‘I must go,’ she told Kenneth. ‘The kids will be back from school soon.’
‘Yes, of course. It won’t take long to run you back,’ Kenneth assured her.
Immediately Sally tensed. ‘No, I’d rather you dropped me at the bus stop, if you don’t mind.’
She could feel herself flushing again as he looked at her. It wasn’t that she felt she had done anything wrong she assured herself defensively, but her neighbours were the sort who wouldn’t waste time in coming round to find out how she had come to arrive home in such state.
It would be easy enough to explain to them, of course, to tell them that an ex-patient had offered her a lift, and, even as she heard Kenneth agreeing pleasantly that if that was what she wanted then that was what he would do, she felt both angry and flustered with herself for the way she had over-reacted. Like someone guilty… someone who had something to hide.
Nevertheless, it was a shock to see Joel’s car in the drive as she walked up to the house, and as her heart started to thump uncomfortably against her ribcage and her stomach tensed with anxiety at the shock of seeing his car there at such an unexpected time of the day her footsteps slowed slightly.
He was in the kitchen when she walked in, his back turned towards her as he filled the kettle. The breakfast things had been removed from the table, she noticed absently as she hurried over to him, but the surface was smeared and there were coffee-mug rings where Joel hadn’t thought to wipe it clean.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ she asked him anxiously as she took her coat off, but the moment he turned round she knew the answer. She could see it in his face, in the defeated look in his eyes.
‘What work?’ he asked tonelessly. ‘There is no work. No work, no wages, and no damned redundancy either by the looks of it.’
‘Oh, but that’s not possible! You’ve worked there since leaving school.’
‘Yes, well, it seems that doesn’t count for anything. According to what we were told this afternoon, we’re only getting our current week’s wages because the bank didn’t want it all over the newspapers that they weren’t going to pay us. As far as our redundancy money goes, we won’t know if or what we’re going to get until everything’s been sold off.’
Sally could see from his face, hear in his voice just how much this extra blow had affected him. He looked and sounded not frightened exactly… more beaten and vulnerable, stripped of his confidence, his head, his whole body bowed.
‘Oh, Joel.’ She walked up to him, instinctively moving towards him, gripping hold of his upper arms. ‘Don’t look like that, love,’ she begged him. ‘It will be all right; we’ll manage.’ Instinctively she adopted the soothing, reassuring voice she used to her patients and small children; the look in his eyes frightened her. She had never seen him looking so vulnerable and defeated. ‘It isn’t as though we weren’t expecting it.’ She felt him move and then take hold of her, wrapping his arms around her, holding her almost painfully tightly as he buried his head against her.
‘Sally…’
She tensed as the kitchen door opened and over his shoulder she saw Cathy walk in. Joel tensed too and she wasn’t sure which one of them moved first, if it was she who pushed him slightly away or he who released her.
‘What’s wrong with Dad?’ asked Cathy as Joel turned his back on them and walked out of the kitchen and towards the stairs without saying anything.
‘Nothing,’ Sally told her. She wanted to go after Joel and tell him everything would be all right, that they would manage, but Cathy was demanding her attention and she could hear Paul whistling outside. As she hesitated, the phone rang. She went to pick up the receiver, sighing as she heard her sister’s voice on the other end of the line.
Daphne wanted to tell her about the new dress Clifford had bought her for a dinner date he was taking her to, and as she listened Sally could feel herself growing not just increasingly irritated with her sister but angry with her as well. How could she go on and on about her dress, boasting about how much it had cost, when she and Joel… ? Quickly Sally swallowed down her feelings. It wasn’t Daphne’s fault that Joel had lost his job.
Upstairs Joel stared out of the bedroom window. His eyes, his throat, his whole body ached. He could hear Sally’s voice from the kitchen as she assured Daphne that yes, she was sure that blue was the right colour. Joel’s body stiffened in angry resentment. Even her damned sister meant more to her than he did. She’d
got more time to talk to her about a dress than she had for him.
Just for a moment there in the kitchen, as he had held her, he had felt the warmth of her against him. It had almost been like the old days when it had been just the two of them, when they’d been so close that sometimes she’d even seemed to read his mind.
Just holding her like that and being held by her had felt so good… it had made him feel so much better. He had even been tempted to tell her how afraid he felt, how alone, but then Cathy had walked in and all at once he didn’t matter any more.
Some of the men had been talking about picketing the factory, staging a sit-in. They had asked him to join them, but what was the point? It wouldn’t bring their jobs back. Besides, he doubted that they’d actually go through with it. They were just a group of hot-heads who couldn’t accept that there was nothing they could do; that they just weren’t important enough, just didn’t count enough to be able to do anything. That girl had made that much plain when she had talked about their redundancy money.
‘Preferred creditors’, she had called them, along with the tax people and the VAT people and God alone knew who else, and Joel could guess just who would come first when it came to getting their money and it wouldn’t be them.
Was this what he had done his apprenticeship for… worked for? Today had underlined for him as nothing else had ever done just how little he mattered and just how little value he had as a human being.
He had wanted to share with Sally the pain and hurt of knowing that… had needed to share it with her. But she had more important things to do, like talk to her sister about a dress!
CHAPTER EIGHT
DEBORAH paused outside the elegant building which housed the practice’s office.
She had been surprised at first when Mark had told her that he wanted to leave London for somewhere quieter and more rural, but once she had been with him to the pretty cathedral city of Lincoln she had fallen in love with it as quickly and easily as she had done with Mark himself. She remembered now how it had crossed her mind when she’d come up here for her own first interview with the practice that it would be a good place to bring up children, and how astonished she had been to have had such a thought.
Children were not something which were on her current agenda; once she was past her thirtieth birthday, with her career firmly established, then she might think seriously about the issue.