Obsession Read Free

And you’ll have the career too. It’ll all work out for you in the end.’
    Shaking her head, Corrie said, ‘if I could do a deal with God I’d live the rest of my life with my frustrations, if only He’d …’
    Paula took Corrie’s hand and squeezed it. ‘I know,’ she whispered, looking up into Corrie’s face.
    Corrie remained at the door, watching Paula battle her way through the wet and windy night until she reached the end of the street and turned into her parents’ garden gate, the last house before the village square.
    When Corrie returned to the sitting room Edwina was sitting on the sofa. The soft light shining through the fringes of the lamp, which stood behind the comfy fireside chair, cast an amber circle across the worn patterned carpet at her feet and over the cluttered bookshelves behind her. There was an odd flicker of a shadow as the wind howled outside and blew a draft around the curtains, and as it whistled down the chimney the fire, in its small cast-iron hearth, shifted and resettled.
    ‘Come and sit here,’ Edwina said, patting the cushion beside her.
    Corrie looked up in surprise, then seeing the expression on her mother’s face she gave a short smile.
    ‘I know what’s on your mind, sweetheart,’ Edwina said. ‘So come along, let’s talk.’
    Corrie shook her head. She had never hidden anything from Edwina, there had never been any reason to since theirs was a very special relationship, making them as much friends as they were mother and daughter, but Corrie didn’t want to have this conversation. They’d had it many times before and it served no purpose. No matter how frustrated, confused and, yes, different to those she had grown up with, Corrie felt inside, nothing in the world would persuade her to leave her mother; to go away from the little Suffolk village of Amberside to find the life she almost constantly dreamed of. And that, she knew, was what her mother was about to do. And she in turn would fob Edwina off with her usual excuse that if she were to take herself and her ambitions out into the world she would be sure to end up making a fool of herself, trying to be something she wasn’t.
    Tonight she didn’t feel like going through the charade, and neither, she guessed, did Edwina. But Edwina’s concern tore at her heart, for in truth they both knew that the way Corrie felt about herself really had nothing at all to do with the reason she wouldn’t leave this grey little village with its infernally dull routine and colourless people.
    Taking the hand her mother held out Corrie stooped to kiss the once beautiful face, now bloated and pale. The eyes, a young woman’s eyes, might have lost their sparkle now, but not the tenderness Corrie had known all her twenty-six years.
    ‘You look tired,’ she said.
    Edwina squeezed Corrie’s hand. In her heart she longed to tell her daughter to go, to stop wasting her young years on a dying mother, who might yet live to see fifty. By then Corrie would be past thirty. But she knew that nothing she said or did would persuade Corrie to leave her. They were devoted to each other, and how Edwina despised the illness that was ruining both their lives.
    For a while they talked about Paula, missing her sparkle now she’d gone. Then, sensing that her mother was once again going to try broaching the subject of her illness, of how Corrie mustn’t take it upon herself and get on with her own life, Corrie went to the cramped kitchen at the back of the cottage to make a hot drink before bed.
    She filled a saucepan with milk, wiped down the draining board, then set out their two mugs. Too soon there would be only one mug to lay out, and she didn’t know if she could bear it. It was five years now since Edwina had first discovered she had cancer. Five terrible years during which the tumour had been removed from her breast and they had thought she was cured. That had given them a two year reprieve. Two years during which Edwina had seemed