Cruel Legacy

‘Where are you going?’ Sally asked him sharply.

‘Round to Jack’s,’ he told her. ‘Dad still isn’t back and it’s going to be too late now.’

She let him go, feeling her irritation against Joel grow. It wasn’t fair, the way he always put himself first and refused to pull his weight, leaving her to do everything.

It had been all right, expecting her to run the house and take care of all the kids’ needs when she was at home, but now that she was working…

‘So stop working,’ he had told her last week when she had come home to find the house in a mess and him sitting in front of the television.

‘You know I can’t,’ she had protested. ‘We need the money.’

‘I’m ready, Mum…’

She forced herself to smile at Cathy as she came into the kitchen.

‘OK, love, I’ll take you now. Don’t forget, your dad’s picking you up.’

‘Huh… if he remembers. Mum, can we go to Florida next year? Nearly everyone in the class has been except for me.’

‘Florida’s very expensive, Cathy…’

Sally hadn’t told Joel, but she had already decided that she was going to try and put something aside from her wages into a special holiday account. She’d love to take the kids to Disneyland. Another few years or so and they would be too old to really enjoy it. It would be worth making a few sacrifices, and if she and Joel both put the same amount away each month …

‘Don’t forget,’ she reminded Cathy as she dropped her off outside her friend’s home, ‘you’re not to leave until your dad comes to pick you up.’

‘All right, all right. I’m not a baby, you know,’ Cathy told her as she rolled her eyes and tossed her hair.

Physically, Cathy took after Joel’s mother, being small, blonde and far too pretty. She had none of Sally’s thick dark hair and, thankfully, seldom revealed any of the tension that often clouded Sally’s deep’brown eyes.

Temperamentally Cathy was far stronger than Joel’s mother and, if neither of their children had shown any signs of the superior intelligence Daphne claimed for her son, Edward, they were both doing well enough at school for Sally to feel secretly very proud of them.

It was nice to have the house to herself, she acknowledged when she got back; not that she was likely to have any time to appreciate her solitude. Unlike Joel, she could not sit down in front of the television set oblivious to the chaos around her.

Upstairs the bathroom floor was covered in wet towels and someone had left the shower gel open on the shower floor, so that its contents was oozing wastefully away.

‘You should make the children contribute more to the household work,’ Daphne had remonstrated with her when she had called round unexpectedly one day and found her sister up to her eyes in domestic chores.

‘The way you do with Edward?’ Sally had commented wryly.

‘Edward is a very special child. With his level of intelligence he needs a constant input of intellectual stimuli to prevent him getting bored. Besides, he’s naturally a very tidy boy. Your two need the discipline of taking responsibility for certain domestic chores. But then, of course, I suppose it is difficult for you. If Joel were a different kind of man … Clifford is marvellous in the house. He wouldn’t dream of sitting down and expecting me to do everything… but then of course it’s all down to background, isn’t it?’ she had added. ‘And with Joel’s family background…’

Daphne hadn’t meant to be unkind. It was just that, as the older sister, she had always seemed to think it her role to have the freedom to comment on and criticise Sally’s family and way of life.

‘She’s a snob,’ Joel had once commented blatantly, and a part of Sally agreed with him, but naturally, since Daphne was her sister, she had felt duty-bound to defend her. She looked at her watch.

She had another half hour before she needed to leave for work.

She finished cleaning the bathroom, emptied the washing machine and refilled it. Both Cathy’s and Paul’s bedrooms were fearsomely untidy, but she hardened her heart. They both knew that they were supposed to tidy their own rooms.

Where was Joel? Irritably she scribbled him a note, reminding him that he had to pick Cathy up and that he had forgotten his promise to Paul.

It must be nice to be a man, and not have to worry about domestic routine and arrangements, safe in the knowledge that there was someone else there to cope. Well, she reflected, she didn’t have that luxury, and if she didn’t leave in five minutes flat Sister was going to be reminding her that every minute she was late meant that either someone else had to cover for her or the ward went unstaffed… Sister was a stickler for punctuality, and who could blame her? If only she could impose the same awareness of responsibility on Joel that Sister imposed on her ward nurses.

As she finally locked the back door behind her, she breathed a small sigh of relief.

* * *

Wearily Joel opened the back door. The kitchen smelled cold and empty, unlike the kitchen of his childhood where his brothers and sisters had always played. But his mother hadn’t always been there, too caught up in doing other things, just like…