Read Dot (Araminta Hall) for Free Online Page B

‘Who,’ she said finally.
    ‘A woman called Silver Sharpe. She was the barmaid at the Hare and Hounds for a while. Frightfully common.’
    ‘But …’ She needed me to help her but my mind felt as if someone had whitewashed it. ‘But why?’
    I shrugged and then I said something stupid like, ‘Men are very flighty, they pretty much always let you down.’
    ‘Really?’ asked Dot. ‘Grandpa didn’t.’
    ‘Well, I suppose he did. If he hadn’t been stupid enough to go out in that storm he wouldn’t have been hit by the boom and, well …’ I knew I had to stop even as I was saying the words because a strange rage was building in my chest when I hadn’t even known that I was angry. ‘Anyway, Dot, this isn’t about Grandpa. I wanted you to know that your father left and there’s no point fretting about him.’
    ‘Did he love me?’ she asked and the question was heartbreaking. I wish conversations were easier; I wish they were set in stone and there were rules and manners we had to follow like in the old days. I wish they didn’t lead you into so many dangerous moments that make you want to run screaming in the other direction.
    ‘Oh goodness, Dot, he certainly did. I used to watch him with you and he was always so proud. He used to carry you round the village on his shoulders.’ At least I hope I said that – I’m sure I did.
    ‘So why did he leave then?’
    And that is a question I’ve often asked myself because I am not lying, he really did adore her. But by God it must have been hard to live with Alice. By the end I wanted to shake her myself. She was so bloody passive with him, so locked into her own world that it wasn’t any wonder he looked for something elsewhere. Although I couldn’t say any of that to Dot, so had to make do with a cop out along the lines of, ‘I don’t know. Really I don’t.’
    ‘How old was I?’
    ‘He left on your second birthday. He said he was going out to buy some extra balloons and he never came back. We thought he might have had an accident or something, but in the end Charles Wheeler came round and told me what had happened.’
    ‘Balloons?’
    ‘I know, it was a poor excuse.’ The whole conversation had become unbearable by then. It was reminding me of the terrible weeks after he left, when Alice stayed in bed and got so thin I became convinced that one day I would take Dot in for her visit and there would be nothing there. The doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with her; where’s the pain, he kept asking her like a stupid fool, when any idiot could have looked into her eyes and seen she was dying of a broken heart. If Sandra hadn’t stepped in I don’t know what might have happened.
    ‘What did he look like?’ she asked.
    ‘Oh well, he was very handsome.’ I was on safer ground then and I reasoned it might help to give her a sense of how her mother could have been so fooled by him. If she was fooled that is; with a sense of perspective I have come to regard their relationship more like a train in one of those old films chugging along down the track to the inevitability of the broken bridge. ‘He had what I would describe as Roman features, if you know what I mean.’ She shook her head. ‘His nose was very straight and his lips were full, but he was often very pale. His hair was brown and he wore it long, to his shoulders. They made a very handsome pair, your mother and him.’
    She sat quite still after this, looking not at me but at the carpet and I was filled with a sudden fear that actually I had been quite wrong about telling her. I know almost nothing about children really. It took Howie and me ten years to have Alice, in a time before tests and scans, just lots of silent tears and grim recriminations. Then when she finally came I found her too hard to love; it all just felt so bloody dangerous. So Howie did the important stuff, like cuddles and stories at bedtime and filling the Christmas stocking and I locked myself tighter and tighter.