Playing Beatie Bow Read Online Free Page A

something idiotic if that’s what you want, but you can’t make me do it, too.’
    ‘But, Abigail, how can I … I can’t leave you here at your age!’
    The shock of realisation hit Abigail. ‘She’d really leave me, if there had to be a choice.’
    Pride forced the hurt into the back of her mind. With an effort she composed her face. She even smiled.
    ‘Oh, well, let’s be practical, Mum. I can easily change over to boarding-school until I’m ready for university, and then I’ll go and flat with someone, or live in college.’
    ‘Oh, no!’
    ‘Don’t try to wheedle me out of it, Mum. I’m not going. No way.’
    Her exit was spoiled because the door slipped out of her fingers and slammed. She couldn’t very well open it again and explain to her mother that she wasn’t so childish as to go around slamming doors. She stood in the middle of her bedroom feeling sick with fury and shock and a horrible kind of triumph, because she knew how much she had wounded her mother.
    ‘She’s hurt because she knows I’m right. How could she, how could she be like that, with all she’s got – me, and the shop, and her friends and… ?’ Here a burst of anger made her feel sickish. ‘And Dad! The nerve of …’
    Her mother tapped on the door. ‘Abigail, I’d like you to come and help me unpack and catalogue some things today. I got so many items from St Mary’s.’
    ‘Thanks, but I don’t want to,’ answered Abigail curtly.
    ‘But,’ wailed Kathy, ‘if you go to boarding-school where will you spend the holidays? You’d loathe it with Grandmother and we haven’t anyone else. Oh, please, darling, I know it’s been a surprise. I suppose I told you all the wrong way. But please come with me and let’s talk it out down at Magpies.’
    Abigail did not reply. After a while her mother gave the door a ferocious kick. The girl could not help grinning; Kathy was such a child.
    After her mother had gone she washed up, and put on her green dress, which made her feel better. But not much better.
    She had a terrible feeling that her mother would go to Norway, regardless. She could not mistake that look on her face. It was happiness and hope. All these years, then, she had longed and hankered for Weyland Kirk to come back to where she felt he belonged. It was like some late-late-show movie – brave little wife making the best of desertion and loneliness, and then one rainy night, gaunt and pale, in comes Gene Kelly. Oh, Kathy, can you ever forgive me? I made such a mistake. I ruined my life, but oh, how can I forgive myself for ruining yours? It’s always been you, Kathy, always.
    Bring up the reunited lovers music, and she falls into his arms and a bit later he dances up and down the stairs on his knees.
    Abigail could just imagine what the girls at school would say. Some, the sloppy romantic ones, would think it just lovely. Together again! But the others, the toughies, would think it disgusting. Love was for the young, everyone knew that. Like having no wrinkles or varicose veins. And besides, they’d say her mother was being grovelly. He whistles and back she goes like a well-trained dog.
    The more she thought about it the angrier and more embarrassed she felt. ‘There’s the shop, too. After all her hard work building it up. She’s not thinking straight – early menopause or something. And what about me? Turning my life upside down once more for him? A lot he cared about me when I was little and needed him! I don’t owe him anything,’ thought Abigail, white with fury. ‘Not one kind word.’
    But, oh God, there was Grandmother, chic and glittery and poisonous and probably thrilled to her long claw toes to get her hands on a lonely Abigail and teach her what’s what and who’s who. Grandmother’s house, expensive suburbia, with a surly houseman, Uruguayan or something, who lived in separate quarters at the end of the garden, the Bridge ladies, the theatre parties, and Abigail required to hand round the