Motherlove Read Online Free Page B

‘Gran’, as if endless repetition would make it true, but Joan would never be ‘Gran’ to Vicky. She had never behaved like other people’s grans. This explained why not. Joan wasn’t really Vicky’s grandmother.
    Vicky walked. Past the half-hearted multi-storey block at the end of the Ring, through the equally half-hearted industrial estate that clustered round the link road.
    Joan had never said it outright before, but there’d been ample hints about ‘gratitude’ and ‘burden’. Snide remarks about Gillian and Terry’s inadequacies in the baby-making department. In her teens, Vicky had thought she understood. Gillian and Terry must have had trouble conceiving. They’d spent – wasted, according to Joan – all their money on fertility treatment. Vicky had assumed sperm donation, meaning Terry wasn’t her biological father. That made sort of sense. Terry had never rejected her in any way, but he never seemed to know what to do or say, to be hoping for someone to tell him. Once, when she’d asked him something, he’d reached forward and ruffled her hair. Like an experiment, to see what would happen. Then he smiled and shuffled away. It hadn’t shocked her to think that he wasn’t genetically connected to her.
    But now she realised she must have it wrong. The egg must have been donated, not the sperm. Why was that so much more disturbing? Distressing. How could it hurt her to know that Gillian wasn’t related to her? She had stopped relating to Gillian so it shouldn’t matter.
    It shouldn’t matter.
    Of course it didn’t. Vicky was an adult now; she could cope. She wasn’t a thumb-sucking infant needing maternal hugs.
    She half-marched, half-ran across the link road, through a gap between the thundering lorries, to the bridleway onto the downs. Gillian used to hold her hand when she crossed roads. A loving mother, she’d thought. She didn’t think it any more – but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t be hurt. Not by them. Not by anyone. She could look after herself.
    So why was this upsetting her? Because Gillian, who had failed her so unforgivably, was all she had, and it was so hard, so cold, to be alone.
    As hard and cold as the wind on Brewer’s Down.
    Gillian, alone in the house, busied herself with housework. Time to vacuum, do the stairs, get the cigarette ash out of the carpet. Try to keep the dread at bay.
    What had Vicky heard?
    Of course she should have told her years ago. Why hadn’t she done as everyone had advised and been honest from day one?
    She had been put off by her mother, that was the truth of it. By Joan’s comments, her constant belittling. Whatever Gillian had said to Vicky, Joan would have spoiled it. With the cat officially out of the bag, there would have been no stopping her. As if her heavy-handed hints all these years hadn’t been enough. It was a miracle this hadn’t happened sooner.
    Landing done, Gillian reverently pushed open the door of Vicky’s room. Nothing to do. Everything neat and tidy, in its place. It had to be; the room was so small. Years ago, when Vicky was doing so well at school, accumulating so many textbooks, needing quiet space to do her homework, Gillian had suggested that Joan, who had the big room at the front, should swap rooms with her. Joan was having none of it. The house was hers, wasn’t it? Damned if she was going to be turfed out of her own bedroom for a brat who should be outside playing with the other kids, not burying her head in books. No matter that widowed Joan spent five nights out of seven away from home, with her succession of ‘fancy men’. Even now she was eighty and her latest, Bill Bowyer, was seventy-seven, she wasn’t a woman for a cosy cup of cocoa before bed.
    Night after night the big front room stood empty, while Gillian and Terry shared the smaller back room and Vicky made do with the