Suicide …
She started to tremble violently.
‘MUM, Paul’s still in the bathroom and he won’t let me in.’
Sally paused on the landing, grimacing as she stooped down to pick up the sock she had dropped on her last trip downstairs with the dirty washing. Her back still ached from working yesterday.
‘Paul, hurry up,’ she commanded as she rapped on the bathroom door.
‘He knows I’m going to Jane’s and I’m going to be late now,’ Cathy wailed.
‘No, you won’t,’ Sally soothed her daughter. ‘He’ll be out in a minute.’
‘He’s doing it deliberately. I hate him,’ Cathy announced passionately.
Sally had just finished loading the washing machine when Paul came into the kitchen. Was he never going to stop growing? she wondered. Those new jeans she had bought for him last month were already too short.
‘Where’s Dad?’ he demanded.
‘He’s not back yet,’ she told him.
Joel had been irritable and difficult to live with ever since they had heard the news that Andrew Ryecart had committed suicide. Sally knew that he was worried about his job, but there was no need to take it out on them—it wasn’t their fault!
‘He said he was going to come home early,’ Paul grumbled. ‘He was going to take me fishing.’
Sally’s face tightened. This wouldn’t be the first time recently that Joel had done something like this. Only last week they’d had a row about the fact that he’d forgotten that she’d arranged for them to go round to her sister’s and had arranged to play snooker instead.
‘You were the one who arranged to see them,’ he had countered when she had complained.
‘Well, someone had to,’ she had told him. ‘If it was left to you we’d never see anyone from one blue moon to another.’
‘I forgot,’ he’d told her, shrugging the matter aside as though it weren’t important. Unwilling to continue arguing with him in front of the children, Sally had gritted her teeth and said nothing, but inwardly she had been seething.
She had still been angry with him about it later that night when he had come in from his snooker match, walking away from him when he started telling her about it and later turning her back on him in bed, freezing her body into rejecting immobility when he had reached out and touched her breast.
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