The Elephant Girl (Choc Lit) by Henriette Gyland Read Free Book Online Page A

grandmother gave a sort of disgusted grunt, but the conversation had depleted the last of her energy, and she closed her eyes with a sigh.
    Helen rose to leave. It was gone noon, and an intrepid shaft of sunlight had broken through the morning’s cloud cover. It fell on a swarm of hover flies by the open window, hanging motionless in the air like the unspoken words between herself and Aggie.
    Turning the door handle quietly, she threw one last glance at the only grandmother she’d ever had, in a way. Aggie had her eyes open, and a weary smile appeared briefly.
    ‘It’s good to see you again, my dear.’
    Mrs Sanders showed Helen out with a sullen air, almost slamming the door behind her. Outside she bumped into another woman who stared at her with an equally sour expression. Plump and middle-aged with short, coarse, iron-grey hair and thin lips, she was dressed in a tweed skirt and a drab olive-green Barbour gilet over a beige shirt, and she clutched a brown handbag to her chest as if she thought Helen was a bag-snatcher.
    Helen did a double-take. ‘Auntie Ruth! I almost didn’t recognise you. It’s Helen.’
    ‘Yes, I know. What are you doing here?’
    She hadn’t seen Ruth in years, nor Letitia, not since she’d graciously been invited back into the fold. She’d almost completely blocked out her old life when, on the morning of her eighteenth birthday, a chauffeur-driven car had collected her from her last foster home and brought her here. In Aggie’s dining room they’d made it clear that she’d been kept apart from her family for ‘practical reasons’ but they now considered her mature enough to understand the complexities of the family set-up. In other words, know her place. They were blood relations, and she was not. That even though it would appear they considered her family after all, she was still an outsider. The gesture had felt like a cruel joke.
    They’d met her screaming rage and frustration with stony-faced silence. She’d adored Ruth as a child – strangely the memories of her aunt were stronger than the memories of her mother – and once she’d thought the affection was mutual, but of the three of them Ruth was the one who hadn’t looked her in the eye.
    It was therefore a shock that her aunt looked straight at her now, and with undisguised hostility.
    ‘I came to see Aggie,’ she explained.
    ‘Why? So you can break her heart again?’
    As a way of showing she didn’t care about any of them either, Helen had spent the following two years saving money to go travelling, then took off. She’d seen Aggie a few times during those two years, always at Aggie’s instigation, and had mellowed a little since that traumatic family meeting, but the sense of rejection was still there, inside her. Ruth’s accusation was too much. ‘I’m not the one who breaks hearts,’ she said, and tasted the acid of her own words.
    For at moment it looked as if Ruth would burst into tears, but then she controlled herself. ‘Well, you could’ve fooled me.’
    She pushed past Helen on the narrow garden path in a miasma of the lemon verbena scent she always wore and which never quite managed to disguise the smell of gin. Then she threw Helen a bitter look over her shoulder.
    ‘Whatever your reasons, we don’t want your sort of trouble here. Just leave her alone.’

Chapter Four
    Helen hadn’t seen Dr Boyd in nearly six years, but he hadn’t changed.
    ‘Hello, stranger,’ he said with a smile.
    ‘Thanks for fitting me in at such short notice.’
    ‘I had a cancellation. How are you? I take it you managed to get replacement medication while you were abroad.’
    ‘I paid to see a doctor in Hong Kong and showed him my old prescription,’ she explained. ‘It cost me an arm and a leg, so after that I … experimented a bit. For the last two years I’ve been smoking cannabis. While I was in India I met someone who recommended it.’
    ‘Another epilepsy sufferer?’
    ‘Er, no, but he had a friend