Good Husband Material by Trisha Ashley Page B

Master.
    The
relief
!
    From not wanting to tell anyone about it I swung round to wanting to tell everyone. James just said I was an idiot, and he could have told me there was nothing wrong with me, but since he hasn’t got a medical degree it would hardly have been likely to reassure me.
    Secretly, I’m still hardly convinced of my reprieve, and the lumpy tenderness is still there. But I expect I’ll live with it, since it’s got to be better than the alternative.
    It’s put me right off checking my breasts, though. How can you spot one rogue marble in a bagful?
    James’s reaction was such a damp squib that I cast about for someone else to tell, then I thought: why not phone Peggy? She’d understand.
    Peggy Mulvaney, my friend from the Society for Women Writing Romance, writes raunchy books under a variety of unlikely pen names, Desdemona Calthrop being the best known of them.
    She says she spends a lot of time on research.
    I haven’t seen much of her since we moved here because it’s so difficult to get to SFWWR meetings as a non-driver, and I do miss her and my other friends in the Society. Being accepted as a member when my first book was published did wonders for my self-confidence. And, of course, since my books keep on selling, I do feel I’m a success at
something
.
    Anyway, I phoned her up and we had a lovely long chat. She understood perfectly what I’d been going through, because she had a similar scare in the past and they’d told her it was some sort of benign thing and to ignore it, which she did.
    She said now she’d put on so much weight it would take her a week to do a check, but Gerry, her current lover, was always willing to try.
    I felt much happier after this, and thought Mother might like to know what I’d been through, too. But there was such a very long wait before the phone was picked up that I’d begun to imagine her lying in a pool of cooking sherry in the kitchen before there was a click and a cautious voice quavered, ‘She’s not in!’
    ‘Hello, Granny!’ I shouted. ‘It’s me – Tish.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Tish – your granddaughter.’
    ‘Why are you shouting?’
    ‘Sorry. Where’s Mother?’
    ‘Gone to the off-licence. She said the library, but when did she ever go to a library? She doesn’t fool me one bit and never has. I answered the phone.’
    ‘I know, I can hear you. I thought you never answered the phone?’
    ‘Yes, I answered the phone, and I never answer it.’
    ‘Then why did you answer it today, Granny?’
    ‘Don’t whisper, I can’t hear you. I don’t know why I bothered to answer this pesky thing. I won’t do it again.’
    ‘Granny, I went to the hospital today because I thought I had cancer, but I haven’t. Isn’t that wonderful?’
    ‘Cancer? I’m Scorpio. Not that I believe in all that nonsense. Your mother does, more fool her. What have you taken up astrology for? I don’t want my charts read!’
    ‘But I haven’t taken astrology up!’
    ‘Then why did you want to know my birth-sign?’ she demanded reasonably. I gave up.
    ‘How are you, Granny?’
    ‘Your mother is trying to kill me.’
    ‘Kill you? But Granny … !’
    ‘Yes, kill me! Brown sherry bottles left on brown carpets and green wine bottles left on green carpets. She does it on purpose. Soon I’ll be falling over your mother.’
    ‘She’s not that bad, surely?’
    ‘“My daughter-in-law drinks,” I told the doctor, and do you know what he said? “Drink is necessary to sustain human life, Mrs Norwood.” “That may be,” I told him, “but sherry isn’t!” Then I told him where to stick his stethoscope, the patronising fool!’ She cackled evilly, and I winced.
    ‘Oh dear – you really shouldn’t have done that, Granny! And I thought you liked Dr Reevey.’
    ‘Stuffed shirt. Said he wasn’t going to come and see
me
again. Good riddance!’
    ‘Oh dear!’ I said again, helplessly. ‘You’ll run out of doctors at this rate.’
    ‘No such luck. They breed