Free The Watcher in the Garden by Joan Phipson

twenty dollar note from my bag.” He gave no sign of having heard and after a pause she said, “Why did you take it?”
    He finished the last of his meal, pushed the plate from him and leaned back. Now he looked at his mother, his face as expressionless as her own. “I needed twenty dollars.”
    â€œIt’s not everyone’d steal from his own mother.” She said it quite quietly, but her voice held the same metallic note as her son’s.
    He gave the smallest of shrugs. “You didn’t need it the way I did.”
    â€œIt was mine. You should learn to leave other people’s things alone.”
    A kind of smile crossed his face very briefly. “Why? I take what I need. Never any more.”
    â€œEveryone has to learn to be honest sometime.” She was still looking at him dispassionately, as if he were divided from her by the lens of a microscope. “Sooner or later you get caught.”
    â€œNot me.” They looked at one another over the old man’s head. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
    â€œI never worry about you. I’m just telling you. It’s your father I worry about. Poor old man.”
    As if it were his cue, the old man put down his knife and fork and leaned back. “I can’t eat no more. I don’t feel too good.”
    â€œYou don’t have to. And you never feel too good. I’ll get your sweets. You like them.” She swept up their plates and put them in the sink.
    While her back was towards them Terry said, “Dad’s honest and look where it’s got him.”
    A plate of stewed fruit and custard landed on the table in front of him and over his head his mother said, “You know quite well that has nothing to do with it. Your father has bad luck. Always has had.”
    â€œLazy, I call it.”
    The old man’s pride was pricked, and he said with sudden animation, “You think I get my war pension for nothing? You’d like me to work my guts out, wouldn’t you? What’s left of them.”
    â€œIt’s smoking ruined your guts, not the war.”
    Before the old man could reply Mrs. Nicholson said, “If we’d got that piece of land he offered for he’d be OK now. A couple of petrol pumps up on the road’d set us up nicely, without his having to work the way he does.”
    â€œWork!” The tone was a worse insult than the word.
    Mrs. Nicholson swung round to her son. “You talk like that when you know what the word means. Your father doesn’t live on the dole. Sometimes I think something got left out of you when you was born.”
    Terry looked at his mother for a long time, and when he looked at her he remained absolutely still. Then, as if he had not heard, he took a long breath and said, “We’ll get your bit of land yet. You’ll see.”
    â€œNot until old Lovett dies we won’t.” Mrs. Nicholson sat down and attacked her fruit and custard.
    â€œThat’s what I meant.” He pushed his chair back and got up. The spoon fell with a clatter into the empty plate. At the door he said, “See you.” For a moment a curious, loaded look passed between him and his mother. Then the screen door banged and he was gone. Before the old man had finished his pudding the sound of the motorbike was fading up the road.

Chapter 8
    Autumn moved into winter. The weather turned wet and cold with now and then a crackle of sleet in the wind, and for several weeks Catherine did not go to the garden. But the tensions of home that had sent her there in the days of spring and summer continued. She knew that she caused them. She knew that as soon as she left the house and as long as she stayed away tension evaporated. The knowledge was a load she found hard, sometimes impossible, to carry. It also made her bad-tempered.
    Why did she have to tell them at breakfast she’d heard a man coming out of the bank say that her father was the