The Marriage K.L. Slater (classic romance novels TXT) 📖

to watch an episode of Virgin River on Netflix. She turned on the gas log burner, which looked just like the real thing without any of the mess or the invasive toxic fumes she kept reading about, and settled back with her glass of white wine.

She looked around the small living room. It was nothing special, this house. Semi-detached, two bedrooms, with a small, narrow garden that she’d had fully decked for convenience three years ago. But it was paid for and it belonged to her and her alone.

On reflection, her life hadn’t turned out quite how she’d expected, but then as far back as college when her friends – including Jill – would chatter on about getting married and having kids, Audrey never joined in. She’d never imagined herself as a sort of mother hen figure, organising her husband and kids and perhaps a family dog.

And now here she was, at almost fifty. Never married and forever hearing how women of her age were unable to find partners because the men all wanted younger women. Well good luck to them! What would she want a grunting, moaning old bloke in her life for, anyway?

She pointed the remote control at the television and watched the beautiful scenery roll by in the show’s opening credits. The series was supposed to be set in California but Audrey had read that they’d done all the filming in Vancouver.

Interesting that, when you believed one thing and then found out another. Quite different but sort of the same was the position she’d found herself in. She’d had to make some uncomfortable decisions but, if push came to shove, she’d stand by them.

The truth would not go down well with her old friend. Audrey had done her best to wake Jill up to reality but she was blind to anything other than what she wanted to believe.

Currently, Jill was as infuriated by the age difference between Tom and his new wife almost as much as she was worried about Bridget’s possibly sinister intentions. Audrey had heard whispers of gossip already around town. People who’d sent her a message or text, asking her if it was true that this middle-aged woman had married Jill’s son, a man who’d not yet turned thirty.

The glossy magazines Audrey had a weakness for were always full of photographs and shallow articles about young women and their much older partners. George Clooney was seventeen years older than his wife, Leonardo DiCaprio was twenty-three years older than his current beau, and nobody seemed to care a jot about it. The vicious comments and wave of negative responses had been saved for Brigitte Macron, twenty-four years older than her husband, the French president.

It annoyed Audrey that Jill subscribed to the same annoying double standards. Of course, she understood her friend’s worries and her resentment of the situation. Bridget and Jill were once good friends and the fact Tom had gone to prison for the manslaughter of Bridget’s son would traumatise anyone.

Still, as an older woman herself, Jill should have known better, been able to separate the age issue from the family issue. Jill had married Robert in her early twenties, and her beloved full-time career in the library service had instantly taken a back seat when she’d had Tom but she’d picked it up again later, taken part-time hours.

Books had been everything to Jill when she’d been younger, and now she barely mentioned them. When he’d been booted out of the architect’s firm and retrained as a student counsellor, Robert had packed Jill’s collection of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen away in boxes and relocated them ‘temporarily’ to the garage to give him space to work. He’d converted the room into his own office and it had been that way for years now.

‘It’s not right that everything you care about is constantly pushed back,’ Audrey had fumed when Jill told her about the books she’d been in the middle of restoring. She’d tried her best to rekindle a bit of inner fire in her old friend, but it had fallen on deaf ears. Like everything else did.

‘I don’t mind,’ Jill had said placidly. ‘I haven’t the heart for reading or repairing them any more.’

Audrey had been forced to accept that Jill had chosen a gentler path in life, conducive to what Robert’s idea of a good wife was. When Tom had gone to prison, Jill had rapidly faded to a shadow of her former self. She’d quit her job and had begun to rely more and more on their friendship, looking to Audrey for guidance and advice although never wanting to take heed of any of it when it came to Robert.

Jill had been too soft for years, allowing Robert – who Audrey had always felt disapproved of their friendship – and Tom to dictate her every move.

It was time for Audrey to even up the playing field a bit. She knew a lot more about the people in her friend’s life than Jill thought she did. More than Jill herself, in fact. The Billinghurst family weren’t quite the wonderful, innocent bunch Jill would lead her to believe, and they had trodden on other people they considered beneath them for long enough.

The last thing Audrey wanted to do was to hurt Jill needlessly. But that was an impossibility now because things had gone too far. One day soon she’d explain to Jill exactly what she’d done and hope she’d somehow understand.

Audrey turned up the volume and settled back into her cushions, cradling her wine while Soames purred on her lap.

She had the distinct feeling that life was about to get very interesting indeed.

Sixteen

1995

Jill had made a Mediterranean vegetable tortilla and a tomato salad for tea. Bridget and Jesse were coming over for their regular Wednesday-afternoon visit to the house.

Jill looked forward to their company. She liked to make a bit of an event of it, set the table properly. Pretty paper napkins, nice cutlery, new water glasses she’d bought in the House