The Lives of Women Read Online Free Page A

ahead. Her daughter would become her project. Her something to talk about. Her something to
do
.
    She’d felt so old then; old and cornered, the way she imagined old people must feel when they find themselves trapped by the mercy of others. A few months ago she’d been a chubby adolescent, and now here she was, a skin-and-bone adult, watching her motherstuff toiletries into a washbag, squeezing and plumping the sides with the palms of her hands, drawing the edges of the zip together: tug, tug, tugging until it finally closed over and everything had been forced to stay jammed inside.

    There would be changes. New chair in her bedroom; new set of towels waiting on the bedside table; new rug on the floor. The garden puffed up with early summer. The shed painted a thin shade of green. In the garage, a chest freezer that growled like a peevish beast.
    The two biggest changes concerned her mother.
    For one she’d started to smoke again. In her youth she’d been an occasional smoker but had always assured Elaine this had only been to give herself something to do while waiting by the wall -flower wall at tennis club dances. And it helped show off her hands, which she considered to be her best feature. It had been an excellent means, too, of striking up a conversation – a man might offer a cigarette, one would accept and then naturally a conversation would follow. Elaine had always imagined these conversations taking place against black-and-white settings and conducted in fruity uppercrust accents – ‘Care for a cigarette?’ ‘How kind, don’t mind if I do.’ ‘I say, what perfectly lovely hands you have!’
    Now it seems her mother was back on the cigarettes, only this time she meant it.
    *
    While they were waiting for the nurse to complete the paperwork, her mother broke the news about her new smoking life. It had started as a way to calm her nerves while Elaine had been at the height of her illness. When she was taken off the critical list and declared out of danger, she had decided to stick with it because Martha Shillman told her it was a great way of keeping the weight down. Instead of the afternoon bun, she’d been reaching for the packet of fags. Two cigarettes in and all thought of the bun would go flying out the window. Already she could feel her skirts beginning to loosen their grip. Martha Shillman had been right all along. Martha Shillman was no fool in such matters.
    Martha Shillman’s name, Elaine had already begun to notice, was cropping up quite a bit in recent conversations.
    Â 
    She’d been expecting to see her father’s car on the hospital fore-court. At the same time, she hadn’t been all that surprised to find, instead, Martha Shillman in her husband’s car, grinning out over the steering wheel. Even so, Elaine had decided she should probably ask.
    â€˜Your father? Oh – who knows? Too busy, I suppose. Off racing, no doubt. Anyway, thank goodness for Martha Shillman, says you.’
    Â 
    On the way home they went in for a drink. Really it was just to have a fag in comfort, Martha explained. ‘Shillman goes mad if you smoke in the car. I wouldn’t mind, but he thinks nothing of stinking us out of house and home with those bloody awful cigars of his.’
    She had forgotten that Mrs Shillman called her husband by his surname. She had forgotten too about the amount of make-up she wore and the fug of her perfume. Her mother, she noticed, was wearing more make-up than usual and had also doused herself in perfume, and it not even Sunday.
    Elaine opened the back window of the car and half-listened to the conversation up front. Mrs Shillman was explaining something to her mother about China, using a story heard in diplomatic circles to illustrate the point. Mrs Shillman, Elaine knew, was an intelligent woman. She spoke fluent French. She knew about politics. She had once taken a correspondence course in psychology and often