Mothers and Daughters by Howard Minna

Author:Howard, Minna
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784975852
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2016-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

25

How strange that Julian had not told Alice about Henry. It hurt… shocked Frank deeply; he hoped he’d hidden his reaction from her. It had been a terrible time, the worst in his life; he’d idolized his elder brother. Henry was so good-looking, athletic, and so talented in almost everything he did. He was a brilliant horseman, shared such an affinity with the horses which brought out the best in them.

Henry rode for a couple of seasons as a jump jockey, done more for fun than to make a career of it, being too tall and therefore too heave to be a jockey. He remembered his brother before that fateful race, laughing with the stable girl – the last time he had laughed with that sheer joy of being young and alive and about to ride – as he had countless times before.

He’d fallen at the third last jump, he was not ahead but in a group and it was no one’s fault. Trojan, his horse jumped badly and both had fallen. Frank remembered the icy chill of shock as he saw it and the long stretched-out moments as he waited for Henry to get up as he had when he’d had other falls. Trojan struggled up at once but Henry did not. Then their lives took on a terrible momentum of hospitals and diagnoses and prognoses and, however it was put, the news was stark and unforgiving. Henry, that gilded youth with so much talent and charm, was imprisoned in a body that was useless. He would never again gallop over the turf, make love, even walk unaided across a room. It was a tragedy that affected all those who loved him, so how could Julian have kept such a monumental event from his wife, the woman he loved above all others?

But as Frank thought this over he realized that it was not as simple as that. Had it just been Henry’s accident and death it would have been different, less complicated, and Alice had been very young and innocent then and might not have understood the whole story and, having been told it, might not have wanted to marry Julian. Then as time went on and they made their lives together and the girls were born, he imagined it became increasingly difficult to broach the subject, so it was pushed away, hidden under other things, perhaps even forgotten. Though when Julian became ill, faced his own death, had he not thought he should tell her then? Perhaps he had decided to do it, was waiting for the right moment, and though his death was not a surprise it was not expected to happen so soon, or he could have thought it too late to tell her Henry’s story? After all he hadn’t seen much of Alice over the years so perhaps Julian saw little point in telling her about something that had happened to his brother, a brother she had never known about.

Johnny kept them going most of

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