A Summer Fling Read Free

you’re all I could ever want.’

 
Chapter 3
    Grace got up the next morning at five-thirty and watched the Teletubbies , Bob the Builde r and Thomas the Tank Engine for a brain-numbing two and a half hours with four-year-old Sable. The combination of a young child’s energy and an early morning following a restless night made her feel far older than her fifty-five years. Gordon was, of course, in bed. It was women’s work getting up and seeing to the children. Or, at least, that was the regime she had always been used to – first at home with Mum and Dad, then when she married the widower with the four dependants: Laura aged six, Paul aged five, Sarah aged three and Rose aged fifty-four. It was funny to think she was older than her mother-in-law was when she died. Rose had seemed like an old, old woman.
    Sarah arrived at eleven with her customary ‘Sorry I’m late. Thanks for letting her stay the night. I know it was last minute.’
    ‘It’s all right, love,’ said Gordon, up and dressed now in his gardening clothes, his thick, steel-grey hair still wet from a leisurely shower.
    ‘Any chance you could look after her for another hour?’ asked Sarah in her best wheedling little girl tone. ‘Just so I can go to the supermarket?’
    ‘ ’Course she can stay here,’ said Gordon, his voice drowning out anything Grace might have had to say on the subject. He chucked Sable under the chin. ‘She can come out and watch her grandad plant some seeds.’
    ‘It’s far too chilly for her to be outside,’ said Sarah, wrapping her fur-trimmed maternity coat a little further around herself at the mere thought of it.
    ‘Well, she can stay inside with her grandma then,’ said Gordon. Grandma. The word grated on Grace’s nerves like a fingernail scraping down a blackboard. She preferred Nana and Gordon knew that. It was as if he was using the word on purpose – a Chinese water torture slow drip, drip: ‘you will be old’.
    ‘I promise I won’t be longer than two hours,’ beamed Sarah, happy at having an extension to her freedom. ‘Three at the most.’
    She tried to ignore how tired her mother looked and concentrated on her father’s expression of bonhomie instead. Gordon disappeared out to his allotment. Grace wrestled with trying to get the washing done, the beds stripped and entertaining a hyper Sable. She needed to go out shopping herself but she was exhausted. Gordon was so generous with other people’s time.
    Sarah came back after lunch, just as Sable had drifted off to sleep. And just as the postman arrived with two catalogues for caravan sites in Blegthorpe-on-Sea.
    Calum’s loud beer-snoring awoke Dawn. She went downstairs to try and sleep on the sofa but what she gained in peace levels, she lost in comfort. The sofa was old and past it; they really could do with another one but every spare penny was being put aside for the wedding. Well, every spare penny of hers, that was. At least Calum had a job at the moment, and one he was sticking at – not that it brought in mega-bucks. But where she was saving everything she could, Calum contributed what was left out of his ‘social fund’. She would have to get a loan out at this rate for the honeymoon, but she was going to have the fairytale. If it took her the rest of her life to pay off her wedding day, she would have the frock, the flowers and the fancy cake. She knew it was the start to a marriage that her mum and dad would have wanted for her. Then, when the wedding debt had been paid off, they could start looking at something a bit better than Calum’s dump of a house. Dawn had moved into it eight months ago and not managed to persuade Calum to do anything to it. There were still wires hanging down from the ceiling, bare plaster walls, furniture that looked as if it had been dragged out of a skip. He was five years younger than her. Dawn rationalized that as some sort of excuse for his student-like existence.
    Calum was still in bed when she pulled