Rainbow of Truth , livre ebook

The Rainbow of Truth
Roger Conlon
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-05-29
The Rainbow of Truth About The Author Dedication Copyright Information © Escape to Paradise Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight The Saudi Triangle Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three New York City Chapter Four The Retreat Chapter One Chapter Two The Mother’s Story Chapter One Chapter Two The Leither Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three The Clairvoyant Chapter One Chapter Two Flight 93 Foreword Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Buenos Aires, Argentina
About The Author
Roger Conlon took up creative writing at night school during his twenty-five-year spell working in Edinburgh’s financial services industry. He has had two books published, The Price of Silence , an autobiographical account of his life in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and The Wishing Well , a crime thriller about a group of British dissidents who try to uncover corruption in the armaments industry.
Roger has one hundred short stories published on Amazon and the latest book is a collection of the ones he has chosen for publication. Roger moved to the Orkney Islands from Edinburgh in 2015 and is working for two charities on a voluntary basis while continuing to pursue his career as a writer. A fourth book titled The Canongate Triangle, a crime thriller set in Edinburgh, was published in late 2019.
Dedication
To my late mother and her embracement of truth and love
Copyright Information ©
Roger Conlon (2020)
The right of Roger Conlon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788230612 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528952972 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
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Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Escape to Paradise

Chapter One
Sandra Armstrong removed the dishes from the rack and began to ponder yet another day of domestic bliss or the reverse, which could be termed an enforced consignment to isolation. Her children had left home. Peter had gone to Edinburgh University to study law while Kirsten entered nursing school at Bristol University. She missed her family; apart from their return home during the holidays, she rarely saw them and communications were limited to text messages and phone calls; a voice at the end of a phone is detachment.
The emptiness of the house left her with a vacuum of despair. Her husband, Tommy had left her five years back and she sued him for divorce on the grounds of desertion. Sandra was left with the classic empty-nest syndrome. The rewards of bringing up a family are universally recognised; the sudden exodus at young adulthood often amounted to an abandonment of any sense of responsibility. Where was the return for years of dedication and love, apart from an empty house and solitude?
She checked her watch and it was only nine o’clock. She had been awake for two hours, but the slow progress of the time felt like crawling on one’s knees along a lonely pavement. She watched breakfast television and read Women’s Weekly before making herself a second cup of coffee. The wallpaper started to close in and envelop her in an embrace of angst; what had happened to the spark and liveliness of the old Sandra? She was now forty-five years old and considered herself to be a spent force.
She had sacrificed a promising career as a ward sister at Great Ormond Street Hospital to bring up her two children. She had the option to go back to work but did not take it because Tommy had insisted that she stay at home because his earnings were sufficient; his career had taken him to the upper levels of the legal department at Lloyds of London. He earned a huge salary, but she felt that she did not have a sense of independence and self-respect. She spent his money on clothes and evenings out with her girlfriends but he made subtle hints that the food on the table was the result of his hard work. He implied that she lived out of his pocket.
Her resentment at his insistence on her being a stay-at-home mum was coupled with her own frustration at her inability to defend her right to go out to work. Tommy was an old-fashioned misogynist whom she hated; his departure brought a sense of relief, bordering on contempt for his betrayal. She found out that he had been having an affair with his secretary. Her years of dedication to the family, of waiting on him hand and foot, had been repaid with duplicity. He had tried to suffocate her for years. He did not want her to have a life outside the home, in case she met another man who would be loyal and faithful to her.
Sandra felt that she had wasted twenty years of her life on drudgery. It was too late to go back to nursing and even if she did, they might not take her back anyway because she had complained about staff reductions and its impact on patient care. She was the source of a leak from the trade union to the Guardian newspaper; her boss took her into his office and she was given a dressing-down. She recalled the chat in her head; even after all these years of motherhood and a humdrum life the humiliation was still raw.
Sandra switched the television off and lay stretched out on the couch; she placed a cushion over her head to block out the light from the window. The mere hint of a peek into the world outside reinforced her exclusion from a society of engagement and participation. She felt doomed to be nobody for the rest of her days. She heard the sound of a baby crying in the street outside; that journey was now complete for her and there seemed to be no beginning left, only staleness. The noise brought back the memories of the sleepless nights which were now a part of the family history. Perhaps, there was a way out? Her solicitor told her that she could sue her husband for a proportion of his earnings, based on her sacrifice as a mother. He earned one and a half million pounds a year, yet he had bullied her into a life of dishes and nappies. He had done nothing on the domestic front. She did not want to be a gold-digger, but she deserved recognition for her efforts.
She looked at the photo on the mantelpiece of the day she was promoted to ward sister at the hospital. She was presented with a bouquet of flowers and her proud husband even took the day off his work to be in her arms; little did she know what was about to follow in the battle for supremacy of the sexes. The tears swelled up in her eyes while the words of recrimination felt like a hammer being slammed inside her head; the career she loved was being stolen from her grasp. Her manager was a bully. Sandra had a strong personality and challenged his blame culture. He still insisted she should take responsibility for the mistake.
‘I can’t condone what you did, Sandra. The reputation and integrity of the hospital has been compromised. It is the biggest crime of all to bite the hand that feeds you. You are pregnant, so I assume you are taking maternity leave?’ said Simon Walker, a man whose obsession with statistics and league tables was legendary. He had borderline views on maternity leave that were discriminatory. She decided to stand her ground and challenge his obsession with targets.
‘A baby died because of insufficient staff cover at night. She was prescribed the wrong drugs by a nurse who had been on-call for a continuous period of forty-eight hours. The hospital was negligent in its duty of care but Nurse Halide cannot be blamed. The hospital is funded by a private finance initiative. It had debts of three million pounds and you authorised cutbacks in staff because of pressure from the board. The whole fiasco of penny-pinching has been a disaster.’ Sandra knew that the politics of the office took precedence over health care. She had rattled the man, who resorted to attacks on women’s equality.
‘You lot think you can take over, but babies will always come first. You take your six months of maternity leave; we will then replace you with loyal staff.’ She rose from her chair and intimated her intention to leave the office. The defeated manager tapped his fingers on the phone in a nervous bout of agitation, waiting for an imaginary call from his robotic wife who no doubt catered for his every need.
‘I can sue you for constructive dismissal and sex discrimination. I know your missus bakes nice cakes for you but is there not something more interesting she can do with her life? See you in court.’ Sandra had the last laugh but her career did not recover. They did not offer her a position after her first child was born. She wanted to go to court but Tommy told her it was pointless; her husband had, once more, been the barrier to her recovery from a crushing loss.
She removed the pillow from her head and woke up to the reality of the present. Being locked in the house was a kind of self-inflicted wound. She had run out of milk so a trip to Tesco might be the answer to her problems. The local store had attempted to set up a dating group for single shoppers; they declare their singleton status at the checkout and then met up in the nearby café. Cus