(from "Act of Will” by Barbara Taylor Bradford)
(Abridged)
Audra Crowther sat on the sofa in the living-room of her daughter’s Manhattan penthouse. She held herself tensely and clenched her hands together so hard that the knuckles shone white as she looked from her daughter Christina to her granddaughter Kyle. The two younger women stood in the middle of the room, their faces pale, their eyes blazing as they glared at each other. Their angry words of a few minutes ago still reverberated on the warm afternoon air.
Audra felt helpless. She knew that to remonstrate with them, to attempt to make them see reason, was a waste of time, at least at this moment. Each was convinced she was right, and no amount of persuasion would make them reverse their position or endeavour to understand the other’s point of view.
Even their clothes were like uniforms, underscoring their intrinsic differences further separating them. Blue jeans and sneakers for Kyle, and for Christina, an expensive, beautifully cut dress and tailored jacket of matching raw silk, without doubt bearing her own couture label; the silver-grey of the silk, the perfect foil for her chestnut hair shot through with reddish-gold lights, the grey also emphasizing her lovely smoky eyes which had always been her best feature. She was slender, impeccably groomed, and not showing her forty-seven years in the least.
Tycoon versus student, … mother versus daughter, Audra thought, smothering a sigh. Well, it wasn’t the first time a mother and a daughter were at odds with each other; that was an age-old conflict.
Suddenly Kyle broke the protracted silence when she snapped, "And there’s another thing, Mother. You had no right to drag poor Grandma into this debacle, drag her all the way from England…”
"I didn’t!” Christina shot back. "It was your father who telephoned my…”
"Oh yes, go on, blame Dad,” Kyle cut in, her voice scathing.
"But it was your father who phoned my mother,” Christina protested. She appealed to Audra. "Isn’t that so, Mummy?”
Audra focused her attention on her granddaughter. "That’s quite true, Kyle.”
