Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [74]
Alan. He’d be at work now. He was always moaning about the fact that his father insisted he work on Saturday mornings. She got out of bed cautiously, tensing in anticipation against the pain that movement would bring.
Bruises were already forming on her stomach and her ribs, her flesh too sore to bear the pressure of her own explorative touch. Bitterness calcified the angry contempt she already felt for Alan, overlaying last night’s fear. He needn’t think she was going to let him get away with what he had done, because she wasn’t. She lifted her hand to the back of her head. She could feel a lump where he had banged her head on the floor, and her hair was sticky. She removed her had and looked in horror at the dried blood on her fingers.
Tears burned her eyes as she moved too quickly and pain savaged her back into immobility. Just let him wait until she told her parents what he had done. Mummy would have her back home with them before Alan could say a word.
Bella frowned, ignoring the thudding pain that struck right through her head. Was that what she wanted? Being a married woman was far better than being an unmarried daughter living at home. A married woman was to be envied by those girls not lucky enough to be looking forward to their own marriage. She could just imagine how some of those cats at the Tennis Club would gossip about her behind her back if it got out that she had let Alan treat her so badly that she had had to go running home to her mother.
No, she had a better idea. Another way of punishing him. A better way; a way that would scare him, and give her the upper hand, she decided triumphantly.
‘Oh, it’s you, Bella.’
Alan’s mother certainly didn’t look very pleased to see her, Bella acknowledged, but that didn’t bother her. Mrs Parker wore her greying hair scraped back into a tight bun. She was a tall woman, taller than her husband and very well built, with an uncompromising no-nonsense manner.
‘I hope you don’t mind, Mother-in-law, but I feel ever so poorly, I really do.’
Bella might be having to fake her exaggerated politeness but she didn’t have to fake the pain that had her lifting her hand to her head, or the dark shadows bruising the skin beneath her eyes. ‘I would have gone home to Mummy, but, well, I wasn’t sure I could …’ She closed her eyes and leaned heavily against the open front door.
‘You’d better come in,’ Alan’s mother told her, curtly taking hold of her arm, and urging her, ‘Hurry up. I don’t want the neighbours talking.’
Once she had closed the front door behind Bella, she released her, eyeing her with hostility.
‘Now what exactly is it that’s wrong with you?’
White-faced, her voice faltering, Bella told her truthfully, ‘I’ve been ever so sick … and … and fainting. I wouldn’t have come round bothering you but I just didn’t know what to do. Alan will be back for his lunch any minute, but I’ve left him a note saying that I’m here. I thought that perhaps the fresh air …’
Bella could see that Alan’s mother had looked more displeased and grim with every word she had uttered. Well, it would serve her right to be led up the garden path a little bit after the mean way she’d been with her, and think that she was pregnant, especially with her going on about goody-goody Trixie all the time, even if the truth was that Bella wanted herself to be pregnant with Alan’s baby even less than she knew her mother-in-law did.
‘Well, I still don’t know what you’ve come round here for. It seems to me that it’s a doctor you want to be seeing, not me,’ she told Bella forthrightly.
‘A doctor! Oh, no. I mean …’ Bella allowed her eyes to fill with tears and her bottom lip to tremble. ‘I know it was only an accident – Alan wasn’t even there – but … well, it sounds so silly saying