Trust by Kate Veitch Page A

husband’s watercolour landscapes with a portrait he’d made of their two daughters, aged perhaps eleven and six. It was not a great painting, but that was not the reason it had been sitting in a cupboard since she’d moved here to the retirement village. Despite the stiffness, the unconvincing hands, Neville had captured rather more of the sisters’ relationship than Jean liked: Susanna in the background, looking not out at the viewer but, with a proud smile, toward her younger sister, while Angie’s winsome blonde curls and bright eyes lit up the picture. Always stealing the limelight . Jean caught that thought, and mentally slapped herself on the wrist. Stop that! It never bothered Susie, so why am I still letting it bother me?
    Jean rose with a sigh and walked through to the kitchen of her neat, pretty unit. Susie is truly a good person . A better person than I am. She took the teapot outside and emptied the leaves on the meticulously tilled soil around one of the espaliered camellias in her courtyard. A few flowers on the gardenia bush had already opened; Jean leaned down to them and inhaled, but without really taking in the pleasure of their sweet fragrance. Her mind was elsewhere, wrestling with a problem more difficult than those brain-teasers her friend Leonard Styles enjoyed solving. It was Leonard, tactful and persuasive, who’d suggested she might put some pictures of her younger daughter up amongst the others on her wall; he who was encouraging her to tackle this most taxing of problems: forgiveness.
    Forgiveness . A concept that had always seemed as facile to Jean as a greeting card. Now she was trying to grasp its essence, what it might mean for her, and she was finding it very, very difficult. It’s like learning another language. And I’m too old.
    But that was merely an excuse, even though she was indeed seventy-three. Jean knew that forgiveness had never been her strong suit. She had resisted it all her life, and especially since Angie proved to be so … impossible.
    Where had it begun? Where had things started to go wrong for her younger daughter? No – Jean corrected herself – between her younger daughter and herself?
    She put the teapot down and started twisting the small furry bud-like seeds from the branches of the camellia. Helping a plant to direct its energy, its growth, that was easy. Just so with Susie: she’d been an easy child, a joy, always so open to guidance and advice. And look at her now: a good career, a solid marriage, two nice, capable children.
    But with Angie, the problems had been there from the start, and the way people responded to her looks certainly hadn’t helped. What a pretty baby! That’s what Neville had said the minute she was born, and everyone – everyone! – had agreed. She was indeed a pretty little thing, like apple blossom, all white and pink, but Jean felt instinctively that it was a mistake to go on and on about it. Was she the only one who even noticed Susie, plain and brown as a nut, standing by as her little sister was cooed at and exclaimed over? Valiant little Susie, ignored but never complaining, never protesting, never resentful of the new star who’d stolen all her light.
    Why could no one else see how unfair it was to make such a fuss of one child, especially for something as frivolous and unearned as prettiness? Fairness had always been a guiding principle in Jean’s life, and she had been a fair mother. Scrupulously so. Neville should have had more sense, but he was besotted. Father and older sister, both were Angie’s willing servants, as the demanding baby became a temperamental child, then a blindly wilful teenager.
    Only Jean had treated Angie with the firm hand she needed. The things everyone else let her get away with! Even when she finally got expelled from school, Neville had been reluctant to chastise her. It was always, She means well. She does her best. She’s highly strung. She’ll grow out of it – to which Jean had