An Affair to Remember Read Online Free PDF

a meaningless jumble.
    That last leave he’d spent making Dad a new hen house. Dad had always kept hens ever since he could remember. He’d said goodbye at the end of his leave, realising for the first time how old and frail his parents had become. No one lasts for ever, he’d thought, but until then somehow Mum and Dad had been a sort of permanent fixture. Now, however, as they waved him goodbye at the door of No. 23, the thought came that perhaps he should stop roaming about the world, get out of the army, find something else to do, buy a small shop, something like that, and be around for their final years. Perhaps it was a premonition – on the whole a pretty stolid sort of a guy, he had upon occasion experienced premonitions before, and although he’d kept quiet about them, fearing he would be laughed at, they had, in most cases anyway, turned out to be valid – he didn’t know, but it was only a few weeks later the call came one evening when he was dining in the Mess. Private Watkins whispering discreetly in his ear that there was an urgent phone call for him: An impersonal voice over the crackling line as he stood sweating in the cubbyhole that housed the Mess extension: “I’m afraid, sir, there’s been an accident.” A car accident. Mr and Mrs Mallory, head-on collision with a lorry, much regret, dead on arrival in hospital… And well, that was that. A good way to go he told himself: together, except when Dad was away at the war, as they had always been . Never to experience the indignities of extreme old age and failing health, that was good wasn’t it? But good or not, their death had certainly marked the end of his world as it had been for as long as he could remember.
    Six months later he was back in civilian life… With hindsight, he can’t help wondering why on earth he’d left the army. The parents dead, it didn’t matter how much he was away from the UK. His service record was good and there was even a moderately reasonable chance of promotion. But he had, and that was the end of it. He’d stood at the front door that last day at No. 23, the house empty, everything sorted, and felt quite suddenly that he was being offered a chance to make a new life. Why he should want a new life, he didn’t exactly know, he’d thought the old one was quite good, but there it was, this voice inside him telling him to get going before it was too late. And what did he do with this new found freedom, he asks himself as he watches a pair of pigeons canoodling on the fence at the bottom of their strip of garden. He goes to a marriage bureau and marries, of all people, Emmie.
    The trouble was at the time it had seemed the obvious thing to do. Everyone said so, even the CO’s wife at his farewell party in the Mess. “You’re wasted, Sam,” she’d told him, “you should be married, you’d make such a wonderful husband.” And he had to admit that although he doubted very much whether he’d make a wonderful husband, it did seem, now he had a bit of capital from the sale of the house plus a pension from the army, to marry, have a home of his own, kids perhaps, was the sensible thing to do. The decision made, the question was of course, who? He’d had affairs in the past, indeed been in love quite a few times – there was that adjutant’s wife in Cyprus, for example, Angela something, he’d been crazy about her, now he couldn’t even remember what she looked like – but never encountered anyone he had the slightest desire to spend the rest of his life with, besides which, and it had to be said this was important, he didn’t know anyone. Not in civilian life, apart from people of his parents’ generation. And how, with no job and no home of his own, was he going to meet anybody anyway, let alone anyone suitable? The CO’s wife once again came up with the answer. “Go to a marriage bureau, lots of people do: life’s so fluid nowadays no one’s ever anywhere long enough to form a proper social circle,