A Most Desirable Marriage Read Online Free PDF

first.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah. But seriously, darling. I reckon you’re still hanging in there on the shaggable index. Sure, you’re sixty, but you don’t look it: tall, slim, legs up to your armpits, those stunning grey eyes . . . you’ve even got muscles in your arms. Your hair could do with some attention, but I’d fancy you if I was that way inclined.’
    Joanna brought her hand up to her hair, self-consciously aware that the thick, layered, light-brown – tinged with grey – mop her friend referred to was long overdue for a cut and colour.
    ‘But the horrible truth is that you’re on the cusp. Another few years and your choices’ll be limited to the drooping willies, paunches and bad teeth of the ageing British male. Not a pretty sight.’
    ‘Thanks. So encouraging.’ Jo held out her glass for a refill. ‘Anyway, aren’t you forgetting something? You didn’t go out at all, not for months after you and Walter split.’
    ‘That was different. I was in love with someone who wasn’t in love with me. That bastard Julian broke my heart. Walter’s departure had nothing to do with any of it.’
    ‘And my heart’s not broken?’ Jo heard the tremor in her voice.
    Donna didn’t reply, just got up and came to sit next to Jo, wedging herself on to the rug and clasping Jo’s hand tightly. ‘I know it must be, darling. But I think I’m glad to hear you say it.’
    *
    Jo got off the two-coach train at Barnstaple and looked around for her daughter. The platform was normally deserted, but today there was a crowd of over-fifties backpackers milling around the small station. Cassie’s tall figure hurried towards her, long, golden hair flying behind her in the wind as it had when she was a child. Jo was always taken aback by her beauty. Cassie had her father’s aquiline nose, her mother’s large, grey eyes and thick, dark eyelashes, a clear complexion now enhanced by a light summer tan, the whole put together in a robust, charismatic beauty that drew the eye of every man she passed, despite the plain T-shirt, jeans and sandals she wore.
    Cassie squeezed her mother tight. ‘So glad you came, Mum.’
    ‘Me too,’ Jo replied, although she had her usual reservations about the visit. It wasn’t Cassie – she loved being with her daughter, and missed her terribly since she’d moved to Devon. Even earnest, humourless Matt (such an odd choice for her extrovert daughter) was bearable for short periods. The challenge was their eco-house.
    Matt had built it himself entirely from recycled materials. It had taken him years of painstaking work – he lived in a prehistoric canvas army tent on site throughout – and it was still unfinished when he’d met Cassie. She’d helped him out, driven him on, mainly out of self-preservation, and it was now habitable – to Cassie and Matt at least. Sitting on the edge of Muddiford Wood, north of Barnstaple, no other house in sight, a stream running alongside the extensive vegetable patch, it looked like a large woodsman’s cottage from a fairytale, except for the solar panels taking up most of the south side of the pitched roof. And although two eco-magazines had dubbed it ‘idyllic’, Jo preferred ‘primitive’.
    It was freezing in winter (despite the state-of-the-art Swedish wood-burning stove), boiling in summer, full of spiders, recycling bins and coir matting that skinned your feet if you were stupid enough to go barefoot. And if that weren’t enough, it was also noisy with the endless clucking of the chickens and grunting of Moby, the pig, in the run outside. But she could just about put up with all that. It was the composting loo that proved the last straw. Not only did it stink in all seasons, attract flies in summer and wobble alarmingly when she sat on it, but she was constantly aware of sitting above the collected poo of weeks. That it was covered in a thin layer of sawdust and aerated by some mysterious method that Matt had unsuccessfully explained about fifty times,