The Past and Other Lies by Maggie Joel Read Free Book Online Page A

Sister’s Life!’ because Kim was desperate. The board could hardly complain about that, could they? Anyway the show had been recorded on Monday night in her own time and you couldn’t get in trouble for talking about your personal life in your own time.
    ‘Board isn’t happy. Company policy to clear all media interaction through Marketing and P.R. You know that. It’s in your contract.’
    Jennifer tried to recall that particular clause of her contract. Then she tried to recall if she had, in fact, ever read her contract.
    ‘This is a clear breach. Board wants a letter of explanation before the next meeting. On my desk 9 am Monday. Understand?’
    ‘Yes but—’
    ‘Good.’ The line fell silent and so did Jennifer.

CHAPTER FIVE
    AUGUST 1981
    I T SEEMED TO CHARLOTTE that everything changed after Grandma Lake came to live with them.
    On a Monday evening nearly a year after Grandma Lake had moved in, Charlotte sat silently in the doorway of her and Jennifer’s bedroom and looked across the landing to the study that was now Grandma Lake’s room. Downstairs Crossroads had just ended and, in the bathroom, Jennifer vomited noisily into the toilet bowl. But here in the doorway it was still. Calm. The door to Grandma Lake’s room was shut.
    Even before Grandma Lake had arrived a year ago, silent and bewildered in the back of the Austin Maxi, the signs had been ominous. How, for example, could there possibly be room in the house for an extra person? It was a three-bedroom semi, five people already lived there. And for how long was she expected to live with them? No one had said, and to ask would have been tantamount to saying, how long will Grandma Lake live?
    Dad had been furious.
    They had all sat around the kitchen table at the tail end of last summer—Mum, Dad and Aunt Caroline—and, when the suggestion was made, Dad had looked up from the sports section of The Times long enough to halt the conversation around the table. Then he had shaken out the paper as though someone had been reading it on the beach and there was sand between the pages, folded it, stood up and left the room. He hadn’t needed to say anything to make his position quite clear.
    Who had first made the suggestion that Grandma Lake should come to live with them? It certainly wasn’t Grandma Lake herself. She was living quite contentedly (you presumed, if you ever thought about it) in the poky Victorian terrace in Oakton Way, Acton, where she’d always lived. That was where she’d always been and that was where, in your mind, you always put her.
    You didn’t put her here in your own home.
    Acton was less than twenty miles away, though Grandma Lake rarely came to visit. It had been left to Mum and Dad to drive over there to collect her at Christmas or on Easter Sunday or August Bank Holiday and bring her over for the day. This had meant a fraught ninety-minute drive into west London that encompassed twenty-two sets of traffic lights and eight roundabouts and probable roadworks at Hangar Lane, as Dad never tired of observing. If Grandma Lake could just find it in herself to take the bus to North Acton and get the Ruislip train, he could pick her up there and save himself an hour-and-a-half round trip twice in one day.
    But Grandma Lake didn’t like to take the bus, much less the tube.
    And once a year, on Grandma Lake’s birthday, everyone piled into the Austin and spent a grim day in Acton, an ordeal that far outweighed the inconvenience of Grandma Lake coming to visit you because it was a whole day of your weekend gone and, worse, you were stuck there until Dad successfully caught Mum’s eye and Mum announced it was time to leave.
    On the face of it, then, you would think Dad had more reason than anyone to wish his mother-in-law closer to home. And perhaps he had wished it. Perhaps he had envisaged her selling up and purchasing a nice little bungalow or a ground-floor flat or a room in an old people’s home somewhere close by like Uxbridge or