Cruel Legacy

They had argued about that as well. In hushed, angry whispers so as not to wake the children. They were getting older now and Cathy in particular was becoming sharply aware. Only a couple of months ago she had come home from school asking if Sally and Joel still had sex.

‘Well, you shouldn’t have had much problem answering that one,’ Joel had grunted when she’d told him.

She frowned again, remembering the conversation which had followed.

‘I suppose that’s going to be another excuse, is it?’ Joel had demanded aggressively. ‘You don’t want the kids overhearing us. Not that there is very much to overhear these days.’

‘Sex—you’re obsessed with it,’ she had countered. ‘We can’t discuss anything these days without your turning it into an argument about sex.’

‘Perhaps that’s because arguing about it is just about all we do,’ he had told her angrily.

It hadn’t always been like this between them—far from it. When they had first married … when they had first met …

She had been a shy, awkward girl of fourteen, her shyness made worse by the fact that she and her parents had only recently moved into the area. At school she had felt isolated and friendless. Her sister, seven years her senior, was already adult, and it was probably inevitable that the others should have picked up on her loneliness and started bullying her.

It had been Joel who had come to her rescue; two years older than her, a tall, dark-haired, broad-shouldered boy with an air of solid self-confidence about him on which she had instinctively and gratefully leaned.

He was the middle child in a family of five, with two older sisters and a pair of younger, twin brothers. The chaotic and unruly household absent-mindedly presided over by his mother had been in such direct contrast to her own orderly home lifestyle that it had fascinated her. Joel’s father was a loud, boisterous bear of a man who made his living in a variety of different ways, from running a market stall to working in a friend’s pub.

He had something of the gypsy in him, both in his looks and his way of life. Joel’s mother had, so local gossip went, married down when she’d married him. Vague and fragile, and completely unworldly, she treated her children as though she was still not quite convinced that she had actually produced them.

Her elder daughter was more a mother to her siblings than a sister, and Joel at sixteen, already mature beyond his years, had been someone for Sally’s fourteen-year-old self to look up to with shy adoration.

They had grown apart after they left school, Joel to begin his apprenticeship and she to begin nursing, and had only met again later through a mutual friend.

There had been sexual attraction enough between them then and more than enough to spare, although Joel had not rushed her into bed.

She had liked that in him. It showed restraint—and respect.

Initially, her parents hadn’t been too keen on their marrying. Her mother had cherished hopes of her marrying a doctor, and Sally had had to suffer listening to her mother’s praises of her sister Daphne’s marriage to a teacher, a white-collar worker.

Both her parents and Joel’s were dead now, and Joel’s brothers and sisters had moved right away from the Lincolnshire town where they had been born and raised. The only family close by now was Sally’s sister Daphne, and Daphne always managed to make Sally feel inferior, second-rate. She and Joel had never liked one another and she knew that Joel disliked her visiting her sister.

‘What’s wrong with you now?’ Joel had demanded after Daphne had summoned her so that she could show off her new kitchen.

‘Nothing,’ she had retorted, but later that night, looking round her own kitchen, she had suddenly started to contrast it and the rest of her home with Daphne’s much larger house. When Joel had seen the kitchen brochures she had brought home, his mouth had compressed immediately.

‘A new kitchen?’ he had stormed. ‘Are you crazy, Sal—have you seen the price of this stuff?’

The quarrel that had followed had been one of the worst they had ever had.

‘We could take out a loan for it,’ Sally had told Joel stubbornly. ‘That’s what Daphne and Clifford did. I could work extra hours to pay for it and——’

‘No,’ Joel had interrupted her. ‘We can’t afford it and I don’t want——’

‘We couldn’t afford for you to have a new car or a garage to keep it in,’ Sally had pointed out bitterly. ‘But you still got them.’

She had known from the white look round his lips that she had gone too far, but stubbornly she had refused to take the words back. Instead she had continued recklessly, ‘If I’m going to have to work to pay for your car, Joel, I might as well do a bit extra and pay for something I want as well.’

Joel hadn’t made any response, but the look on his face, in his eyes, had made her catch her bottom lip between her teeth.

Joel was a very proud man—too proud, she sometimes thought—but then her guilt had changed to irritation. Why should she be the one to feel bad just because she wanted a new kitchen? Was it really so much to ask? The trouble with Joel was that his precious pride was more important to him than she was, or so she was beginning to think.

In the end, Joel had given way and she had got her kitchen. The units weren’t the same as her sister’s expensive hand-painted ones, of course. Joel had installed theirs himself, working in the evenings and at weekends, and the day he had finished them she had come home from night duty to find that he had worked all through the night to get them finished.

He had grinned at her like a boy as he’d invited her to admire his handiwork, sweeping her up into his arms and kissing her.

He had smelled of wood and paint and sweat, his exuberance reminding her of the boy he had been when they first met.

The kitchen had been perfect … just what she had wanted, and she hadn’t resisted when he had whispered suggestively to her that they play out a certain sexy scene from the film Fatal Attraction to celebrate its completion …

Paul had put on his coat and was opening the back door.

‘Where are you going?’ Sally asked him sharply.

‘Round to Jack’s,’ he told her. ‘Dad still isn’t back and it’s going to be too late now.’

She let him go, feeling her irritation against Joel grow. It wasn’t fair, the way he always put himself first and refused to pull his weight, leaving her to do everything.

It had been all right, expecting her to run the house and take care of all the kids’ needs when she was at home, but now that she was working …

‘So stop working,’ he had told her last week when she had come home to find the house in a mess and him sitting in front of the television.

‘You know I can’t,’ she had protested. ‘We need the money.’

‘I’m ready, Mum …’

She forced herself to smile at Cathy as she came into the kitchen.

‘OK, love, I’ll take you now. Don’t forget, your dad’s picking you up.’

‘Huh … if he remembers. Mum, can we go to Florida next year? Nearly everyone in the class has been except for me.’

‘Florida’s very expensive, Cathy …’

Sally hadn’t told Joel, but she had already decided that she was going to try and put something aside from her wages into a special holiday account. She’d love to take the kids to Disneyland. Another few years or so and they would be too old to really enjoy it. It would be worth making a few sacrifices, and if she and Joel both put the same amount away each month …

‘Don’t forget,’ she reminded Cathy as she dropped her off outside her friend’s home, ‘you’re not to leave until your dad comes to pick you up.’

‘All right, all right. I’m not a baby, you know,’ Cathy told her as she rolled her eyes and tossed her hair.

Physically, Cathy took after Joel’s mother, being small, blonde and far too pretty. She had none of Sally’s thick dark hair and, thankfully, seldom revealed any of the tension that often clouded Sally’s deep’brown eyes.

Temperamentally Cathy was far stronger than Joel’s mother and, if neither of their children had shown any signs of the superior intelligence Daphne claimed for her son, Edward, they were both doing well enough at school for Sally to feel secretly very proud of them.

It was nice to have the house to herself, she acknowledged when she got back; not that she was likely to have any time to appreciate her solitude. Unlike Joel, she could not sit down in front of the television set oblivious to the chaos around her.

Upstairs the bathroom floor was covered in wet towels and someone had left the shower gel open on the shower floor, so that its contents was oozing wastefully away.