A Woman of Courage by J.H. Fletcher

Author:J.H. Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises Pty Ltd Australia

1967

AN END AND A BEGINNING

It was a do or die effort, the only way Hilary could think of saving her marriage. With the first shopping mall nearing completion and a hundred other ideas on the drawing board the timing was diabolical but it couldn’t be helped. If she didn’t do something now it would be too late because Sean, backed by an increasingly ferocious Mrs Madigan, had had enough.

Hilary didn’t discuss her plan with Sean but did it anyway. Sex had become a rarity between them but she had always been able to get him going when she was in the mood and did so now. And again the following night.

Sean didn’t know what was going on. ‘Something got into you?’ he asked.

‘Other than you, you mean?’ She smiled. ‘No such luck.’

But two months later she had news for him.

‘A baby?’ Sean said. ‘You sure?’

‘Aren’t you pleased?’

Because although she’d been putting it off for years, although she supposed she’d cheated him by not telling him she’d stopped taking precautions, it was still important that Sean should be pleased about it. Unfortunately the way he reacted made it hard to tell whether he was pleased or not.

‘I’d stopped thinking about it, tell you the truth.’

‘You can start thinking about it now,’ Hilary said.

While Mrs Madigan – who had been bitching for years about the absence of a grandchild – now complained even more bitterly, wouldn’t you know it, how Hilary had trapped her darling son all over again.

For the first few months it made no observable difference to Hilary’s life at all. She still wrote deals at every opportunity. She drove up and down the coastal strip, north and south of Perth, tying up blocks of land for more development, sweet-talking councils, making deals with builders, never forgetting the new shopping malls that she and Haskins Gould had inked in for all the major towns. She still climbed the scaffolding to check on the progress of their first mall: she had promised the bank six months and it was important they kept to the timetable. Haskins climbed with her, which was unsurprising because Haskins was everywhere, gesticulating, running, above all yelling.

‘Get moving – I got a deadline even if you haven’t! You wanna be paid, you got to work. OK? So get with it!’

She looked down at what seemed chaos: the air thick with dust with electricians and cables everywhere, plumbers and labourers having to hop over wires waiting to be embedded in the walls, everywhere the roar of drills and voices, the clatter of hammers.

‘Those wires… They’re not live, are they?’ Hilary said.

‘Some clown trips over them we’ll soon know,’ Haskins said.

He couldn’t have cared less and Hilary saw what she had already known, that he was not a man to worry about such things.

‘And we’ll have the unions on our back.’

‘Not a chance. Every man jack on this site is self-employed. I spelt it out from the beginning. You want a union, go someplace else. This is a non-union shop.

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