The Girl in the Scrapbook by Carolyn Ruffles (reading women TXT) 📕

door once again. It was still bitterly cold and the sky had darkened after the bright morning sunshine. Norah shivered. The day no longer felt filled with promise.

Suddenly, she saw a figure running up the drive towards the farmhouse. She recognised Arthur immediately and smiled broadly in welcome. Then she wondered what had happened to cause him to run with such urgency. Was it one of the horses or maybe one of the cows? As he approached, there was something about his face and the way he refused to meet her eyes which filled her with dread. Something awful had happened. His pace slowed to a walk and then he stopped, staring at her helplessly. She stood rooted to the spot and waited. Already, she sensed the horror of what he was about to say.

‘Norah, I’m so sorry. There’s been a terrible accident …’

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Chapter 7

Jennifer - November 2016

Jennifer was used to walking a solitary path. As an only child, she became accustomed to her own company from an early age and spent many hours, growing up, in her bedroom alone, immersed in the fantasy worlds that books had provided. At school, she never lacked friends but she was one of the quiet ones, serious and studious, preferring to watch from the side-lines rather than taking centre stage. She was known as the class swot because lessons came to her so easily. She learnt it was best to keep a low profile and adopt an air of self-deprecation. No one liked a know-it-all.

She was ambitious though. Her father was a doctor and he had nothing but the highest expectations for his only daughter. Unwilling to disappoint him, she worked hard through school and university and always achieved the highest levels. Stephen Thompson was a dour man, twenty-six years older than Elizabeth Bainbridge, Jennifer's mother, whom he'd married when she was barely sixteen. Elizabeth had told her daughter that she'd experienced a very strict upbringing by parents who had adopted her as a young child. She was desperate to escape. When Jennifer’s father had proposed marriage, after a brief courtship, she was swept along by the romance of it all. She had considered herself fortunate to have attracted the regard of the tall, elegant doctor. Jennifer’s arrival had followed just nine months after the wedding but complications during the birth had meant she was unable to have any more children. The marriage deteriorated quickly after that but they had stayed together and Jennifer’s childhood was coloured by bitter rows and cold silences between her two parents. Elizabeth had been a very pretty woman with red gold hair and brown eyes but years of disappointment in a loveless marriage prematurely aged her and she died of cancer when she was only thirty-nine.

At the age of twenty-one, Jennifer joined a large firm of accountants. She had always enjoyed the logic of numbers and, at the time, it had seemed an obvious choice of career. For the first few years, she had enjoyed the challenge of working her way through all the exams and gradually earning herself more responsibility. Once she was fully qualified, though, a sense of dissatisfaction crept in and she began to cast around for something more.

The turning point, when it came, was totally unexpected. Children from a local primary school were doing a project on women in business and she was asked to go in and answer questions about her job. Now aged twenty-six,  she considered children an anathema and did not look forward to the experience. She wondered how she could make her job seem exciting and interesting to a group of ten-year-olds and spent some while preparing a talk.

The day came. With trepidation, she walked into the classroom and  proceeded to have the time of her life. The children were polite and interested during her brief presentation and then bombarded her with questions.

‘Do you enjoy your job?’ asked one boy with piercing, blue eyes.

‘Er … of course,’ Jennifer replied lamely.

‘What do you enjoy most about it?’ he persisted.

Jennifer thought quickly. What exactly did she most like about her work? ‘The bit I like best,’ she began, ‘is  … the people … the clients … getting to know what their needs are and what solutions I can provide.’

‘Do you spend much time doing that?’ asked a small girl with frizzy, brown hair. ‘You said you spend most of the time in your office working on your own.’

‘Er … well yes, that’s true … but I like that too.’

‘If you like working with other people, why did you choose a job where you spend most of your time on your own?’ asked the blue-eyed boy.

‘That’s a very good question,’ Jennifer smiled at him ruefully. ‘I suppose the truth is that, while I enjoy my job, I’m always looking for a new challenge. There’s nothing to say I won’t be doing something entirely different in a few years’ time. That’s why it’s so important to work hard at school,’ she rushed on having intercepted a questioning glance from the class teacher, Miss Potter. ‘Then you have lots of choices open to you. You can do whatever you want.’

‘Could you be an astronaut?’ asked a small boy sitting in the front row. ‘That’s what I want to be when I’m grown up.’

‘That’s great. I think I would need a lot of training to become an astronaut. I would probably have to start by going back to university and doing a different degree but there’s no reason why I couldn’t do that.’

‘If you weren’t an accountant, what would you most like to be?’ This question came from a serious- looking girl with long, plaited, blonde hair and large, black framed glasses.

‘I would have to think about that,’ she answered truthfully. ‘It’s not something I’ve seriously considered.’

‘You could be a hairdresser like my mum,’ another girl chimed in helpfully.

‘Or a stunt pilot,’ exclaimed a boy from the back of the room.

‘You could be a teacher. I think you’d be a