Unspoken: A story of secrets, love and revenge T. Belshaw (good books to read for beginners txt) 📖

a bottle, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with it. She had to go straight onto the formula milk.

Marjorie fed on the breast for her first feed. Then, Martha must have garbled a warning to her in toddler speak, because from the moment those two were introduced, Marjorie refused to breast feed. Again, it was good for me, because I didn’t have to spend half the bloody day expressing.

As they grew up, Martha took complete control over Marjorie. She used to copy everything Martha did, every little quirk, every action, even the speech patterns were the same, she became a clone of her sister. I didn’t think it was healthy, nor did Miriam, who took on the extra task of looking after them in the daytime while I was out on the farm.

We tried to isolate Marjorie but she just screamed the place down until we let Martha into the room. They shared a bed when Marjorie was old enough to leave her cot. She had her own bed but she’d get out of it as soon as the light went out and climb in with her sister.

Martha was married twice, how she managed to snare two men with her personality, I’ll never know, but she did. The first one was a tubby, balding man called Thomas, and he married her at twenty-five. He had a good job in a bank and they were very comfortably off. Martha never needed to demean herself by having to take a job, she thought she was the Queen Bee. They bought a house with a cheap, bank employee mortgage. It was a nice one too, detached with a big garden. They had just the one child. Your mother, of course.

Thomas died of a heart attack in nineteen seventy-five, but Martha didn’t seem to mourn his passing that much. The house was paid off by that time and he’d left her a decent amount in the bank account. She was only a widow for six months. She met a man called Roger at Butlins, where she’d taken Nicola on holiday. Marjorie was there too of course. She had never married. Martha hadn’t approved of any of the few men she had met.

Roger was younger than Martha by a good few years; he was a serial adulterer, a lousy husband and an awful step-father. He refused to work, and spent Martha’s money like water. Although she worried about the drastically dwindling bank account, she refused to take my advice and throw him out. She accused me of never liking him and that was true. I told her not to marry him at the start and I’d never even met him.

Marjorie backed her up of course. In a rare moment of singular thought, she told me that I had cursed her sister’s marriage. Anyway, I refused to get involved after that, and when Roger announced that he wanted a divorce, as he’d met someone younger, I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised.

Martha was. She was grief stricken; it was as though she had suffered another bereavement. Marjorie moved in with her and nursed her through the divorce proceedings, giving up her own rented bungalow in the process.

Because she’d been stupid enough to marry him, and live together for eight years, Roger was able to claim some of her assets. The divorce court judge awarded him a quarter of the current value of the house, but she was allowed to keep its contents and the paltry amount of money left in her bank account.

Martha loved that house, it enabled her to look down her nose at the ordinary people of the town who struggled just to pay their rent, but she couldn’t afford to remortgage as she didn’t have a job, and even if she got one, she wouldn’t be able to earn enough to cover the monthly payments. The only income she had was her family allowance and the inflated rent that she charged Marjorie.

So, the pair of them came cap in hand to me.

I had not long sold off a couple of acres of land to a house builder, and the farm was still ticking along nicely, so I had a good income and money in the bank to spare. When they knocked on my door, I had just finished wrestling with a boar so that I could get to a hen that had somehow found its way into the sty. I was aching, wound up and grumpy. Not in the best of moods to receive a cry for help.

Martha and Marjorie sat facing the window in the front room, I sat opposite them in pretty much the same spot, though thankfully, not the same chair, that my father had sat in during his drunken sojourn. They didn’t waste time on pleasantries.

‘I need twelve thousand pounds, and I need it this week,’ Martha said, flatly. It was a demand, not a request.

Marjorie repeated part of it like the parrot she was. ‘This week.’

I didn’t reply. I had seen this coming, just not the extortionate amount.

‘You owe me,’ Martha said. ‘I’ll get the farm when you die anyway, let’s call it an advance.’

‘An advance,’ repeated Marjorie.

I pursed my lips as if I was considering the ridiculous request. I hadn’t offered them so much as a cup of tea and I wasn’t about to agree to this.

‘Martha,’ I said firmly. ‘I advised you to get rid of that leech of a man a long time ago. Had you taken that advice he wouldn’t have been in the position to fleece you like he has.’ I looked out of the window to the neatly kept front garden. ‘So, because of that, I’m not going to give you the money. You can quite easily sell your house and buy a smaller one. You don’t need all that space. Why do you need four bedrooms? You can buy one of the new builds on the other side of town for the money you’ll make. Have you seen them? They’re quite