Реклама. ООО «ЛитРес», ИНН: 7719571260.
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Returning home to Newtown had the feel of a backward step about it but Veronica pushed the thought aside as she parked her car outside the little semi-detached. She sat in the car and stared at the frowning roof over the little verandah, the single window – her room, and the single door into the hallway; a single room-wide house, just four rooms deep, with a back shed where, Sally, her mother lived. Yes, she was coming back but she was coming back home. This was hers. Yes, this was home and the niggling thought about a backward step faded and disappeared.
Valda Mirabella, a thirty two year old retrenched bank executive, decided to stop worrying about being unemployed - the constant rejections were humiliating - and to have a go at the jobs that her husband, Andrew, had always wanted her to do: being a wife and mother. She had never thought of those jobs as employment, she thought of them as most men thought of them: as things one did while waiting for a job. Like everything she did, Valda Mirabella, gave it her all. She worked hard at her job at the bank and when that disappeared she worked hard at being unemployed, which was really the problem; but then she realised that the house was a mess, the routines were unworkable, her two daughters were perpetually disorganised and angry, and something had to be done. Her first thought was to give a local unemployed woman a financial helping-hand and hire a housekeeper but during one of her daughter’s vitriolic tantrums, Valda was informed in language crude and hurtful that SHE was an unemployed woman and more ‘local’ than anyone. After slapping her daughter’s face, which only made things worse, she had to face a few realities, and one of those realities was the possible immense satisfaction she knew could be gained by doing a job well. Does that still apply when the jobs are “wife and mother”? She hated the word ‘housewife’. It didn’t take long. In fact, she was a little surprised at the ease with which the words ‘home-maker’ slipped into her vocabulary of things called ‘work’; and life, like everything she did, she did with gusto.
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“Oh, we never have the light on.”
Veronica made a mental note but didn’t respond. “I want you to use the actual words you would use in such a situation.”
.....