A Bouquet of Barbed Wire by Andrea Newman Page A

you’d like her to have?’
    He was momentarily chilled. ‘How very perspicacious of you. Both, I suppose.’ A dishonest answer, he thought with disgust.
    Sarah said, ‘Then how about a gold bracelet. You can spend whatever you like and it’s classic and never goes out of fashion and she can wear it all the time, with everything.’
    He thought about it. He liked the picture. ‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’ But he was not sure if it was the bracelet itself that he liked or Sarah’s description of it. She had seemed so sure that Prue would wear it all the time. How had she known that was just what he wanted?
    ‘Or a watch,’ Sarah said. ‘Has she got a watch?’
    ‘Yes. That was her eighteenth birthday present—’ laughing apologetically. His eyes lighted on Sarah’s own watch, very slim and gold and unobtrusive. Easily a hundred pounds. ‘Rather like yours,’ he added. Again by suggesting a watchshe had hit on something that Prue would seldom remove. He found it uncanny.
    Sarah said lightly, ‘She a lucky girl. My father never bought me anything like that. Oh, not that I blame him, he couldn’t afford it. But it must be fun if you can. I love my watch.’
    ‘Boy-friend?’ Manson kept his tone casual. He was surprised to find that it mattered to know who had given Sarah the watch. Perhaps he had been wrong about her.
    She laughed. ‘Good heavens, no. Step-father. It was a piece of bribery and corruption, you see; supposed to make me love him.’ She spoke very flippantly but Manson thought he detected real bitterness underneath: the first hint that her parents’ rearrangements were perhaps not as ideal as she had painted them.
    ‘And did it?’ he asked. Conversations with Sarah were like trips on an escalator: it always seemed impossible to get off half-way but the end when it came was abrupt.
    ‘No. But he bought my sister a washing machine and a fridge at the same time and she loves him.’ She started typing again.
    The phone rang. It was Prue.
    ‘Daddy.’
    He was startled into saying, ‘Darling, are you all right?’
    ‘Yes, yes of course I am.’ But she did not seem to be laughing at him. ‘I just called to say goodbye.’
    Called?
Called
. She had picked up the beastly word from
him
of course. ‘Goodbye? But you’re not off till next week.’
    ‘No, we’re going tomorrow. The cottage is empty so we may as well be there—and I hate my job.’ Pause. ‘You were quite right.’
    He couldn’t say anything.
    Prue went on, ‘I don’t think work suits me.’
    ‘Oh, what nonsense. It just wasn’t the right job, that’s all.’
    ‘I don’t think anything suits me.’
    Prue, whatever do you mean?’
    Choking sound. ‘Oh, Daddy, I’m so miserable.’ She was actually crying.
    ‘Darling, what
is
the matter?’ He had a tight, hard sensation in his chest, a pain like a lump of apple lodged against his rib-cage—the way he ignorantly imagined heart-cases would feel.
    ‘Oh, nothing.’
    ‘It can’t be nothing. You don’t make a fuss over nothing, you never have.’ As a child, her courage had astonished him: she had always been much braver than the twins. Falling out of a tree, burning herself, being bitten by a dog, she always, after the age of about nine, tended to turn white with shock rather than cry. He remembered in particular one hideous cut, right to the bone, on a spike, and her ashen, incredulous face at the pain and the blood and the damage she had done herself. But no tears.
    She said, almost inaudibly, ‘I’m sorry we had that fight.’
    ‘Oh, darling, you’re not crying about
that.’
    She didn’t answer.
    ‘Look, Prue, we were both sticking up for ourselves, that’s all. Two pig-headed old characters locking horns.’ He was too moved to disentangle the metaphor. That’s all forgotten.’
    She sniffed, and he heard her blowing her nose. ‘Was that all you were crying about?’ He wondered (hoped?) that she had quarrelled with Gavin and wanted his comfort and