Free Just a Family Affair by Veronica Henry Page A

hopped on it in front of EastEnders three times a week - and you could see the results.
    She turned back to her mother, shrugging her shoulders in exasperation.
    ‘Well, if you’re not going to listen, then you’re on your own. I can’t come running over here at the drop of a hat. Roy and I never have time for ourselves as it is, what with the kennels, and Mason and Ryan. They’ve got tournaments every weekend now. We’ve got to support them.’
    Elsie stifled a snort. Angela never did anything she didn’t want to. If she was happy to drive Mason and Ryan round the country, it was because of the attention she got from the other fathers on the motocross circuit. Roy, bless him, did all the donkey work while Angela paraded round the other motor-homes, swapping notes on performance. And as for the kennels, Elsie knew perfectly well Angela had a raft of dog-loving teenage girls who came up at the weekends and were happy to clean out the runs in return for peanuts. She wasn’t exactly wading through dog muck herself. She just made sure she was there to greet the owners when they dropped their precious pooches off, to reassure them they were having the five-star treatment they deserved, given her outrageous prices.
    Five minutes later Elsie heard the door slam, and watched her daughter flounce up the garden path in her skin-tight trousers and get into her car.
    Elsie sighed. She didn’t know when it was that Angela had turned from a sweet and loving little girl into . . . well, a spoilt madam. Perhaps that had been their mistake, she and her husband Bill. Spoiling her. Not with things, perhaps, but with time, indulging her every little whim, because they had waited so long to have her and when she had arrived she had been so breathtakingly beautiful they couldn’t ever bring themselves to say no to her.
    It was ironic that Elsie had been nearly forty before she had had Angela, and then Angela had gone and rather carelessly got herself pregnant at the age of seventeen. Carelessly - or deliberately? The alleged father was a titled tearaway from Warwickshire she met when serving behind the bar at the local point-to-point. Angela had sworn that she was in love with Gerard, and he with her, that they were going to make a go of it, and that she was going to have the baby, who would apparently inherit its own title: she was going to give birth to a baronet! Elsie waited with a sinking heart for it all to go wrong. She didn’t see Angela for five months, as she was apparently ensconced in domestic bliss in a cottage on Gerard’s estate in Warwickshire, being waited on hand, foot and finger by his ageing retainers.
    Angela turned up distraught a month before the baby was due. When she went into labour two days later, Elsie was surprised that the baby looked, if anything, rather overdue. In a flood of postnatal hysteria, the truth came out. The baby wasn’t Gerard’s at all. Angela, finding herself pregnant by a boy from school, had seduced Gerard behind the beer tent at the point-to-point, and thought she had found her ticket out. His family, however, weren’t so easily fobbed off. His astute and protective mother had eventually bullied her into a confession and, rather coldheartedly, booted her out, swollen belly and all.
    After the birth, Angela fell completely to pieces, unable to pick the baby up, unable to bond with it. She just lay in bed for days, staring at the ceiling, complaining that she felt ill. The doctor assured Elsie that her motherly instincts would take over before long, but Elsie was shocked to find Angela couldn’t even summon up the enthusiasm to give the baby a name. So Elsie named her Mary, a name that was so plain and ordinary that Angela was bound to want to change it, if only out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
    Eventually, Angela dragged herself out of bed because she was bored. She complained of total exhaustion, but Elsie chided her for not eating. Angela was desperate to get back to her pre-baby