The Back Road by Rachel Abbott Read Free Book Online Page B

that cow Mimi is bound to comment. What is Pat doing with her, Max? He must be mental, leaving Georgia for her.’
    Max couldn’t fail to agree, but this was another discussion they’d had several times in the last couple of months, without resolution.
    ‘Look, why don’t you go and have a lovely long shower - leave your hair curly, because it suits you better like that, and I’ll go downstairs and bring up a bottle of ice cold bubbly which we can drink while you’re getting ready. Wash away the trauma of your day. Nobody will be here for a couple of hours, so there’s loads of time.’
    Ellie pulled an apologetic face.
    ‘Ah. I forgot to tell you. I asked Fiona and Charles to come early. I wanted somebody else to be here when Pat and Mimi arrive, so we’ve got about an hour. Sorry.’
    Max groaned, not relishing the idea of being landed with bloody Charles for an hour while the women nattered in the kitchen. But he put a brave face on it. Anything to see his wife’s beautiful smile.
    ‘Fine - well we can still have a couple of glasses, courtesy of The Old Witch. What do you say?’
    Max was pleased to see a flicker of a smile as he closed the bedroom door.

8
    Grabbing a silk dressing gown from the bed, Leo thrust her arms into the sleeves. What on earth was wrong with Ellie? It wasn’t like her to be so tetchy. It felt like a bad omen for the evening ahead, and Leo couldn’t help thinking that in some way it was her fault. She had been so sure of her welcome here, but maybe it had been wrong to act on impulse.
    Plugging the straighteners in to warm up, she walked over to the open window and leant her elbows on the sill. The view calmed her; it hadn’t changed in all these years. The flat green fields stretched for miles behind the house but she could just glimpse the dark hills in the distance. Her bedroom hadn’t had a window - it was more of a cupboard really - so whenever she had been able to sneak in here she had always stood gazing at the scenery, thinking about other places, other times, and other lives.
    Without warning, her mind was assaulted with a memory so vivid that she gasped. She recalled standing in this very position gazing out of the window, and she remembered the day clearly. She must have been about fourteen, and she’d been sent home from school because of agonising stomach pains. She hadn’t wanted anybody to know because there would be no sympathy, so she had sneaked into the house unobserved. She’d never said that she had started her periods, and her stepmother hadn’t bothered to ask. Leo had to take everything she needed from Ellie, or sometimes Ellie would hand over some of her pocket money. Leo didn’t get pocket money, of course.
    She remembered that she had sneaked upstairs and come into Ellie’s room to raid her top drawer. It had been a day much like today, and the window had been open. Nobody knew she was there. She had no idea why her father was home that day, but he was unenthusiastically hoeing the flowerbed below the window - probably the last time the garden was touched until Ellie and Max had taken it over. She had moved back, afraid to be seen, but the voices still invaded the room, and their bitterness and hatred seemed to be tainting every surface they touched.
    The first voice was her stepmother’s.
    ‘You can’t hide from me out here. I haven’t finished with you yet. I’ve always known you lack moral fibre, but I thought you’d finally learned your lesson. I suppose that would be too much to ask, wouldn’t it?’
    ‘Shut up Denise. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
    ‘Hah! You’d like to believe that wouldn’t you? But I know you. And I know what you’re up to when you’re not here. I didn’t know about your brat, but do you think I didn’t know about her mother? Your whore?’
    ‘She wasn’t a whore. She was my wife. And she’s dead - more’s the pity. She at least made me smile.’
    ‘I’m
your wife. Me. Maybe I should