CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
SALLY winced inwardly as her daughter turned her head towards her with obvious reluctance.
She had been at work since six and almost halfway through her shift Sister had allowed her an extra ten minutes’ break, despite the fact that they were short-staffed, so that she could come down here to see her daughter.
She had looked in on her when she’d first arrived but Cathy had been fast asleep then, unaware of Sally’s presence as she’d straightened the bedclothes and tenderly touched her, holding her breath until her fingertips came into contact with the warm, living flesh.
The loss of a child must surely be every parent’s worst nightmare, and its echoes haunted Sally still as her heart ached with pain at her daughter’s rejection of her.
‘When’s Dad coming?’ Cathy demanded now. ‘He promised he’d be here.’
The hunched shoulder and sulky pout which accompanied her demand left Sally in no doubt how little she wanted her company.
‘He’s coming to collect you later,’ Sally told her quietly. ‘Once Mr Davies, the specialist, has been to see you.’
The specialist’s round was later in the afternoon, after she had gone off duty. She had wanted to wait and take Cathy home herself but what was the point when Cathy had made it so obvious that the parent she wanted was her father?
‘All you do these days is nag,’ Cathy had accused her only the previous week when Sally had asked her to tidy up her room. ‘And all you care about now is money, not us,’ she had added hurtfully as she’d slammed the door closed on Sally’s reminder of how expensive and wasteful it was when Cathy spent far too long on the telephone talking to her friends.
As Cathy continued to keep her back turned towards her, Sally stood up, blinking back her tears.
As she left the ward, she paused for a moment, looking back at the small, still form of her daughter, remembering how the previous evening she had felt so shut out and unwanted as she’d watched Joel bending over Cathy’s bed, comforting her, his arm around Paul’s shoulders, the three of them a complete self-sufficient unit in which there was no place for her.
Even the specialist had directed his comments to Joel and not to her.
Depression filled her, saturating her thoughts, surrounding her like a thick grey cloud of dull misery.
There was no place for her in Joel’s or her children’s lives any more, she decided as she went back to the ward. Financially they might need her, but that was all… If she weren’t there… She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
Leave
him and come to me, Kenneth had urged her.
She couldn’t, she had protested. They needed her…
But that wasn’t true any longer, was it?
* * *
By the time she had finished her shift she knew what she had to do.
Joel would soon find someone else to take her place; he was, after all, a very sexually attractive man, as she was constantly being told.
Her hands trembled on the steering-wheel of her car as she stopped in a queue of traffic, catching her breath on the sharp, hurtful pain that bit so deeply into her as she visualised Joel with someone else, holding her, touching her.
It confused her that she should feel so intensely emotionally and sexually jealous, hating already the woman who would lie in her bed, in Joel’s arms, responding eagerly to his touch, drawing from him soft sounds of pleasure and excitement… Sounds he no longer made for her.
Behind her another driver punched his horn impatiently and she realised that the road ahead of her was now clear.
The children wouldn’t miss her either. Not now that they had Joel, and she couldn’t have taken them to Kenneth’s with her anyway; she knew that and had known it from the moment she’d entered Kenneth’s house.
How would Cathy, with her love of loud pop music, her untidiness, her giggling friends who liked to practise the latest dance steps on the bedroom carpet and make up one another’s faces, leaving brightly coloured pieces of cotton wool and sticky bits of make-up all over the bathroom and Cathy’s dressing-table, ever be able to fit in or feel comfortable in Kenneth’s immaculate rooms?
And Paul, who took his bike to bits outside the back door and then scattered oil and dirt all over the kitchen floor, who left his muddy football boots on the kitchen table and argued volubly with Cathy about whose turn it was to choose the tapes on the video. Would Kenneth welcome and want him?
She already knew the answer.
Kenneth liked order and discipline in his life; she had absorbed that knowledge instinctively; those ruthlessly weeded flowerbeds, those empty, immaculate rooms—her children would stifle and choke in them…