Alma Cogan Read Online Free PDF Page B

called ‘slopping out the bilge’. He’s standing on the deck of The Terri-Marie throwing water overboard from a plastic bucket.
    And now the phone is going again. It’s going to be ——— ——, oozing apologies and the usual charming horse manure. I know without meeting him that, if I ever did meet him and offered a straightforward ‘How do you do?’, he would shift his glass from one hand to the other, tilt his head to what he considers its most pleasing angle (expertly-cut slabs of hair realigning themselves impressively in the light) and say: ‘I do fan tas tic!’
    I’m tempted. Of course I’m tempted. My idea of happiness is the Happy Hour: a bare-brick bar with the office-bound straggling in wall-eyed after a trying day; the Nat Cole and Swingles tapes being swapped for Elvis’ ‘Suspicious Minds’ and the volumesimultaneously going up; cold beaded bottles and expensive nibbling bits going on to some no-questions business tab.
    I could say ‘yes’ to a bit of that. I could say ‘yes’ to quite a lot of it, if I’m honest. But I have to bear in mind the almost inevitable consequences and something I recently wrote into my book.
    ‘A normal, human-like existence is what the majority of the human race aspires to – the aim must be to operate on the same physical and psychological plane as the majority of people – like every natural process, human life gravitates toward moderation.’ Gone over in acid-yellow over-marker, meaning ‘v. imp.’
    In other words, it wouldn’t be hard to get talked back into rejoining the conga-line of the professional attention-grabbers and pathologically unignored. Devora says she’s convinced she could get a book ‘into the sellers’; Brick writes that he’s already got the main promotional chat shows ‘locked up’.
    All things considered, and everything being equal, though – ‘Per ardua ad astrakhan’ is a phrase which suddenly presents itself here – I think I’ll stick.
    There’s some potatoes that need pulling; there’s a dog in the kitchen whining for his feed. So here I go. I’m walking away from this broop-broop. Watch me now.

Chapter Three
    ‘Beginnings.’ ‘Solace.’
    If you could wish to have two words spring out of the dark at you, you couldn’t wish better than these. If it happened to be the darkness enfolding the countryside where you were about to begin a new life – so much the better.
    ‘Beginnings’ – pokerwork lettering on a piece of varnished blond timber – was illuminated in the headlamps of the taxi when we pulled over to let a car squeeze past us at the top of the narrow lane. The car was travelling uphill, away from the village of Cleve, which was our destination, and it slid like a bolt along the high hedges whose sides were grooved smooth from a thousand tight negotiations like this.
    We had one more pull-over to make in the dark on the steep gradient. Then ‘Solace’, the name of an old tub, was suspended in the lights as we carefully negotiated the last corner at the bottom of the hill: the letters were sharp-edged and oddly permanent-looking against the boat’s flaking boards, which were mainly that mysterious secondary colour, apart from their paint, which very old boats have.
    I had another look at the piece of paper containing the directions which I had been reading aloud to the driver, and realised then that the lighted windows that we’d seen before bearing left round the end of the estuary were the windows of the cottage to which we had been blindly descending.
    The driver seemed to realise this without me having to tell him. ‘Nearly got you home, young lady,’ he said (a sure sign that the years were starting to take their toll – the years and the efforts of my liver to process the brave intake of the night before: the truth was I was still quarter-cut). And then, ‘And you, mister’ to the dog, who was spiralling up in excitement atthe back of the man’s head, in between scuttling from