The Making of Us by Lisa Jewell

Author:Lisa Jewell [Jewell, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: General, Fiction, Romance, Last Words, Fertilization in Vitro; Human
ISBN: 9781846055744
Google: xv2JiE_wwScC
Amazon: 0099533693
Publisher: Arrow
Published: 2011-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

MAGGIE

Maggie asked her friend Jeannie over for dinner the following night. She invited her for three reasons: firstly because she wanted a pedicure, secondly because her eighteen-month-old granddaughter Matilda was staying the night and, as much as Maggie might have given birth to and raised two children all by herself, she still felt a little untethered when left alone with a child she had not directly brought into being. But thirdly, and mainly, because she wanted her help with signing Daniel up to the donor website. She’d had a quick look at it last night when she’d got back from his flat, and quickly switched it off again. It had looked horribly convoluted and she hadn’t known where to start in terms of correlating the information in Daniel’s folder with the information needed on the form.

It was 7.30 and Jeannie was upstairs with Matilda, having offered to read her her bedtime story while Maggie got on with dinner. Maggie could hear Matilda overhead, scampering up and down the landing, screaming with high-pitched excitement, and realised that Jeannie had fallen into the oldest trap in the book: attempting to endear herself to a small child by making it laugh, prompting an endless cycle that resulted, on the whole, in hysteria and ended shortly thereafter in tears. Maggie raised her eyebrows and smiled. It was nice to hear life in her house. She did enjoy living alone, but it was at moments like these that she remembered what it had felt like when her house was full of other people’s lives.

On the hob was a pot of coq au vin, though Maggie realised it was a little old-fashioned to call it that these days; chicken stew would probably be more de rigueur. On the kitchen counter she tipped some green leaves into a smart white bowl (she’d got rid of all the patterned stuff when her husband moved out, and replaced it with this over-sized white stuff, like they served on in trendy pubs). She opened a bottle of French dressing and then she sliced a fat French loaf (known as a ‘Rustique’ according to the accompanying signage in Waitrose) into ovals. She unfurled a John Lewis brightly spotted tablecloth on to the kitchen table and laid it with more white plates and matching spotted paper napkins.

She had already opened a bottle of wine. It was one that Daniel had recommended to her many months ago, French, of course, and she’d developed a fondness for it that was less to do with the wine itself and more to do with the memory of a charmed moonlit night in a bistro in Aldeburgh, involving fresh razor clams and samphire, flickering red candles, and a slow and balmy walk back to the car park through cobbled streets accompanied by the sounds of seagulls circling overhead in the almost darkness.

She’d spent three hours at the hospice today. Daniel had been sweetly spacey, his face relaxed into a kind of compacted smile for most of her visit.

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.