thinking you never took any interest in what I do.’
As Aidy went off to do what she was asked, a worried expression appeared on Bertha’s face. Easing the pain of her injuries was not what was really concerning her so much as the situation her injuries had left her in. Her broken leg and wrist had rendered her practically incapable while they healed. She couldn’t even go to the toilet without help. It was a hard enough job looking after a family of five for a normal housewife who didn’t work. Aidy did, full-time, and on top of that, she now had the problem of covering the chores Bertha herself would have been doing, plus the care of an invalid. The kids would help when they came home from school and at weekends, but there was only so much youngsters their age could manage. Pat Nelson certainly had a lot to answer for but Bertha doubted the woman was feeling the slightest glimmer of remorse for what she’d done. In the kitchen, as she was mashing the soggy bread and vinegar together to form the poultice, Aidy too was worrying about just how, on top of working full-time, she was going to manage all the household chores while her grandmother recovered, her only help being with the lighter tasks her siblings could perform. But somehow she would just have to. And no matter how tired she was, she must not let her grandmother know and make her feel any more guilty than she already was.
It was approaching nine o’clock and Aidy had just finished mopping the kitchen floor. Bertha’s home-made pain-killing remedy certainly seemed to have done something for her. At the moment she was asleep on the sofa, although looking quite a sight with clumps of the bread poultice resembling grotesque growths covering her bruises, in the hope they’d help speed up their healing. The children had all gone to bed without so much as a murmur of protest tonight. Usually they put up some sort of lame excuse to delay bedtime for a while longer. Aidy was grateful they hadn’t. They’d obviously sensed that with all she had on her mind, their sister wasn’t in the mood to put up with any nonsense from them. Since their mother’s death, before going up, Marion’s parting words were always the same. ‘Mam might be back when I get up in the morning.’ All the others were always too choked to respond to her. Betty and George still cried themselves to sleep, although George would deny it. How Aidy wished she could magic away their pain, and her own, Gran’s too, but she couldn’t. It was only time that would help ease that.
Despite her efforts not to, she started to think about Arch then. He had been an important part of her life for the last ten years, the most important for the last five as her husband. They had been very loving and supportive of each other. She was angry with him, hurt and shocked to have witnessed a side to him she hadn’t known about before and didn’t like at all, but regardless she was still missing the Arch she knew and loved dreadfully. A future without him in it seemed very bleak to her.
Why couldn’t she be like the majority of other women, who managed to turn a blind eye whenever their husbands were discovered to have been dishonest with them? But then a simple white lie, such as saying their wives looked nice when they looked awful or that the food was delicious when in truth it was unpalatable, was a far cry from voicing the sentiment that you were happy giving up your house and all your plans for the future, when in truth you weren’t at all. And there was still the matter that Arch had stood by and done nothing when his own mother had been verbally and almost physically attacking his wife and her family.
As desperate as she was for a way to resolve matters between herself and her husband and to return to the happy couple they had been before this, Aidy didn’t believe they could be reconciled.
She was just cleaning the dirty mop head in a bucket of cold water when her ears pricked as she heard the click of the latch on the yard gate, announcing the arrival of a visitor. The back door was already open to aid the drying of the floor. Propping the mop up by the