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178 pages

English

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‘Stop trying to be brave all the time, Rachel. Fear is a necessary part of being alive. Sometimes we have to let it show. We have to own up to it or it drives us mad.’

Rachel Elliot is single and attractive, a director of a successful advertising agency, with a handsome lover, close friends, and a clutch of beloved godchildren. But as her fortieth birthday approaches, so does a whispering fear that she might have missed the point...

Almost imperceptibly over the years her friends and contemporaries have settled down and started families. Rather less subtly her parents have been urging Rachel to do the same. Managing a shocking incident at work is soon taking up all her energies and she adores her godchildren. So, is a child of her own what she really wants? Or is motherhood just what everyone else wants for her? If she picks the wrong path, there will be no turning back...

Join Amanda Brookfield as she revisits and refreshes her novel, The Godmother, and rediscover how she got her well-deserved reputation for writing about women’s lives with humour and honesty. Includes a brand-new foreword from the author.

Praise for Amanda Brookfield:

'An engaging, emotionally-charged and intriguing story' Michelle Gorman

No one gets to the heart of human relationships quite so perceptively as Brookfield.' The Mirror

'Unputdownable. Perceptive. Poignant. I loved it.' bestselling author Patricia Scanlan on Before I Knew You

'If Joanna Trollope is the queen of the Aga Saga, then Amanda Brookfield must be a strong contender for princess.' Oxford Times

What readers are saying about Amanda Brookfield:

‘I felt so involved in this story that I found myself thinking about it a lot during the day. A fantastic read. Gripping, moving, characters you care about, highly recommend.’

‘Packed with suspense, (I actually held my breath during some of the scenes) and full of relatable characters, this book will draw you in from the first page. Highly recommend.’

‘The tension builds on every page, the characters, as always with this author’s books, are drawn beautifully. I couldn’t put it down and am looking forward greatly to Amanda Brookfield’s next offering hopefully before too long!’

‘Brookfield is undoubtedly one of Britain's foremost chroniclers of human relationships. It goes without saying that this novel is another page turner – guaranteed to make you read the last 50 pages before sleep, even though you know you have an early start in the morning – but it is much, much more.’

Sujets

Mashups

Feminist

Siblings

Women

Coming of Age

Contemporary history

Sibling

Mother's Day

Woman

Feminism

The Women

Holiday

Contemporary

Family Life

Romance

Fiction

Informations

Publié par	Boldwood Books
Date de parution	05 mai 2023
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781838896362
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0850€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE GODMOTHER

AMANDA BROOKFIELD
For Edward
CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Acknowledgments

More from Amanda Brookfield

About the Author

About Boldwood Books
FOREWORD

I wrote The Godmother over twenty-five years ago, back in distant pre-digital days when people used fax machines instead of sending emails, and ‘mobile’ phones were cumbersome office gadgets used by the rare few. It was my fifth novel and I was in my mid-thirties, raising two very young children between finding time to write.
I picked advertising as the career for my heroine, Rachel, because it was the industry I had gone into after leaving university and therefore a world with which I was familiar. I had found it a fun and well-paid career, but also hugely stressful, mostly from being – like all workspaces then – a male dominated world. I loved being able to create my single, feisty, capable heroine, Rachel Elliot, and plant her in the middle of it, ready to take on all challenges, giving as good as she got – or at least doing her best to. ‘What Rachel Elliot wants, Rachel Elliot gets’, as an envious friend remarks at one point, which is what Rachel believes of herself, until life – reality – starts to get the better of her.
It is a curious business re-reading something you wrote a quarter of a century ago – a bit like meeting a person you once knew, of whom you feel inordinately fond, while seeing all their flaws! What struck me most on returning to The Godmother, however, was the fact that all the difficulties – some of them deeply disturbing – that Rachel has to grapple with, at work, in relationships and in society at large, have not really changed. That pressure on women not to cause a fuss, not to assert themselves, while still being multi-tasking domestic/work goddesses – sadly, it’s a battle still being fought. Indeed, Rachel Elliot, in many ways, was ahead of her time. She takes some dire wrong turns, but she is fearless and true to herself – which is what we are all aiming for in the end.

