Read Online Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs by Victoria Clayton - Free Book Online
Authors: Victoria Clayton
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I know you’re all right. Why aren’t you being properly looked after?’
‘Sebastian told the clinic I was going to a nursing home so they’d let me out early, but it would have been too expensive. And everyone in the company’s either away or too busy.’ I brought Bobbie up to date with the events of the past week, feeling warmth return to my extremities and optimism to my powers of reasoning. ‘I don’t need looking after, really. I can hobble about. It’s just that it’s so difficult to get up and down the stairs.’
‘I’ll find something for us to eat and then we’ll think what’s the best thing to do.’
‘There’s a tin of frankfurters.’ I pulled a face. ‘Otherwise it’s brawn, I’m afraid.’
Bobbie picked up a pale green carrier bag with ‘Fortnum and Mason’ written on it. ‘I stopped on my way to pick up a few bits and pieces. I won’t be a minute.’
She returned with a tray piled with good things.
‘Smoked salmon!’ I cried. ‘Oh, the luxury! A whole camembert! Tomatoes and olives! Cold chicken!’ I felt my mouth fill with saliva. ‘And little fruit tarts! You angel!’ I winked away tears of gratitude.
She had also brought a bottle of claret that tasted deliciously of raspberries and liquorice. While we ate and drank we talked as easily as though we had met yesterday, though in fact it had been two years since we had last seen each other.
I had known Bobbie all my life. Our mothers had been at the same boarding school. As a homesick new girl, my mother, who was much given to hero-worship, had developed a crush on Bobbie’s mother, who was several years her senior. She had run errands for her and written her passionate notes and spent all her pocket money on presents of chocolates and bath salts. To judge by her adult personality, Bobbie’s mother, Laetitia, had been a good-looking but reserved and probably rather friendless girl. It must have suited her to have an acolyte.
Somehow the relationship had lasted beyond school and even after marriage. Laetitia was invalidish. My mother spent weeks with the Pickford-Nortons in their large, gloomy house in Sussex, surrounded by dripping trees and sodden shrubberies, cooking little delicacies, running baths, fetching books from the library, a willing slave. After she married my father the visits became much less frequent, but once a year my mother, my sister Kate and I made the long journey from Northumberland to the south coast to stay for a week or two at Cutham Hall.
Given the eight-year age gap, it would have been quite understandable had Bobbie chosen to ignore me altogether during these visits, but she had been angelically kind and looked afterme like a mother – which was just as well as my real mother was too busy to have time for me. Laetitia became more demanding with age. She had to have shawls, spectacles, hats and pills fetched, and constant cups of tea and cakes made while she lay either in bed, on a sofa or in a deckchair in the garden. Her cook and her daily gave notice almost hourly and had to be cajoled into staying. During the sulking periods, my mother had to vacuum acres of carpet, polish her way through cupboards of silver and rustle up lunch and supper for Major Pickford-Norton, a small man with a peppery temper and a selfishness quite as colossal as his wife’s.
Bobbie had taken us for walks and helped us make daisy chains and grass whistles or collect conkers, depending on the time of year. Sometimes we went to the beach. Bobbie would give us piggybacks down to the place where it briefly became sand and we’d make mermaids with shells and bladderwrack and skate’s-egg cases and she would plait my hair so that it wasn’t torture to brush afterwards. On wet days she took us in turn on her knee and read us stories and played Happy Families and Ludo. I thought her the most beautiful creature in the world, with her long fair wavy hair and eyes that were the colour of the sea. Despite my dislike of
‘Sebastian told the clinic I was going to a nursing home so they’d let me out early, but it would have been too expensive. And everyone in the company’s either away or too busy.’ I brought Bobbie up to date with the events of the past week, feeling warmth return to my extremities and optimism to my powers of reasoning. ‘I don’t need looking after, really. I can hobble about. It’s just that it’s so difficult to get up and down the stairs.’
‘I’ll find something for us to eat and then we’ll think what’s the best thing to do.’
‘There’s a tin of frankfurters.’ I pulled a face. ‘Otherwise it’s brawn, I’m afraid.’
Bobbie picked up a pale green carrier bag with ‘Fortnum and Mason’ written on it. ‘I stopped on my way to pick up a few bits and pieces. I won’t be a minute.’
She returned with a tray piled with good things.
‘Smoked salmon!’ I cried. ‘Oh, the luxury! A whole camembert! Tomatoes and olives! Cold chicken!’ I felt my mouth fill with saliva. ‘And little fruit tarts! You angel!’ I winked away tears of gratitude.
She had also brought a bottle of claret that tasted deliciously of raspberries and liquorice. While we ate and drank we talked as easily as though we had met yesterday, though in fact it had been two years since we had last seen each other.
I had known Bobbie all my life. Our mothers had been at the same boarding school. As a homesick new girl, my mother, who was much given to hero-worship, had developed a crush on Bobbie’s mother, who was several years her senior. She had run errands for her and written her passionate notes and spent all her pocket money on presents of chocolates and bath salts. To judge by her adult personality, Bobbie’s mother, Laetitia, had been a good-looking but reserved and probably rather friendless girl. It must have suited her to have an acolyte.
Somehow the relationship had lasted beyond school and even after marriage. Laetitia was invalidish. My mother spent weeks with the Pickford-Nortons in their large, gloomy house in Sussex, surrounded by dripping trees and sodden shrubberies, cooking little delicacies, running baths, fetching books from the library, a willing slave. After she married my father the visits became much less frequent, but once a year my mother, my sister Kate and I made the long journey from Northumberland to the south coast to stay for a week or two at Cutham Hall.
Given the eight-year age gap, it would have been quite understandable had Bobbie chosen to ignore me altogether during these visits, but she had been angelically kind and looked afterme like a mother – which was just as well as my real mother was too busy to have time for me. Laetitia became more demanding with age. She had to have shawls, spectacles, hats and pills fetched, and constant cups of tea and cakes made while she lay either in bed, on a sofa or in a deckchair in the garden. Her cook and her daily gave notice almost hourly and had to be cajoled into staying. During the sulking periods, my mother had to vacuum acres of carpet, polish her way through cupboards of silver and rustle up lunch and supper for Major Pickford-Norton, a small man with a peppery temper and a selfishness quite as colossal as his wife’s.
Bobbie had taken us for walks and helped us make daisy chains and grass whistles or collect conkers, depending on the time of year. Sometimes we went to the beach. Bobbie would give us piggybacks down to the place where it briefly became sand and we’d make mermaids with shells and bladderwrack and skate’s-egg cases and she would plait my hair so that it wasn’t torture to brush afterwards. On wet days she took us in turn on her knee and read us stories and played Happy Families and Ludo. I thought her the most beautiful creature in the world, with her long fair wavy hair and eyes that were the colour of the sea. Despite my dislike of
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