Fallen Women. Sue Welfare

bastard, bastard,’ she spat, sitting very still, glaring through the windscreen at a set of chrome bull bars.

      A tall, wiry, anxious-looking man clambered down from the driver’s seat and round to her side of the car. The 4x4 was black and shiny and fashionably chunky, the kind of thing you’d drive across the open tundra stopping to winch the occasional reindeer to safety from an ice floe.

      ‘You okay?’ he asked. He was tall and sounded genuinely concerned and looked as if he might be something medical, a country doctor maybe. He was wearing ginger-coloured cords and a matching open-necked blue and ginger checked shirt and as he spoke pushed a mop of greying red-blond hair back off his forehead.

      Not that Kate really noticed. She just nodded, trying hard to disguise the fact that she’d been driving on autopilot.

      ‘Sorry about that, I couldn’t see through the wall,’ he said. Which was a generous and conciliatory thing to say under the circumstances. He said it with a grin not a growl which was nice, or would have been, except that Kate wasn’t feeling generous or conciliatory and most definitely not nice and could feel herself getting angry with him for being so bloody cheerful.

      ‘Not many people can,’ she snarled. ‘Are you looking for my mother?’

      ‘Is she small, grey, deaf, incontinent and in obvious distress?’

      ‘Not when I left her last week.’ A picture of Guy in his tight white underpants flashed briefly through her mind.

      ‘Then no, probably not. I’m Andrew Taylor, the local vet.’ He extended a hand.

      Kate struggled with an inclination to decline the introduction but couldn’t quite bring herself to be that rude. His handshake was warm and businesslike. And then the grin widened out into something else. ‘Kate? It is, it’s Kate Sutherland, isn’t it?’

      Kate looked more closely at him. ‘Do I know you?’ she said icily.

      ‘Yes, I think you probably do – Denham High? You’re a couple of years younger than me – Andy Taylor, I used to be in the drama club with you?’

      Kate looked again, trying hard to hold on to her annoyance, while shuffling through the memories and there he was, sixteen with a mass of floppy hair and no shoulders to speak of, the grin hadn’t changed though. ‘Andy Taylor. God you’ve grown. I thought you were in – in –’ Kate fished around for the tail end of something she’d heard on the family grapevine. ‘Somewhere hot and foreign.’

      ‘Australia. Yeh, I was out there for eight years then came home to take over my dad’s practice. I’ve been back three years now.’

      Trying to stay outraged and angry Kate didn’t ask him how he liked it or wait for him to ask how her life was going, instead she said, ‘And what are you doing here?’

      ‘Looking for the meaning of life and the heart of a good woman.’ It was corny and daft but at least he did have the decency to say it with a big grin.

      Kate laughed aloud, aware of how bitter it sounded. ‘Then you’re most definitely in the wrong place, Mister,’ was what she wanted to say, but instead Kate raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Really?’ in what she hoped was a superior way.

      His expression didn’t falter. ‘Actually I’m looking for a grey and white tabby called Tiddles and a woman called Mrs Hall, 84 Church Hill?’

      ‘Viv. Next door.’

      ‘Thanks.’ He smiled. ‘Home on a visit?’

      ‘My mum’s broken her ankle.’

      ‘Damn, sorry to hear that.’

      Kate waved the words away. ‘She’ll be okay. I’ve come to give her a hand for a few days.’

      ‘Well, I hope she gets better soon. It was really nice to see you again. Have a good day. Maybe we’ll catch up again some time.’ He looked ruefully at the vehicles nose to nose on the gravel. ‘And mind how you go.’

      It didn’t sound rude or churlish, which was annoying, and as Kate couldn’t think of anything smart to say, she nodded in acknowledgement, wound up her window and reversed out into the road. This time she looked both ways. Twice.

      Andrew eased out and Kate drove back in and parked up under the laburnums. It was barely lunchtime and already she felt in need of two paracetamol, a warm bed and a good night’s sleep. Kate didn’t notice whether Andrew waved goodbye or looked back as she unfolded herself from the car, she was too busy swearing.

      ‘Hi Mum, it’s only me.’

      Kate let herself in, dropped her bag in the hall and tried very hard to paint on a happy face. Maggie was reclining on the sofa in the sitting room, crutches propped up within easy reach. She was wearing a long cream silk shirt, a single flat leather sandal and a pair of baggy black tracksuit bottoms, one leg of which was cut off and rolled up in a rakish pirate fashion just above her cast. Kate sniffed; she suspected Guy had done it before he left. It looked like a Guy thing. The French windows were open onto the garden and Maggie was looking pale but nevertheless radiant and not in a deathbed, verge-of-something-terminal way.

      She smiled and put down her book. ‘Hi love, how was the drive?’

      Kate grimaced and stretched, trying hard to ease the nasty kinks out of her soul as she bent down to kiss her hello. ‘Ask me something else.’

      Maggie laughed. It was a good wholesome laugh, a laugh that made Kate feel quite envious.

      ‘How’s Joe?’

      Bad choice.

       Chapter 5

      ‘For someone so small you weigh a bloody ton.’ The words, hissed between gritted teeth, sounded far grumpier than Kate had intended but then again she was sweating and fighting for breath having struggled down Church Hill, steering Maggie in a wheelchair, trying very hard to avoid letting her mother roll off the kerb and under passing juggernauts. Controlling a wheelchair was a lot harder than Kate had anticipated; they’d been out of the house less than ten minutes and she was totally knackered. Maybe flat shoes would have been a better choice rather than the little kitten heels sandals that she was wearing.

      Kate had been home about an hour. Once she had recovered from her encounter with Andrew and finished the unpacking and bedmaking, Kate rapidly realised that if they didn’t do something she would probably end up asking Maggie about Guy or alternatively telling her about Joe and Chrissie, and she didn’t feel ready to do either.

      A walk, that was what she decided they needed, get Maggie out in the air, must be awful to be cooped up in the house all day with just four walls to look at. Kate paused; who the hell was she trying to kid? It sounded like bliss to have a few days on the sofa with a pile of magazines, with nothing to do and no one to disturb you.

      Watching Joe drive away that morning, before going back inside to wake the boys, Kate had wondered if he had arranged to meet Chrissie somewhere. Maybe they had met up for breakfast. Had he grinned and waved, hurried across some road somewhere to join her for croissants and coffee?

      Chrissie would be hurting like hell, Kate thought, as she manoeuvred Maggie down the drop kerb and across the traffic lights. She and Chrissie had been friends for years, which made everything worse than impossible. How the hell could she be having an empathic response for the woman who had been sleeping with her husband? A woman who had betrayed all those sacred arcane laws about shagging your best friend’s bloke?

      Kate could guess exactly how Chrissie would be feeling and there was part of her, against all the odds, that felt really sorry for her. It was impossible not to think about all the things they’d done together, as families, as a couple, as friends; it seemed just so unlikely, so impossible and so bloody unfair that all that time Joe and Chrissie had been holding on to this huge secret thing. They knew and