a PI he’s very good.’ She shifted a little in the bed and I wondered if she was, despite appearances, in pain.
     
    ‘I hoped you’d come,’ she said. ‘I wanted to see you again – and I’ve got something to tell you.’
     
    ‘I don’t want explanations,’ I said quickly. ‘They’re not necessary.’
     
    ‘Oh, explanations?’ Her large blue eyes looked amused. ‘There aren’t any I could give you, not for why I went. Nothing you’d understand. I could tell you I’m sorry, and it’d be true. But it wouldn’t help, would it? Even if you believed me, and just now, you probably don’t. I hope you will one day. It was a terrible thing I did to you in walking out when you were so young. But sometimes you have to make hard choices in