Corporation Wife by Catherine Gaskin

Author:Catherine Gaskin [Gaskin, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: family saga, 1960s, literary fiction, historical fiction, America, womens fiction
Publisher: Wyndham Books (Historical/Literary Fiction)
Published: 2019-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

Six

Sally Redmond also heard the hoot of the diesel echo through the valley. She liked the sound; it had grown to be a familiar thing in the time she had lived here. She looked towards Tom’s hunched figure in the other bed, and smiled a little to see how tightly his eyes were closed in sleep, as if he concentrated on even that with the intensity he gave to everything else in his life. But now he also looked young, and surprisingly vulnerable. Or was it, she thought, just the indulgent fantasy of every pregnant woman to see in every man the image of her unborn child.

Through the half-closed Venetian blind the light was growing stronger. In a few minutes the sun would be up. She loved these early silent hours before the valley began to stir. She liked to sit by the kitchen window with a cup of tea in her hand ‒ the hang-over from the Irish household she had grown up in ‒ and gaze over the roofs of the houses on the slope of the hill below her, and across to the Laboratories on the hill. Tom called it her day-dreaming time, and it was true that, with no cars on the highway and none climbing the road to the Laboratories, with the early sun so bright on the glass and aluminium, the building could almost have been the shining castle of her childhood story books.

She eased herself out of bed carefully, and slipped into her robe. In the kitchen were the stacked cups and plates from last night, when the Johnsons had dropped over, and they had talked until after midnight. Sally ignored them now, and put water on the stove for tea. She was in her bare feet; the floor felt deliciously cool, and to-day would be another hot one in the valley. It was Saturday, and Tom would have two days at home. She hunched a little over the stove as she waited for the kettle to come to the boil, and acknowledged it was strange that she still thought of week-ends in the nature of holidays, when they had long ago ceased to be precisely that. The week-ends were busier than the other days, but it was a business they called leisure.

She took her tea to the stool by the window, curling her toes sensuously around the chromium rungs. She was thinking now about the party that had gone on last night at the Dexters’, over on the other side of town. Through various sources the news that Phil Conrad would spend the week-end in Burnham Falls had leaked out. It was known in Amtec Park exactly which of the top echelon had been invited to meet him, and there was speculation about the feelings of those who had been left out. In Sally’s mind there was something tremendously important about that invitation ‒ an acknowledgment by Amtec of the possession of qualities that were a little more than those strictly required by one’s job.

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