A Place in the Country Read Online Free PDF

there, perched on a tall barstool. Showing too much thigh, when this guy came in. He stood a couple of seats away from me and ordered a mojito, exactly like mine.
    â€œHe gave me a look,” Caroline remembered with a smile. “Our eyes met and linked and I thought oh my God he is so handsome, so … Anyway,” she’d gone on briskly. “He asked if I minded him joining me. That is, if you are alone, he said. And oh, Issy I was so alone, all by myself in Singapore. I’d just finished two years of culinary school and was running away from a boy I thought not man-of-the-world enough for me. I was on my way to Hong Kong to do some boring cooking job, but you see, I didn’t even get as far as Hong Kong because your father said—there and then—he said, I am going to marry you. And I don’t even know your name.
    â€œSo I told him my name and he told me his, and instead of being Caroline Meriton, I became all at once, Caroline Evans.”
    â€œAnd was it lovely?” Issy always asked the same question, sucking on her thumb, already half asleep, knowing her mom would tuck the sheet up over her chest, turn down the lamp, kiss her, and always say, “It was so lovely, sweetheart. I will never forget it.”
    Of course now she knew her mother had meant her dad was sexy. Then, she had been too young to know about sexual attraction. She wasn’t even sure now what it was, except that the word “fuck” had something to do with it.
    She’d guessed she must be a late bloomer or something, but she just didn’t want to know. She wanted men to be sweet and nice and to wear beautiful suits and ties, and loafers with tassels and smell of Vetiver cologne, like her dad. In fact she was horrified by the whole idea of men taking off their clothes and showing their dangly bits. Who on earth ever wanted to see that?
    They’d given a talk in class, demonstrating with cucumbers and condoms, about how it was done and how not to get pregnant, while the girls giggled and said no way, and some sniggered and said, “ yeah right…”
    And then came the upheaval, her mom’s unhappiness, her dad suddenly remote, hardly ever home; the fights, and then leaving, just like that, with never a thought of how it might affect her. She had not even had time to say goodbye to her friends, her school, her swim club, her Saturday sleepovers. It was all gone. Just like that. And she didn’t know what to do. And worse, nor did her mother.
    Now, here they were, in rented rooms over a pub in the Cotswolds. The rain was still pelting against the window and the kitten moved restlessly in its basket.
    She reached out, touched the pathetic little heap of cheap-looking gray fur. The milk was still warm and she inserted the dropper into its slack mouth and squeezed. It began to suck. It wanted to live after all.
    Issy almost never did, she had trained herself not to, but now, quite suddenly, she began to cry.

 
    chapter 7
    In the room down the hall from her daughter, Caroline was not sleeping either. Her thoughts, as they always did, had returned to James, and what had happened. She remembered it all so clearly.
    The day they left they’d flown to Hong Kong and checked in to the Peninsula Hotel. That was where James always stayed—nothing but the best for him, so Caroline determined it would be “nothing but the best” for his wife and daughter.
    She’d taken a small suite and charged it to James’s platinum card. She ordered room service, just the way James did, and overtipped the waiter, the way he always did. She drank a martini—telling herself she would only have one because she was in charge of a child. Well, a fourteen-year-old anyway, but when Issy had finally cried herself to sleep, she sent down for another, before she also cried herself to sleep on the sofa, only to be roused by the phone ringing.
    It’s him, she’d thought, waking up,