Page 16 of Second Chances at the Farm on Muddypuddle
‘I don’t want to put you out,’ Walter said.
Beth returned fire. ‘You should have thought of that before you went up a ladder. And in slippers, too.’
‘It was an accident,’ he shot back. ‘Unlike what you did. You could hardly call moving house and not telling anyone anaccident.’
‘What I do is none of your business.’ Beth’s voice was sharp. How dare he lecture her on what she should or shouldn’t do.
‘Ditto.’
‘Ooh, get you and your fancy words. Been looking up the crossword answers, have you?’
‘Don’t be so childish.’
‘It’s better than being oldish.’
‘Oldish?’
‘Yeah, too old to go up a ladder, and too stupid to realise it.’
‘Mum!’ Dulcie was aghast.
‘It’s true. Anyway, he started it.’ Beth glared at Walter.
Walter glared back.
Beth had gained a lot of experience in outglaring teenage daughters, and she smirked when Walter looked away first. When she noticed that Dulcie was glaring ather, Beth quickly rearranged her features.
‘I’m not standing for this, Mum. Walter needs rest; not you goading him. If you can’t behave yourself, you’ll have to go.’
Beth gasped. ‘Where?’ Surely Dulcie wouldn’t throw her own mother out.
‘Maisie’s static has three bedrooms. You can stay there until your new house is repaired.’
‘No!’ Beth cried. Maisie would never agree. And even if she did, a static caravan would be too cramped for three.
Dulcie was still glaring. ‘Promise me you’ll behave yourself?’ She had her hands on her hips and looked as though she meant it.
Beth forced out a reluctant, ‘Yes’
‘Good.’ Dulcie turned her attention back to Walter, and Beth felt a small degree of satisfaction that Dulcie was going to berate him too.
But she didn’t. When Dulcie said, ‘What’s it to be Walter, soup or omelette?’ Beth ground her teeth together to hold her irritation in check.
The next couple of weeks were going to be very long indeed.
Bloody hell, this was going to be worse than he anticipated, and he wasn’t referring to his broken leg, either. Walter was referring to Beth. Why, oh why, did she have to rock up at the exact same time he was incapacitated? And it looked like she’d alreadysharpened her knives and wasn’t averse to stabbing him with them. Talk about kicking a man when he was down.
He held the moral high ground though: climbing a ladder to see to his guttering himself because he didn’t want to bother Otto, might have been misguided but it had been done with the best of intentions. He couldn’t say the same for the stunt that Beth had pulled. Deceitful and underhand, that’s what she was. Although he did concede that she had a stroke of bad luck with her ceiling coming down. If she had been able to move into her house in the village today, her actions wouldn’t have had such annoying consequences.
Poor Dulcie. Walter felt very sorry for her. Not only did she have him and his broken leg to contend with (which he was deeply sorry about) but she now had her mother to put up with. The woman was a menace.
Abruptly, he felt exhausted. All he wanted was to crawl into his own bed in his cottage and sleep for a week, but his cottage was out of the question. To his chagrin, he was acutely aware that he needed help (the nurse had been right) and the only way he would get it was to stay with Otto and Dulcie for a while. Otto, the poor boy, had too much on his plate with the restaurant to be able to give him a great deal of assistance, but Dulcie worked from home, so she’d be able to keep an eye on him. Walter hoped he wouldn’t put her out too much.
‘I think I’ll go for a lie down,’ he said as soon as Otto returned with his things, but as he tried to get up, he didn’t know how. He feared putting any weight on his plastered leg, and he couldn’t lever himself up using just the one.
Shuffling awkwardly to the edge of the chair, he reached for his crutches and promptly knocked them over. Dismayed and humiliated, he could feel his face flushing, and if he hadn’tbeen so damned cross about the whole thing, he had a horrible suspicion that he might have burst into tears.
Quietly Otto bent to retrieve the crutches, holding them in one hand whilst he offered the other to Walter, who took it gratefully. But even with his son’s help, Walter found it a struggle to get to his feet, and he was even more irate and embarrassed by the time he was upright.
