An Affair to Remember Read Online Free PDF Page A

doesn’t look half bad in it. Please let Jack think so too, she prays as she hurries into the utility room to switch off the washing machine – she’ll hang the stuff out later – and puts her head round the door at the rear of the shop to tell Karen she’s off.
    “Everything alright, Karen? Shan’t be long, and the major’s in the back doing his VAT if you need any help.” Karen Bogg, her skin tight, acid green mini skirt exposing a hefty chunk of pink thigh, is perched on a stool behind the shop counter, on which she’s spread her comic. She nods lethargically, without bothering to remove the earphones clamped to her ears. What can you do with a girl like that? “And make sure you remove those things when serving a customer.” Karen nods again.
    “Will do, Mrs M. But we’ve been really quiet this morning so –”
    “Never mind that, just make sure you remember what I’ve said. And if you’re not busy there’s that top shelf you can make a start on sorting.”
    “Okey-doke.” Karen rises reluctantly from her seat; with her scalp showing pink through her cropped, orange hair, green skirt and pink top, she bears a strong resemblance to a large and brightly coloured sweet. She hovers listening for a moment or two in front of jams and marmalades, but once she hears the car engine start and Emmie is safely off the premises, replaces her earphones, climbs back on the stool and resumes her comic. “Stupid old cow,” she whispers under her breath, “and don’t think I don’t know where you’re off to either…”
    Sam Mallory too hears the sound of Emmie’s departure, and feels himself relax. Why she makes him so tensed up he’s no idea, but she does. Where did he go wrong, he wonders as he lights yet another cigarette, leans back in his chair and stares mournfully out of the window. His office, as it’s grandly called, situated next to the kitchen at the back of the house, was once a windowless store room. He and Emmie had a window installed when they moved in, and though on the cramped side, it made a not unpleasant little room in which to do a spot of work (the admin required to run the shop is pretty minimal) and contemplate life in general. Well away from the living room, with its incessantly burbling TV, it probably has the best view in the house – most of whose windows face on to the village street – looking down the valley towards the river and the hills beyond, quite steep ones too for Suffolk, it has the added advantage that Emmie seldom visits, and Sam has come to regard it as his own, private little kingdom.
    Sam Mallory is forty-two years old, but has only been married two, having met his wife, Emmie, through the services of a marriage bureau. That their marriage was a mistake of monumental proportions they now both realise, but Sam, following the code by which he was brought up, feels that having made a promise he must stick to it, and Emmie has, quite simply, nowhere else to go.
    The thing was it had happened so quickly, so quickly indeed, that looking back he can’t now imagine how it had all come about. It was the summer he left the army; the summer his parents died, and as an only child with the home he’d known all his life sold, its furniture dispersed, he had become aware of a feeling he’d never experienced before, loneliness: that from now on, unless he did something about it, to be alone in the world with no ties or commitments was what his future held. And at thirty-eight years old it was not a future he looked forward to. It was as though with his parents’ death, so sudden and so final, he had somehow lost his identity. No longer Sam Mallory, army son of Ted and Betty Mallory: middle of the road efficient, but managing to reach the rank of major, leaves spent with his parents at the house in Kitchener Road; always busy; always something to sort out, places to go, things to do, he seemed to have suddenly become a totally different person; indecisive, lost, his priorities