The Spy's Wife by Reginald Hill

Author:Reginald Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The frail old lady had survived the operation and after a night’s rest was adjudged fit enough to be cross-examined by Mrs. Haddington, whose findings were passed on to a group of friends who had arrived for the afternoon visit. The ward sister had weighed up these formidable ladies and wisely decided not to apply the letter of the law, so they all sat around the bed and talked in chorus but with Mrs. Haddington’s voice indisputably carrying the solo line.

Molly rose some ten minutes before the hour was up and kissed her mother’s cheek.

“Off already?” asked one of the visiting party with the ghost of reproach in her voice.

“Yes,” she answered calmly. “Dad likes a Scotch pie for his tea on Thursday and I’d better get down to Marks’ before they get sold out.”

Her mother nodded approval at this flattening formula, and as she left Molly heard her interlocutor attempt to re-ingratiate herself by saying, “She is a good lass.”

“She’s always been close to her dad,” said Mrs. Haddington. “Always, from a little girl.”

Did she believe it? wondered Molly as, irritated by the tardiness of the lift, she walked down the stairs. Perhaps this was the blueprint for the successful life—for the first thirty-five to forty years you carved out the future; after that you just chipped away at the past.

In town she bought her father’s pie—her mother would check the story tonight—and strolled idly round the streets. Here they had chipped away at the past with a vengeance. Doncaster had never been a beauty spot, but at least it had been homely. The planners and developers had worked at it like a committee of plastic surgeons. Every good intention was marked with a scar.

“Molly, how’s your mother?”

It was Jennifer Challenger whom she was passing unnoticed. Her face was slightly flushed and her smile far from beaming. Perhaps she had miscalculated with the make-up, but Molly had a feeling that, had she not by accident ignored Jennifer, then Jennifer would by design have ignored her.

“She’s OK, in the circumstances, I mean, thanks.”

“That’s good,” said Jennifer. There was a hiatus now in which the two women stood on the pavement and looked at each other without speaking, Jennifer with the breathless look of one who is about to speak and Molly (she hoped) with the alert look of one who is eager to listen. Jennifer, she realized, was pretty much a cypher to her, fossilized in her teens and little considered since then. She had had something of a reputation for flightiness, but this was the common lot of any pretty girl not in one’s own intimate set. The news of the engagement between Jennifer and Trevor had come as a surprise, momentarily even a shock, but thereafter she had mentally covered them with leaves and left them to sleep time away like the Babes in the Wood. But it had been babes in the womb instead, and just as Trevor had grown and changed so must this woman who now confronted her on the edge of the busy street.

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