New Beginnings for the Surplus Girls by Polly Heron

Author:Polly Heron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Chapter Twenty

PRUDENCE SPENT A quiet afternoon at home. Vivienne had gone out and so had Patience. Niall had collected her in a taxi to meet with his daughters again. The daughters were due to travel home to Annerby in the morning.

‘You’re welcome to come too,’ Patience had said when she was waiting for Niall to arrive.

‘Thank you, but I’ll stay here. You need to get to know them all.’

‘So do you. They’re going to be your nieces.’ Patience shook her head. ‘I can’t get used to the idea of having all those stepdaughters. It’s bewildering. Wonderful but bewildering.’

‘And you’ve yet to meet the husbands and children. You’re going to be a grandmother.’

‘I know,’ Patience said softly. ‘It’s everything I hoped for when I was young. The dream vanished years and years ago, but now it’s come true. I don’t know what I did to deserve to be so lucky.’

‘My dear Patience, firstly, luck isn’t something that comes to one through being deserving; and secondly, if anybody could be said to deserve it, that person would be you.’

‘Bless you. That sounds like the taxi. Are you sure you won’t come?’

‘Positive. Go and enjoy your new family’s company.’

Alone in the house, Prudence felt the strangeness of her situation. She was on her own here so infrequently, especially since they had started taking pupil-lodgers, but this afternoon felt different, a foretaste of her life without Patience. Aside from that brief time in Scotland which had ended for Prudence with the birth of her daughter, they had lived together beneath this roof their entire lives and she would miss her sister keenly. Oh, she was eminently sensible and practical and she wouldn’t make a fuss out of it, but Patience’s absence would make a huge difference to her.

Patience was a good companion, an attentive listener. Her propensity to see the best in everyone had long acted as a reminder to Prudence that her own critical nature wasn’t as agreeable as it might be. Yes, there had been many occasions when she had felt vexed because it seemed that all the difficult decisions were left to her to make, but the truth was that she had set herself up as the head of the household after Mother died and Pa abdicated responsibility, and that was how she had always liked it.

But she would be lonely without Patience. That was the truth. No matter how dear Vivienne was to her, she would miss Patience deeply and lastingly. She gave herself a shake. Times were when she had regarded having the house to herself as a luxury. Now she was feeling it in a different way, a way that was acutely painful but which she would have to get used to.

Going into the dining room, she removed her box of lesson plans and resources from the sideboard cupboard. She had taken to spending a couple of hours on Sunday afternoons sorting out the following week’s lessons. She had been brought up to believe that it was wrong

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.