by Martina Cole
She heard Colin’s three daughters shouting with glee and June shouting back at them. They loved coming here though their mother thought Susan and her family were all common. The thought made Susan smile.
Silly cow that she was, all middle-class respectability and Blairism, Marks and Spencer’s clothing and mystic medicine.
Feng Shui had been turned into cockney rhyming slang for fuck me and one of Colin’s kids had picked up on it. Susan knew she had got the blame for that one as well. Yet without her Colin would still have been a no one, working for nothing. Her case had made him and he was grateful for that. They had all bonded after the appeal, kept together, stayed friends.
He smiled at her now.
‘You’ll be on the box tonight, Sue. They’re going over all the big stories of the century.’
She raised her eyebrows in annoyance.
‘I ain’t watching that crap, I’m having a bleeding party.’
He kissed her gently. She smelled of Chloë as she always did.
‘They’re noisy gits, your lot.’
Colin grinned. ‘Only when they’re round here, Sue. It’s the way you affect people.’
‘I get the blame for everything, me!’
Later that night as they toasted the new millennium Susan looked around at her family and friends. She saw them all as they had been, younger but less hopeful somehow.
She saw Ivy, smiling and grinning and not understanding what was going on around her, and was amazed once more at what extreme age could do for a person. Everyone liked Ivy now, and she was adored in her old people’s home. But they had not known her in her fighting days.
Susan saw her friends, all happy in their own ways, and glad to be here, glad to be with her.
She was Susan White now. A new person, a new woman in more ways than one. As she felt Peter grab her hand she was grateful that from the first time she had kissed him, she had been enveloped in the love and respect she had craved all her life. These feelings had grown stronger over the years. Nothing that had happened in the past could change what she had been given. Four happy children, a grandchild on the way and good friends. What more could she possibly want from this new century? She already had all she needed, all that she had craved as a little girl.
She felt Peter’s hand safe in hers and smiled at him happily, knowing that when they finally went to bed she wouldn’t be allowed to sleep for hours. Mind you, she couldn’t think of a better way to be.
The thought made her smile wider and looking at Roselle they locked eyes. Roselle raised her glass in a private toast, just for the two of them and Susan did the same. They had both been the victims of Barry in their own ways and the bond had grown stronger over the years. Joseph was in New York with his wife, and Roselle knew that since burying Ivan, and her son finding out the truth of his beginnings, there had been a rift. Well, it was his loss, though she knew Roselle didn’t quite see it that way. She felt the pain for her friend as though it was happening to her.
As Danny’s arm went around Roselle she smiled happily and Susan could relax once more and enjoy herself.
Geraldine, worse for wear and flirting with Colin, was sitting on the arm of June’s chair. Looking over at her mother, Susan screwed up her eyes with mirth. June had long ago been forgiven by her daughters.
‘I told you, everyone! I said she’d sleep through it, and she has!’
TWO WOMEN
MARTINA COLE
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