Trust by Kate Veitch Page B

snorted, ‘I doubt it!’ And she’d been proved right, alas, as Angie went from folly to disaster to tragedy.
    Jean stood now by the espaliered camellias, face grim and shoulders rigid as the ghastly events of those years of Angie’s drug addiction beat at her again: the lying, the stealing, the police knocking time and again on their door, searching their house – the thousand and one betrayals both small and large. The tremulous hope Neville held out every time Angie swore she was giving it up, going into rehab, turning her life around. Time and again, the dashing of that hope.
    It was what Angie did to Neville, that’s what Jean couldn’t forgive. The apple of her father’s eye; he’d had no defences against any of it. He always had a weak heart, and she broke it: that’s what killed him. And then Angie’s own husband, that poor foolish boy. He’d never touched heroin till he met her. She killed him, too.
    Forgiving Angie would mean that she’d got away with it all: the years of unremitting selfishness. The deaths. Let her take up with these fundamentalists and their born-again mumbo-jumbo; let them forgive her, if that’s what they were so keen on. Not Jean Greenfield. She had more steel in her spine than that.
    But Leonard had put forward another proposition: that forgiveness might be the stronger, the more courageous thing to do. Jean respected him too much to dismiss this idea, much as she’d have liked to. Leonard was a former magistrate, a tough-minded, admirably fair and balanced man, a rationalist and atheist like herself. Therefore Jean had forced herself to listen, even though the very word forgiveness made her so angry she wanted to evict it from her mind. Even allowing it to sit there quietly was a challenge that at times felt downright dangerous.
    And how does one forgive, precisely? Jean had no idea. If there were a pattern, a recipe, a form, then she might be able to follow it, but there was none. After considerable hesitation she’d taken up Leonard’s suggestion about putting the portrait up, but look: here she was turning herself inside out, again, over this girl who’d always received far more attention than she deserved.
    Jean clicked her tongue and bestirred herself, picking up the teapot from the white patio table. Make a cup of tea – that, at least, was a straightforward and pleasant thing to do. She went inside, closing the glass door behind her, only to pause and open it again. The air was warm, and sweetly perfumed. Why not let it in?

EIGHT
    Stella-Jean had taken hold of Finn’s arm to tow him through the stream of kids surging out of the yard of the local primary school when she suddenly felt his skinny body go tense, like one of those antelopes on a wildlife program when it sees the lion creeping up. He stopped dead and the kid behind bumped into him, setting up a chain reaction of bumps and shoves. Swiftly Stella-Jean scanned the crowd for the source of her twitchy cousin’s alarm.
    There: that clutch of boys up ahead, idling just outside the gate, sneaking glances in their direction. The one in front, with the show-off looks: she’d seen him before. They were waiting for Finn, and not with friendly intent.
    She prodded his shoulder. ‘Come on, Finnster; stick with me,’ she said, and walked straight toward the gate at a fast clip. She fixed the boys with a tough look as she approached, but they had eyes only for their prey. Four of them had formed a semicircle around the good-looking kid, and all five now raised their right hands, each making a kind of microphone of his fist but with the thumb poking out stiffly toward his mouth. The leader counted them in, tapping his foot – one, two, three – and his followers drew a deep breath, eyes alight with excitement.
    ‘ Thumb, thumb, thumb, suck-a thumb, thumb, thumb ,’ they sang in perfect harmony. ‘ Suck-a thumb, thumb, thumb, suck-a thuuuumb …’
    She recognised this little outfit now: they’d been the stars of