Till We Meet Again by Lesley Pearse Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t understand that explanation then. Granny had been dead for four months, the house was lovely again, Mother’s worries were all over. Yet it did make sense to her now after all these years. Her own lid had blown. She’d shot those two people to relieve the unbearable pressure inside her.
    Looking back to 1967, she could see now how simple it would have been then to divert her life from the channel it was beginning to run into, if she’d only been a little less willing. Martin didn’t allow their mother’s stroke to interfere with his career and ambitions. Even her father hung on to his job, his home and his hobbies of shooting and golf.
    If Susan had been a couple of years older she would already have had a job; if she’d been a couple of years younger, she would have had to go to school. But she was in limbo at that time, having sat her final exams, and her only career plan was a tentative one about going to college in Stratford-upon-Avon in September. She had nothing to excuse her from housekeeping duties.
    She got what might be called the thin end of the wedge. But of course at sixteen she wasn’t able to predict, or even guess, what might be on the fatter end, or that once the wedge was driven in, there was no escape. She loved both her parents, she was devastated by her mother’s illness, she was only too anxious to do whatever was best for everyone. And of course she had no real ambition then beyond hoping for marriage and children of her own.
    Loneliness was what Susan could remember most about that summer. She would think back to all the fun she and Beth had had in previous years, and end up in tears. Sometimes she would stand in the garden watching the pleasure boats in the lock, and the sound of people’s chatter and laughter made her feel even more lonely.
    During August she got the results of her GCEs. To her shame she’d failed everything but Domestic Science and Geography, and that made her feel even more despondent and useless. The holidays ended, and the days seemed even longer then with no school to go to. The only callers at the house were the odd neighbour dropping off some fruit or flowers for her mother. Sometimes, going home on the bus from the hospital, she’d see a couple of girls from her old class, yet much as she longed to go and sit next to them, and explain what had happened and ask them round, she didn’t feel able to.
    So she filled the days with jobs – cleaning, dusting, washing and ironing, cutting the grass – striving to do them as well as her mother would have. She undertook the bottling of plums and blackberry and apple for the same reason. She had been helping her mother do it for years; the fruit trees in the garden always had a good yield and it was an annual ritual they’d both enjoyed, like Father digging the trenches for runner beans in the spring. That year it seemed even more imperative to do it alone, to show how adult she was.
    Susan could remember going out into the garden early each morning, picking up the fruit that had fallen before the wasps and other insects could get to it. She’d shake the tree to loosen more ripe fruit, and start on the bottling almost as soon as Father went out. There was a bumper crop that year, especially plums, and there was something incredibly satisfying about filling the larder shelves with the full bottles.
    By that time Mother was getting a little better. She could move her right arm slowly, and her hand was just strong enough to hold a pencil and write down a few questions. Susan had never felt more proud than when she visited and could announce she’d just bottled another twenty jars of plums and ten of blackberry and apple. ‘Such a good girl,’ Mother wrote one day, and Susan floated home on a cloud of pride, forgetting about being lonely.
    Yet she set her fate with it. Had she made a hash of it, burned herself, made the bottles explode, her father might have viewed her differently. But her success showed him how