Read Dying Fall, A for Free Online

feels she will never be able to trust Shona again. It doesn’t help that Shona is living with Ruth’s boss Phil, whom she doesn’t trust either.
    ‘How are you?’ she says now. ‘How’s Louis?’
    In February, Shona had given birth to a son, her first child and Phil’s third. Shona, with her willowy grace and Pre-Raphaelite hair, is so essentially feminine that Ruth had been sure her baby would be a girl. But Louis is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bruiser. A delightful boy with a shock of ginger hair and the build of a prizefighter. At birth he weighed over ten pounds and now, at five months old, is in clothes meant for one-year-olds. In fact, he’s not that much smaller than Kate, who is a slight child, causing Ruth to panic every time she looks at her growth chart at the doctor’s.
    ‘He’s great. Huge. Eating all the time.’
    Shona has thrown herself into the role of earth mother, vowing to breastfeed Louis ‘until he goes to university’. Ruth, who found the whole business difficult and uncomfortable, tries not to feel envious.
    ‘What about Kate?’
    ‘She’s fine. A bit tired at the moment, I was just putting her to bed.’
    ‘Oh, I won’t keep you. I just wondered if you could pop in tomorrow. It seems like ages since I’ve seen another adult.’
    ‘What about Phil?’
    ‘He’s a man. He doesn’t count.’
    ‘It’s a bit difficult. We’re digging all week.’
    ‘I know,’ says Shona fretfully. ‘It’s all I hear about from Phil. Samian ware this, bath house walls that.’
    Ruth can see that life with Phil as your only link to the outside world could feel rather stultifying. ‘I’ll try to pop in on my way home,’ she says.
    Kate is almost asleep so Ruth skips the bath and puts her straight into bed. A few lines from Dora and Kate is fast asleep. As Ruth tiptoes out of the room, her mobile phone bleeps. Jesus. Who is it this time?
    It’s a text message. Sender unknown.
    Don’t come to Pendle if you know what’s good for you.

5
    Shona lives in King’s Lynn, near Sandra the childminder, so Ruth drops in on her way home. Kate loves children younger than herself and has developed a convincingly patronising attitude towards them. ‘Baby,’ she says as soon as she sees Louis.
‘Little
baby.’
    ‘Yes,’ says Shona admiringly. ‘But you’re a big girl, aren’t you?’
    Kate looks pleased at this description but Ruth, who is also sometimes called a ‘big girl’, is rather more ambivalent.
    But Louis really isn’t that little. In fact, he seems to have grown since Ruth saw him a few days ago. He dominates Shona’s stylish sitting room, surveying the world from his bouncy chair like his namesake, the Sun King himself. Toys and baby clothes cover every surface, nursery rhymes play on a manic loop in the background. Ruth is reminded of the time when Shona looked after Kate, then only a few months old. Kate had screamed the entire time, and in minutes Shona’s beautiful sanded wood floors had become covered in toys, books, tapes, bottles of milk—evidence of abortive attempts to placate her—and when Ruth had arrived, all she had to do was take her baby in her arms and the crying had stopped immediately. Ruth remembers that day well. It was the first time she had really felt like a mother.
    Shona still doesn’t look like a mother. She is too slim for one thing, having miraculously regained her prepregnancy figure. ‘It’s the breast-feeding,’ she says smugly, floating away to put the kettle on. She is also too well dressed. Ruth spent her entire maternity leave in tracksuit bottoms; Shona is wearing a short flowery dress, and high-heeled sandals tied with ribbon. She has even done her hair, though, as usual, it looks artfully dishevelled. It is only when Ruth sees her close up that she notices the shadows under the mascara’d eyes.
    ‘How are you?’ asks Ruth, when Shona reappears with tea, and juice for Kate.
    ‘OK. Knackered.’
    ‘They are tiring, the first