The Graft by Martina Cole Read Free Book Online Page B

I will cancel it. Do you hear me?’
     
    She nodded sheepishly.
     
    ‘I’m taking the boys back to school today. I’ve arranged for them to sleep there for the next few weeks until all this blows over, OK?’
     
    She nodded, annoyed with herself that she was pleased the boys would be gone for the rest of the term. She loved them but they drove her mad with their continual wanting when all she wanted was a bit of peace.
     
    As Nick left the room he looked back and smiled at her.
     
    ‘I’m sorry I shouted.’
     
    ‘Me too. Nick!’
     
    He faced her once more.
     
    ’Are you OK?’
     
    She shrugged.
     
    ‘I’ll survive, I always do.’
     
    He left her then and she climbed back into bed and for the first time in years cried for her mother.
     
    Her mother wasn’t actually dead, lived in Spain with her toy boy in fact, but she might as well have been for all the use she had ever been to Tammy.
     
     
Verbena was upset. She made herself a cup of tea as she listened to the radio. The house smelled of perfume. Tyrell’s wife always put on too much. Now she had gone shopping with the boys and the house still stank of her. She liked the girl, what was there not to like? She was pretty, kind, loved her sons and adored the man she was married to.
     
    But she irritated Verbena. It was her voice. Her ways. Everything the girl did grated on her. And she knew it wasn’t Sally’s fault. It was because every time Verbena looked at her she saw Jude.
     
    She blamed her son for the way Jude was. Believed that he should have stuck his first marriage out. God himself knew he had fought hard enough to marry the girl in the first place.
     
    Tyrell’s father had taken one look at her and decided she was definitely not the woman for his son, and he had said as much.
     
    Which had not gone down too well with Verbena or Tyrell.
     
    But she had taken to Jude, she didn’t know why. That girl had been pulled from pillar to post all her life. Meeting her mother had told Verbena everything she had needed to know. That woman, or girl - she had after all only been seventeen when Jude was born - was the most selfish individual Verbena had ever clapped eyes on. And Jude had inherited that selfishness. That belief that you looked out for yourself first, even before your children.
     
    When Verbena had phoned Jude’s mother about her grandson, she had replied that he’d got exactly what he had asked for. It seemed everyone thought like that. Even her own neighbours and friends from church thought Sonny Boy had finally got what he had been asking for. Verbena understood it. If it had not been her own grandson who had died she would have felt the same, she was honest enough about that.
     
    But it was much easier when it was someone else’s family in the frame and not your own. It was simple to make sweeping judgements when it didn’t really affect you personally.
     
    Sonny Boy had always ruined everything for himself and there had been nothing she could do about it. He had stolen from a young age, even from her. He had lied, cheated, taken whatever he had wanted. She knew all that, no one knew it better than she did. But there was also kindness in him, real goodness.
     
    Her husband Solomon said Verbena had been taken in by Sonny’s big eyes and poor-little-me act, but she knew she had connected with that boy like no one else had. And Jude’s lifestyle had affected him. How could it not? He was always smoking dope, the scourge of the young people today. He had seen it all his life with his own mother. Got a problem? Pop a pill, inject some happiness into your arm, smoke yourself happy.
     
    Verbena hated drugs, yet somehow she understood Jude’s reliance on them. Jude used them as a crutch and she always felt that if Jude had let herself be herself she would not have found the world such a scary place, and neither would her son.
     
    But that was in the past, and the past was best left where it was.
     
    She sipped her tea and