A Lovely Day to Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

wake up. All you can do is lie there quietly and wait, in the certain knowledge that you are bound to wake up in the end.
    *
    And thus it was that Millicent, certain that she was bound to wake up in the end, lay there quietly and waited.
    And waited … And waited … And waited …

DANGEROUS SPORT
    “D ARLING , I’ D JUST love to be able to stay a bit longer. You know I would. I’m just as disappointed as you are. But …”
    But.
    But, but, but. What would it be this time, Stella wondered sourly? Whatever it was, she’d have heard it before, that was certain. After five years of going around with a married man, a girl knows his repertoire by heart.
    But I have to help Wendy with the weekend shopping. But the man is coming to do the boiler. But I have to fetch Carol from the Brownies. But Simon is away from school with a temperature. But I have to meet Aunt Esmé at the airport.
    This last had been the funniest one of all. Looking back, Stella could hardly help laughing, in a black, bitter sort of way, though at the time it hadn’t seemed funny at all. For it had come so soon—so cruelly, and (as it turned out) so ironically soon after that golden September day when, lying in the long grass by the river beyond Marlow, Gerald had been confiding in her, as married men will, about the depth of his inner loneliness. Even as a child he’d been lonely, it seemed.
    “No brothers or sisters. Not even any uncles or aunts,” he’d explained sadly. “I used to long, sometimes, for one of those big, close, quarrelsome families, all weddings and funerals and eating roast chicken and bread sauce at each other’s tables, and running-down each other’s in-laws. I yearned for something beyond the tight, nuclear family in which I was raised—just myself and my two parents. I’d have given anything for a disapproving aunt or two, or a black-sheep uncle! Particularly at Christmas I used to feel …”
    Stella couldn’t remember, at this distance of time, what the hell it was that Gerald used to feel at Christmas: something abouttangerines, and somebody else’s grandfather out in the snow sawing apple-logs—or something—it was of no importance, which of course was why she’d forgotten it. What was important, and she wouldn’t forget it till her dying day, was the discrepancy she’d instantly spotted between those maudlin reminiscences and the cock-and-bull story, only three months later, about having to meet “Aunt Esmé” at the airport.
    No brothers or sisters. Poor, lonely little boy with no aunts or uncles, even. And so who the hell was this “Aunt Esmé”?
    She’d given him every chance. Why couldn’t Wendy be the one to meet the woman? she’d asked, watching him intently while she spoke. After all, she was Wendy’s aunt, not his … “Oh, no, darling, no, whatever gave you that idea? She’s my aunt, she was awfully good to me as a kid, and so I feel that this is the least I can do. It’s an awful bore, but … You do understand, don’t you, darling?”
    Of course she’d understood. That’s what mistresses are for.
    “ Of course, darling!” she’d said, not batting an eyelid; and afterwards, how she’d laughed about it, when she’d finished crying.
    She had to be so very careful, that was the thing: call Gerald’s bluff even once, and the whole thing could have been wrecked for ever. He had made it quite, quite clear to her, very early on in the relationship, that suspicion, jealousy and possessiveness were the prerogative of the wife, and of the wife alone. It was in the nature of things (Gerald seemed to feel) that Wendy should cross-question him about his business trips, ring up the office to check that he really was working late, go through his pockets for letters and for incriminating theatre-ticket stubs; but for Stella to do these things struck him as an outrage, an insult to the natural order of things.
    “Look, darling,” he’d said (and the cold savagery of his tone had seemed to