Free What Have I Done? by Amanda Prowse Page B

jolly mood this morning. He’s had several admiring comments about his floral accessory from the faculty. Whatever you gave him for breakfast, same again tomorrow please! Makes my life easier when he hasn’t got his sore bear-head on!’
    What should she say to that?
‘It makes all our lives easier, Judith. You have no idea, Judith, of just how bad his sore bear-head can make my life. Leave me alone, Judith, you vacuous woman; leave me alone because you have no concept of what my life is like, of how I live.’
    Instead, she smiled.
    ‘Will do, Judith.’
    She wasn’t entirely sure what she was agreeing to, but knew that it would be enough to appease Judith, to make her feelthat her errand and her messages had been understood, loud and clear.
    In her meaner moments, Kathryn would think unpalatable thoughts about her unpopularity or her sickening fawning over Mark. This, however, would be quickly followed by,
How dare you offer up these thoughts when your own situation is so dire?
Then another thought would creep in:
I must be as thick as Mark says I am, otherwise how did I get myself into this bloody mess? I’m like one of those little bugs caught by a Venus flytrap and the irony is the more I wriggle the deeper I become entrenched. I am trapped
.
    Kathryn wished that someone would offer her an escape, a way out. She often dreamed of freedom in a different time and place. She could only bear to contemplate a solution that was simple, having no capacity or inclination for anything complex. Yet no matter how hard she tried, a simple solution would not present itself. Every idea, every permutation, left her homeless and away from her children. Homeless she could just about manage, but living without her children and not being there to defend them, should… if…
That
she could not manage. Her kids would always be an extension of her own heartbeat, the best thing she had ever done. She could not, would not contemplate a life without them.
    Kathryn’s grandmother had been an upright, slender harridan whose clothes and manner anchored her firmly in the Victorian era. Despite her humble beginnings and a life of hard graft in the East End of London, she exuded an air of grandeur that belied the poverty in which she had been raised. Kathryn remembered giving her the news that she was to marry Mark Brooker. Her granny’s response had made her laugh although it didn’t seem quite so funny now.
    ‘My dear, think very carefully about this match. Youshould of course always make sure that you marry outside your postcode, but never outside your class. Your father went to university and that makes you a somebody. I’m afraid that just because young Master Brooker has ideas above his station does not instantly make it so. It makes things so much neater when you know the same people and have the same standard of table manners.’
    It was still funny in one sense, that Mark’s lack of understanding of what cutlery to use, that he regularly said ‘tea’ instead of ‘dinner’ and expressed a preference for UPVC over timber-framed windows was actually the least of her concerns.
    Kathryn thought as she often did of Natasha; even the memory of her gave her mood a lift. Natasha had been a rare commodity in Kathryn’s life. For nearly three years, she had been her friend, her only friend. She was sure that it was Natasha’s recent move to another school at the other end of the country that was partly responsible for the ever blackening cloud that seemed to hang over her head. She felt like a cartoon character who, when everyone else is bathed in sunshine, sits under their own portable rainstorm and, were it not for Acme umbrellas, would be soaked right through.
    Natasha had gone to work in a school just outside York, teaching kids with special needs, helping them develop through expression in art. Kathryn thought it suited her much better than the jab and thrust of life at Mountbriers. She had moved to Alne and was living less than a