Abandon Read Online Free PDF

The perfume bottle didn’t look expensive; he could surely leave it outside the door.
    He put it beside the welcome mat, so she would see it when she returned, and then went back to his car, looking over his shoulder to make sure it was safe from the rain. As he got into his car and started up, suddenly there was a kind of clattering behind him, and a large white tank, as it seemed to him, so smeared with dust that it was turning grey, labored into the open driveway. At its wheel, he could tell from where he sat, was a young woman.
    He got out and waited by the driveway, to make sure it was her, and for a long time heard nothing but someone struggling through the debris of the car. From where he stood he could see sweaters, newspapers, old dresses, and boxes piled up so high in the back that it was a miracle she could look out.
    At last a small figure stepped down from the vehicle—it was a long way down for someone her size—and came up to him, flushed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve been waiting. You must be the person who called?”
    “I am. John Macmillan. I actually left the present on your doorstep—I wasn’t sure you were coming.”
    “I’m sorry. I was running late, so I canceled the bank and gave up on the flowers and came back here, so I wouldn’t miss you. And then . . .” For whatever reason, she looked bereft.
    “No harm done. I’ll give it to you now.” He went over to the door, picked up the box, and brought it over.
    “Camilla,” she said, extending her hand. “We talked on the phone.”
    “I know.” He looked at her—the long fair hair falling to her waist, the pale, clear face, and, more than that, the sense her hair gave her of someone taller than she really was—and said, “Sorry, I know this sounds stupid, but you look familiar. Might I have seen you somewhere before?”
    “At the lecture maybe? I was there with my friend.”
    He thought of the woman alone with her plate of snacks and the unmet “friend” she’d come with—who was now, apparently, standing before him. Strange that she’d made the connection so instinctively.
    “So—would you like an orange juice or something?” She brushed a few stray hairs away from her forehead, and he saw someone flustered, a little, as if she’d mislaid something, just when the telephone rang, and couldn’t now put her hands on it again.
    “Why not?”
    She fumbled with the key for a few seconds, leading him round to the side of the house, and then into a small, too-typical Californian kitchen. There were counters on all sides, boxes of tea bags by the sink, a calendar with a picture of the Moorish courthouse. She had, in the current fashion, magnetized letters on her refrigerator, waiting to be turned into words.
    “Would mango juice be okay? I seem to have run out of everything else.”
    “Fine. Excellent,” he said, as she extended two dirty glasses that looked as if they’d recently been excavated from Pompeii.
    “So you’re a student of religion?” she said, to be saying something.
    “Whatever that means. But, yes, here for a few years of graduate work. And you?”
    “I’m a kept woman,” she said, and again he sensed something strange in her, withdrawn: the answer came trilling out so easily he felt it was a standard ruse.
    “Funny. I’d have thought you were an actress.”
    She looked up suddenly. “How did you know that? Have you been making inquiries?”
    “No. It was just a lucky guess, I think. A joke.” But she was looking away again, and he was reminded of how often conversations in California went like this: as if you were going through the lines of a play, which everyone knew and was used to performing, and then suddenly somebody fell through a trapdoor, and her words came back to you from very far away.
    “That’s so weird,” she went on, alone in her own world. “Because I had this friend once, an old boyfriend, and one day I was writing down his name, and he called me at that very