An Affair to Remember Read Online Free PDF Page B

and they’ve really come into their own.”
    And then, when he’d finally plucked up enough courage to go, the lady at the marriage bureau (Friends for Life) had been most optimistic. “Good gracious Major Mallory,” she’d said, looking up from a careful perusal of his application form, “with all this going for you, you can take your pick. Are you sure you haven’t been married before?”
    “Of course I haven’t,” he’d said crossly, “I’d know if I had wouldn’t I? The thing is I’ve been in the army since I was eighteen and there just never seems to have been the time.”
    “Not to worry,” the lady (a Mrs Jeffreys) had said briskly, busy fingers already scrabbling through her card index, “I’ll soon fix you up.” And, more’s the pity, she had.
    He met Emmie a week later, in the buffet at Victoria Station. She lived in West Norwood at the time and Victoria was handy for trains. His first sight of her, when sweating with nerves, he’d stood in the doorway of the buffet at Platform 9 looking for a lady in a red coat with a white carnation in the buttonhole, had in fact been a nice surprise. Tall, blonde, fortyish. She appeared, when, overcome with shyness he had finally made himself known, to be full of warmth and high spirits and, he had to admit, not unattractive.
    Over coffee amidst the clutter and noise of a British Rail Station buffet, she told him she was a widow, her husband having died four years ago after a lingering illness. Since his death she’d continued to live in the flat they’d rented in West Norwood and kept her old job as a dentist’s receptionist, but had now reached the stage when she felt it was time to start a new life, make new friends, live a little, before it was too late. “Know what I mean?” she’d asked, and he felt he did. He knew exactly. It must be fate, he told himself after they’d parted, having arranged to meet for a meal in two days’ time, pushing aside the niggling doubts about whether they were really suited. After all, they both seemed to want the same thing, and surely out of all the women he could have met that counted as some sort of a coincidence? Over dinner in a bistro in Ebury Street, he told her of his plans to buy a small business in the country with his savings and the money from his parents’ house. And she had seemed quite enthusiastic. “What about a little tea place, or a bed and breakfast,” she’d suggested, “you’d meet loads of new people that way.”
    “Actually I was thinking in terms of a small shop. One of those village affairs that sell everything…”
    “Why not. Sounds great. I’ll help you look if you like.”
    Two days after that they’d made love in Emmie’s flat: small, and rather dreary, looking out on a shunting yard, and sharing a bathroom with the man upstairs; no wonder she wanted to get out of it. “Stay the night if you like,” she’d said after their rather tepid lovemaking, “and we can have another go later on. It’ll be better then, you’ll see.” But he had to get back to his Aunty May’s, in whose house he’d been staying since he left the army, and somehow it never did get much better. Despite the fact that in the past several of his lovers had described him as hot stuff in the bed department, with Emmie for some reason he simply could not summon up any great enthusiasm. However, Emmie, at least in their pre-marriage days, had more than made up for any failure on his part: crawling perseveringly over him, wrapping her naked body round his and poking her finger up his anus with every appearance of enjoyment. To no avail. He’d found the former embarrassing, and the latter acutely uncomfortable, but ashamed of being thought, no doubt rightly, a bit of a wimp, didn’t have the courage to say so.
    Just two months after their first meeting they were married, 1st of April to be exact: to have chosen that particular date for it no doubt the first of the many mistakes he was to make. It was