ROSIE THOMAS 4-BOOK COLLECTION
Strangers
Bad Girls, Good Women
A Woman of Our Times
All My Sins Remembered
by Rosie Thomas
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1997, 1988, 1990, 1991
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007560639, 9780007560561, 9780007560646, 9780007560578
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780008115371
Version: 2015-02-25
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the United Kingdom by William Collins and Company 1987
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1987
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © MAR 2014 ISBN: 9780007560639
Version: 2014-02-18
It was just starting to snow.
Annie stood beside the row of coats hung untidily on the pegs and looked out of the glass panel in the back door. The dark grey specks fell out of a paler sky, and the wind caught them and blew them up into a spiral before letting them drop on the path. They changed from grey to white, and then vanished. In a minute, Annie thought, the flakes would stop melting. The snow would stick. She would need to wear her boots to go shopping. She opened the door of the cupboard under the stairs and rummaged for them, sighing as she always did at the sight of the tangle of family belongings. Then she took her coat off the peg, disentangling it from a red anorak with the sleeves pulled wrong side out.
A boy came down the stairs, two at a time, thumping his feet. He swung around the banister post and vaulted the last four steps down to the lobby. ‘Careful,’ Annie said automatically. ‘You’ll break a leg doing that, one of these days.’
The child looked squarely at her, and she knew that he was wondering how forcibly to contradict her. Then he shrugged. ‘No I won’t.’ He went to the door and pressed his face against the glass. ‘Look, Mum, it’s snowing. Can’t I come out with you?’ She buttoned up her coat and picked up her handbag, flipping through the contents to see if she had everything.
‘Can’t I?’
She smiled quickly at him, then glanced past him into the kitchen to see if her chequebook was on the table. She felt her attention being pulled two ways, fixing nowhere. It was often like that, nowadays.
‘No, you can’t. You hate shopping and you’ll only nag me to come home as soon as we’ve got there. And I’ve got a lot to do today.’
She found her chequebook in her coat pocket, and put it into her bag with her purse. The boy was sitting on the bottom step now, still staring longingly out at the snow. A thought occurred to him and he looked up at her.
‘Buying presents for me? For my stocking?’
His earnest gaze, a perfect replica of his father’s, made her smile.