Making Marion by Beth Moran

Author:Beth Moran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2014-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

I drove to Nottingham on Christmas Eve and spent a couple of hours wandering around the Winter Wonderland in the old market square, until the scrum of desperate last-minute shoppers drove me into a café. There was a pay phone in the corner. I sipped my hot chocolate and stared at it. The warmth of my drink couldn’t melt the lump of ice in the bottom of my stomach. I made a decision. This would be my Christmas present to myself: doing the right thing. In the midst of all my mistakes, I could tick this one thing off my list. I picked up the phone and dialled.

“Aye?”

“Eamonn, it’s me.”

There was a hard silence.

“What do you want?”

“I’m sorry. Really, truly sorry. It wasn’t about you – ”

“Is that it?”

“No, Eamonn, I…”

“Bye, Marion. Have a nice Christmas.”

I drove home, nauseous and wretched.

Sitting in the caravan on my bed, I opened the little box with the ring Eamonn had given me. I knew now that he did not love me – only the idea of loving me. I knew he thought of me only in terms of how I fitted into his life. He considered me too fragile, too small, to have hopes or dreams of my own. But he had genuinely believed it would make me happy to be the doctor’s wife, to spend my life looking after him and being protected by him. He had believed I needed a safe harbour, a calm sea, after all the storms I’d endured before. He had never realized that the peace I needed would come, not from my surroundings, but through making peace with myself.

By eleven-thirty I still felt restless with remorse. Old habits die hard in guilty Catholic girls. I grabbed my bag, picked my way through the deserted campsite with a torch and went to church.

I parked on the street outside Hatherstone village chapel. If the full car park hadn’t confirmed my guess about there being a midnight mass, the warm glow of lights shining through the lead-paned windows would still have enticed me in.

From the outside, the chapel looked a typical English country church. Within, it had been surprisingly modernized. Rows of padded chairs greeted me instead of the pews I expected. The floor had warm carpet instead of old stone, and I could see no ancient relics or statues at all. Bright banners hung on the walls, and dozens of paper lanterns filled with coloured lights dangled from the rafters. None of the familiar landmarks I associated with church were visible – no altar or stations of the cross, no pictures of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. If it hadn’t been for the box of white candles stacked behind the last row of chairs, and the wooden nativity scene on a table beside the door, I wouldn’t have known where I was.

Most of the hundred or so chairs were occupied. The glass door from the porch creaked as I slipped inside, and about ninety of the hundred people there twisted round in their seats to see who had come in late.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.