Untimely Graves by Marjorie Eccles Read Free Book Online Page B

temporary ! Just until Val gets herself sorted.’

    Having disarranged all her mother’s carefully ordered CDs and not found anything worthy of playing, Cleo knew exactly what Daphne was thinking. But she was never ever going to settle for being somebody’s secretary. That seemed to her more like an admission of failure than taking a job with Maid to Order. And once there, she’d be trapped. She couldn’t say this to her mother, however, who was very proud of her own job as part-time secretary (almost full-time, the hours she put in) to the Bursar at Lavenstock College. The Maid to Order job wasn’t going to do anything to reinforce the impression that she was serious about getting herself together, yet how could she explain that this was something more than just a silly whim? That doing something undemanding would give her a breathing space while trying to do the one thing she really wanted to do?
    ‘There’s a letter from Jenna on the mantelpiece, she’s going to take the job with that big law firm,’ Daphne said at last with a sigh, realising she’d lost the battle yet again. She patted her already immaculate hair in the mirror before going out, looking neat and trim in her white skirt and navy blazer. ‘She might be coming home next weekend.’ She fluffed up a few cushions and blew some imaginary specks of dust off her Lladru collection on the display shelves. Cleo half expected the same treatment, but Daphne only looked at her, then left, with instructions about what time to switch on the oven for the evening meal, and how to peel the potatoes.
    Cleo didn’t read the letter for an hour and a half – an hour and thirty-four minutes, to be precise. She let it sit there, while she gazed out at the semi-detached houses opposite, a mirror image of their own, then back at the neat, familiar script on the envelope, telling herself she wouldn’t read it. In the end, of course, she did. If she’d known what it would contain she could have saved herself one hour and thirty-four minutes biting her nails.
    What had she expected? That Jenna was going to pour it all out, how she’d gone across to visit Cleo at Norwich, met her lover and stolen him? No, she wouldn’t. Not Jenna. Well, not many people would, Cleo had to admit. No one would willingly admit to such perfidy. Perhaps she’d thought Jenna was simply writing to say she’d met this perfectly wonderful man, Toby Armitage, and was going to marry him and could she bring him
home and please would Cleo keep out of the way? Preferably for the rest of their lives?
    Cleo would keep out of the way, all right. She’d seen Jenna only once since that spectacular fight. Toby she hadn’t seen at all. He’d dissolved like Scotch mist when all the trouble arose, leaving Jenna to face the music.
    Oh Lord, thought Cleo. Never mind they weren’t alike, she and Jenna did understand one another, there was a special sort of sibling bond between them whatever they said; until this last thing had happened, they’d always been best friends. Until that night when Jenna had admitted that on those weekends Toby had told Cleo he was going home to see his parents, he’d been seeing her in Cambridge, that they’d developed this grand passion.
    Cleo’s work had already suffered during the last year when she and Toby had no time for anything else except each other, and after he was gone and her exams loomed she was too miserable to apply herself to catching up at that late stage. She’d sort of been running backwards for a long time, anyway. Fighting against the admission that perhaps she wasn’t really university material, which was something just too hard to swallow. You don’t need a degree to be a writer, she’d told herself fiercely, think of all those famous names who’ve never been near a university. Think of Shakespeare. Think of Charlotte Brontë. Think of almost anyone. All the same, it was mortifying for someone who’d intended to be a writer for as long as she