Free Who Was Angela Zendalic by Mary Cavanagh Page B

exhaled slowly and paused diffidently. ‘I suppose you might say I’ve got two choices. Say yes, and give her a stable future, or tell the truth and take her back myself. And I can’t, can I? No matter how much I want to, I just can’t. I think it’s what they call Hobson’s choice. I’ve tried to believe that Joseph’s going to come back, but I know deep down he’s not going to.’
    Ted looked up with an expression of deep compassion, and his obvious enduring love. ‘Offer’s still open, Peg. I can sell up and get a transfer.’ She covered his hand and shook her head.
    When Ted had gone she stood in the kitchen, hearing the faint sound of Angela’s whimpering cry coming through the party wall. Not to signal the child’s misery, but the usual last throes of over-tiredness before she was carried upstairs to bed. To be lain down carefully into her soft, cosy cot and kissed goodnight; to sleep peacefully in the pink-painted bedroom and waking up to the smile of the kind, bonny-faced woman she knew to be her mother.
    â€˜We’re keeping her name the same,’ Edie announced. ‘It really suits her. Our little angel, like. The other two are going to be after the Queen, and after me. Well, why not? I’m her real mother now.’
    And so, when Peggy, as chief Godmother, was asked by Father Reynolds to ‘name this child’ she’d been forced to answer, Angela Elizabeth Edith .

April 2014
Monks Bottom
    W ith the boys sound asleep I lit a log fire in the inglenook, and with the smell of pine filling the room I opened a bottle of fridge-cold Chardonnay, poured out a decent slug and sank down on the sofa. Maybe I drank too much. I’d certainly finish the bottle, but did I care? Yes, I cared every morning when I woke up with a dull throb to my temple, but it quickly cleared, and by this time in the evening I was far too keen on a glass to remember any sort of hangover.
    Having downed the first welcome slurp I now planned to start my on-line search for Angela, but first I checked my mobile. A text from Mark outlining the proposed Sunday outing with the boys, but I was thrown again into cursing my rotten, sodding ex. Fuck, fuck, fuck him. Fuck him for bypassing our strict agreement to clear any outings with me before he told the boys. And fuck him for fucking elsewhere as soon as life became too noisy, and tiring, and expensive, and untidy, and socially restricting and sex-starved due to the demands of parenthood. But I was determined to show him I didn’t need him, and I’d certainly done that.
    In a fit of independence I turned my back on Sunday-supplement Highgate to start a new life in the pin-drop village I’d grown up in. To have my dear Pa five minutes up the road, Carrie and my mother’s nursing home in the next village, the boys attending the top-ranked village primary school, and myself with a (short-lived) appointment with the Oxfordshire Education Department. The cottage bought for a bargain recession price with the larger share of our joint assets my brilliant lawyer had fought for, underlined with a legal proviso that I’d receive fair financial maintenance from the bastard I’d once loved.
    Everyone said that life would be tough alone – tell me about it – but I was now gloating that Mark’s selfish idyll had recently been blown to buggery. The stick insect had dumped him and there’d been a bitter bust up of The Renaissance Men . Ha, ha bloody ha. Poor old fading glamour boy. Early forties and too old for a solo singing career, now (according to the grapevine) trying to bluff his way into some sort of media job. With no success. Excellent news! And if he thought he was worming his way back into my life he could hang himself. My sisters reminded me today that I could give Catherine-sodding-Zetasodding-Jones a good run for her money, and despite the mess I looked tonight, I still could. And one day