Before I Met You Read Online Free PDF Page A

asleep and then she left the room.
    The house was waking up. It was almost five. Betty was dehydrated and too awake now to sleep. She headed downstairs, through the empty corridors and towards the kitchen. The debris of the previous night was still there on the kitchen table. Beer cans rammed with cigarette butts, congealing bowls of vegetable curry and rice, ashtrays brimming with fag ends and ring pulls and glitzy crumpled Quality Street wrappers. Someone’s baseball cap sat amidst the carnage and someone else had left a full packet of Marlboro Lights in the middle of the table. Betty groaned and poured herself a glass of water.
    Bella had stayed and was sleeping upstairs, in the spare bed in Betty’s room, but everyone else had piled into Mitch’s camper van at some time around one, and disappeared in a puff of Nirvana and raucous laughter.
    Arlette was oblivious to the parties that happened almost nightly in her house. She was bedbound now, after her stroke five years earlier, the one that had stricken her the morning after Betty’s sixteenth birthday.
    Betty sometimes wheeled her to the terrace at the end of their corridor to feel the sun, but Arlette asked to be taken less and less these days, lived more and more inside her own head and in the endless corridors of her remembered history.
    She had a carer now, a woman called Sandra, who turned her and cleaned her and medicated her. There had been talk, of course, of moving Arlette to a home. Jolyon and Alison had moved away last year, at Alison’s insistence, after the heating had packed up for the fifth winter in a row. They lived in a small two-bedroom apartment overlooking the harbour at St Peter Port, clean, new and fitted out with all mod cons. They begged Betty to come and live with them, but Betty just could not find it within herself to leave Arlette in the care of strangers every night. Alison and Jolyon visited most days but Arlette had little idea who they were any more.
    Betty had chosen to do an Art diploma here in Guernsey rather than a degree in London. And she had chosen to stay on in this big cold unwelcoming house with a ninety-four-year-old woman rather than find herself a room in a shared house with her friends. She had made these choices willingly and freely, in spite of the seventy-odd years that divided them, in spite of Arlette’s irascibility and her misanthropy and her unshakeably grey-tinted view of the world, because she loved her.
    Arlette had lived in this house for seventy years, had given birth in this house, grown old in this house, and Betty was determined that she would die in this house, surrounded by all her lovely things. The Alzheimer’s had arrived shortly after the stroke, but Betty didn’t mind the Alzheimer’s. In a strange way it had softened Arlette and made her more palatable.
    Betty heaped two teaspoons of instant coffee into a mug and watched the kettle on the Aga slowly bringing itself to a wild and rolling boil.
    ‘Morning,’ someone croaked behind her. It was Bella. Her long brown hair was two curtains, half drawn across her elfin face. She was fully dressed in last night’s clothes: baggy jeans that sat on her pointy hipbones, cropped marled T-shirt, red hoodie and socks. Her stomach was a slice of toned white flesh between her clothes. Her mascara was smudged around her eyes and she had a scab on her lip where a cold sore was healing. But she was still about the prettiest girl that Betty had ever seen.
    ‘Nightmares?’ she asked in a husky morning tone, balling her hands up inside the sleeves of her hoodie.
    Betty nodded and yawned. ‘Do you want one?’ she asked, gesturing at her freshly poured coffee.
    ‘Yes. Please.’
    They took their coffees out onto the back step and rested the mugs upon their knees, staring out into the new day opening up across the distant gardens.
    ‘I’m really going to miss this place, you know,’ said Bella.
    Betty sighed. ‘Not as much as I’m going to miss you.’ She