A Poison Tree (Time, Blood and Karma Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

health problem?”
    “No, he’s OK. His blood tests were fine. I’m not sure what the problem is. Maybe it’s just stress.”
    “He doesn’t have your resilience, my darling.”
    “Or my happy home life, eh?”
    “Obviously not. He doesn’t have me.”
     
    “This is the manuscript I wanted you to have a look at,” said Anna.
    She handed me a sheaf of papers.
    “It doesn’t look like a very long book,” I replied.
    “I haven’t given you the whole book, silly, just the opening chapters. Do you want a cappuccino?”
    “Well, they’ll throw us out of the coffee shop if we don’t order something soon. I still don’t see why you want me to read it, though. You’re the literary agent.”
    “ I wanted a second opinion before I talk to my colleagues. You have a good eye. Especially since I’ve been supervising your education in literary matters.”
    “You mean I have the same tastes in writing as you do, since you’ve brainwashed me.”
    “Now don’t spoil it. It’s not often I get to have a private chat with my brother-in-law these days. Shut up. I’ll get our coffees and maybe a couple of naughty cakes.”
    While she went to the counter, I looked at the first pages of Quiet Betrayal .
     
    April is not the cruellest month, Eliot got it wrong. For me it is June.
    June was the month I found out. What I found out was that I was a – and even now the quaintness of the word makes me grin – cuckold. Cuck-old. A ridiculous word for a ridiculous situation, is it not? Particularly given that the man in question is almost old enough to be Emma’s father. Or mine, for that matter.
    My finding out was not the work of a moment. I did not stumble on them in an act of passion, did not intercept some love missive, was not informed of the affair by the other man’s distraught wife. Neither was I told by my own wife. Rather it was a slow dawning, an accretion of circumstances, of small details which, finally I could not ignore. I realise now, of course, that I had been ignoring the signs, perhaps deliberately or perhaps in genuine innocence. But the affair had been going on for quite some time, over a year. In all that time Emma had protested their friendship was nothing more than that, that they were close because they were working together, that others’ voiced suspicions were ‘disgusting’ given Aidan’s age.
    So I suppressed any half-formed doubts, put aside any unreasonable jealousy and thought no more of it, for a while.
    Their closeness was, however, very public. At social gatherings, they were often together, as would befit work comrades. Laughing, flirting and often excluding others from their close circle, they made a sparking couple, and at times I felt glances of sympathy in my direction from our more worldly acquaintances. To these I paid no attention. These people did not understand my wife as I did. She was unusual, outgoing and bubbly, and she loved me. I was the man she came home to after her days and evenings out. And we slept together naked, as we had done for twenty years.
    Such was the nature of my blindness.
     
    Anna had returned with the drinks. There was a degree of intensity in her look. And perhaps something more.
    “What do you think?”
    “Speaking as a car salesman, I’d say the writing is a bit flowery and overdone. Does he keep this up for the whole novel?”
    “It’s not a novel,” she replied. “It’s a memoir.”
    “Anyone I know?”
    “No. Do you think Claire would like it?”
    I took a sip of coffee. “She’s not big on romance these days, Anna.”
    Anna put a hand on my arm.
    “Not many people are, David,” she said.

 
    4
    DAVID
     
    Piece by piece, we remember. Our youth. Our life. The things that made us.
    The poet’s heap of broken images. How it began.
    Ah, yes. That bittersweet indulgence of memory.
    Claire .
     
    Claire – or Claire Elizabeth, to be more accurate – is the younger of the Holland sisters by a year. Her sister Anna, in fact, was my