The Hook by Raffaella Barker Read Free Book Online

she jumped up again. Should she go and offer to help? No, Mick’s backview filled the kitchen door. There was no room for her in there with him. She picked up a magazine and stared at the cover. She dropped it and picked up another one. Unable to keep still she walked around the room, one handtrailing the sofa back. She needed air. Relieved by a decision, she reached to open the back door beyond a muddle of coats. It was not the back door. A mop, a broom, golf clubs and an axe fell like spillikins into the room. Panicking now, she bent to pick them up, wedging them against curtain poles and fishing rods in the corner of the cupboard. She turned to go out of the front door.
    Mick called through, ‘Are you all right in there, Christy?’
    And she managed to answer, ‘Yes, fine, I’m just going to look at the garden.’

Chapter 4
    Jessica Naylor’s coffin was smaller than Christy expected it to be. Although Jessica was a slight woman with narrow hands and movements as fluid as a Siamese cat’s, Christy could only remember her as huge. The hole her mother left gaped, and from the childhood memories soaring through the first days of loss stared a monumental Jessica. Perhaps because I was little then, Christy thought, unable yet to form another thought: Perhaps I was afraid of her. The memories were dimly lit, but in them Jessica was lambent, her children strung around her like baubles on a bracelet.
    When Christy was tiny Jessica bloomed youth; she would hold her daughter by the hand and stand, poised at the front door or outside a shop or in the playground, until someone animated her with a compliment, an admiring smile.
    â€˜How lovely to see such a beautiful mother and child,’ the Vicar beamed, squeezing Christy’s cheek with bone-cold fingers.
    Christy hid her face in Jessica’s neck, hugging her, breathing in her familiar scent of China tea and sunshine.
    Jessica didn’t push Christy away then. She kept the little house neat and clean. She was happy when Frank came home and the hall smelt of polish, the kitchen of dinner. If the children were in bed and asleep she shone with smooth accomplishment. Frank sat at the kitchen table with his tie undone, clean-cut in his suit among the frills of her frilly kitchen.
    She chopped vegetables and told him about her day.
    â€˜We’ve cleaned out the goldfish today. Christy’s one had some fungus on it but the pet shop gave me blue liquid to squirt into the water. The children loved that.’
    She could do it, she really could. This small life Frank had brought her to was enough. She didn’t want to run back to her parents and the big house where she grew up. She didn’t need to be called Miss by men on the estate now that she had local shops where she was Mrs Naylor.
    â€˜Naylor. Such a ghastly name. What a pity.’ Her mother’s sole comment when Jessica told her parents she was getting married was still resonant in her mind, but she never told Frank. She loved him too much to hurt him like that.
    Frank gave her everything he had promised. The house was small, but they weren’t in debt, and Jessica could enjoy bringing up the children without bothering her head with bills and mortgages. She madepicnics and cleaned the house while the girls were at school, laughing at herself when she started tying her hair in a coloured scarf to keep it off her face. Every day that her house and family were in order was a mark of proof that she had made the right choice. And that her parents were wrong. She was sure Frank would become something more than a factory manager and she sat often on the window seat dreaming of their future, of trips to London to the theatre and holidays abroad. In the meantime, Frank encouraged her to go to the hairdresser once a week and to buy a new dress twice a year. She loved the sparkle in his blue eyes when he looked at her and the strength in his narrow face. They were a handsome couple