Amanda Brookfield, 2023
1

‘Give him to Rachel,’ said Joy, pointing with the christening candle across the room.
‘Yes, give him to Rachel,’ echoed Tony, her husband, emerging from the kitchen with a fresh pitcher of wine. ‘Let the godmother have a go.’
The wriggling bundle of yellowing silk, trimmed with cob-webbed lace, was passed from hand to hand along the line of guests, like a parcel at a children’s party, thought Rachel, regarding its approach with all the wariness of a native being invited to speak a foreign language.
‘He’s bound to cry,’ she declared, smiling through her fear, feeling all eyes upon her as she laid her white, suede handbag on the arm of the sofa and rubbed her hands together in a show of eagerness for the challenge ahead.
But Leo, who was six months old and who had been placed in the woefully haphazard care of his eleven-year-old sister, Isobel, for the last twenty minutes, did not cry upon being delivered to his godmother. He frowned at her instead, twisting his fist into his mouth and kicking out at the restrictions of the long christening robe, now entwined round his stocky legs like clingfilm.
‘I’m not sure he approves of his costume very much,’ Rachel ventured, cradling the baby in stiff arms, wary of projectile milk-dribble staining the front of her white, linen jacket, or, worse still, her chest being mistakenly identified as a source of nutrition. A frisson of repulsion and curiosity had zigzagged through her the day before upon finding Joy with her T-shirt hoicked up unceremoniously over one ripe and veiny bosom, so that Leo could feed while she guided Sam, her dyslexic nine-year-old, through a French reading book about farms.
‘But they all wore that gown,’ remarked a brisk, mousy-haired woman with Tony’s nose, ‘it’s family tradition.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Her arms were aching now. The woman turned away, giving Rachel the chance to step out of the social throng, none of whom she knew anyway, and sit down beside her handbag. Gingerly, she propped the baby up on her lap, straightening the copious folds of the gown as tidily as she could and doing her best to contain the wriggling limbs. For a moment, she thought wistfully of her other three godchildren, all of whom had long since acquired mouthfuls of teeth and a taste for beautifully undemanding, post-able activities like video games and Barbie dolls. ‘Bad luck, Leo,’ she whispered, giving the voluminous family heirloom another tug, ‘I should hate it too.’ The baby offered a feisty kick by way of concurrence and then promptly put his head in the crook of her arm and closed his eyes. Hardly daring to move for fear of interrupting this astonishingly rapid – and most welcome – submission to the pull of sleep, Rachel lifted her eyes for a few moments in order to study the room.
It was still only a few months since Joy and Tony had made their daring exit from the London rat race, transplanting the family from a four-bedroomed semi in Wimbledon to a charming but dilapidated farmhouse a few miles outside Turon, a medieval town that nestled in the upper regions of the Loire valley. A daring move indeed. Something to be admired as an attempt to make a dream come true, one of those about which most mortals ended up doing nothing more than talking. Upon studying the undisguisable chaos of the Daltons’ new sitting room, however, the peeling wallpaper, bunches of wires sticking out everywhere, like skeletal fingers, the scores of boxes stacked along every spare inch of wall, Rachel could not resist a shiver of relief that the experience was being endured by Joy and not herself. Leo hadn’t been part of their plan either, she remembered, casting a wary eye at her lap, her godson’s conception apparently having occurred quite by accident during the chaotic and unforeseeably long business of trying to sell the house and settle all their affairs in England. Joy, while professing to be appalled at the discovery of this unscheduled pregnancy, had seemed to revel in it too, perhaps, thought Rachel wickedly, because she was secretly thrilled to have proved that a fifteen-year marriage could still muster enough passion to overlook the use of sexual prophylactics.
‘Well, if it is such a disaster, why not consider your options?’ Rachel had asked, trying to be blunt but kind, when Joy first broke the news, weeping into a glass of wine which she said she really shouldn’t have, but from which she nevertheless gulped with unabashed need.
‘Christ, Rachel,’ she had gasped, hugging the small hump still easily disguised by a generous sweatshirt, ‘there’s a child in there. At twelve weeks, it’s got all its bits. I know it may be hard for you to understand, not having children and so on, but to have its life terminated, even now, would be tantamount to murder.’
‘Okay, okay – sorry I spoke.’ Rachel held both hands up. ‘Though I do remember,’ she couldn’t resist muttering, ‘there was a time when you waved a banner for abortion rights.’
‘That was years ago, for God’s sake. It’s different when you’ve had children, believe me. The very thought that… Oh, it’s impossible to explain.’
Rachel had nodded in a show of empathy, hating the familiar, unspoken criticism that she herself had not borne any children, that she had committed the unmentionable sin of choosing to remain single and nurture a career instead of a family. Once, friends like Joy had challenged her openly about such things, expressing either pity or fascination with her single status, teasing her with suggestions for life partners and having late babies. Now they no longer did so. An omission which Rachel suspected was connected directly to the fact that, at thirty-nine, she was moving ever closer to an age at which acquaintances had stopped expecting – or even wanting – her to change her ways.
Leo yawned, absently pushed a thumb into his eye socket, scowled at the unexpected pain, and then settled back to sleep, the dimpled fingers of one hand closing round the third button of Rachel’s suit jacket.
The trouble was, thought Rachel, watching the button being tugged by its cotton roots and not minding, something did feel different these days. Some new, unclassifiable emotion was pushing its way into the perfect bubble of her world, something which she did her best to ignore, but which felt disturbingly like a growing sense of pointlessness behind all that she had created, all that she had achieved. The ebb and flow of such thoughts, apart from being unpredictable and distressing, was also highly inconvenient. As board director of an international advertising agency, earning in excess of a hundred thousand pounds a year, with a luxurious flat in Chelsea, a soft-topped Audi and her own named parking slot in the underground cubby hole of a directors’ car park, Rachel Elliot was not in the habit of entertaining doubts of any kind. As well as being a formidable businesswoman with a string of happy clients and successful campaigns to her credit, she had lovers, she had hobbies, she had friends, she had good health. Dissatisfaction – or whatever it was – had no business creeping up on her like that. How dare it? she thought now, looping her little finger into the cup of Leo’s free hand and being surprised at the hungry clench offered in response.
‘Rachel, you are sweet. Thank you so much. I know babies aren’t exactly your thing.’ Joy held out her arms for her son. ‘Both Tony and I are absolutely thrilled that you a