Blue Bedroom and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

abruptly before any more germs could be released into the sterile air of his palatial office. “If you start off now, you should be home before the worst of the rush-hour traffic. We’ll see you on Friday morning. And if I were you, I’d take care of that cold. Whiskey and lemon, hot, last thing at night. Nothing better.”
    Fourteen years earlier, when James and Louisa had first been married, they had lived in London, in a basement flat in South Kensington, but when Louisa became pregnant with the first of their two children, they had made the decision to move out into the country. With some financial juggling, they had achieved this, and not for a single moment had James regretted it. The twice-daily hour-long journey to and from work seemed to him a small price to pay for the sanctuary of the old red brick house and the ample garden, and the simple joy, each evening, of coming home. Commuting, even on roads swollen with traffic, did not dismay him. On the contrary, the hour in the car by himself became his switching-off time, when he put behind him the problems of the day.
    In midwinter, in darkness, he would turn into his own gateway and see, through the trees, the light burning over his own front door. In spring, the garden was awash with daffodils; in summer, there was the long drowsy evening to look forward to. A shower, and changing into an open-necked shirt and espadrilles, drinks on the terrace beneath the smoky-blue blossom of the wistaria, and the sound of wood pigeons coming from the beech wood at the bottom of the garden.
    The children rode their bicycles around the lawn and swung on the rope ladder that hung from their treehouse, and at weekends the place was usually invaded by friends, either neighbours or refugees from London, bringing their families and their dogs, and everybody lazed in chairs with the Sunday newspapers, or indulged in friendly putting matches on the lawn.
    And at the heart of all this was Louisa. Louisa, who never failed to amaze James, because when he had married her, he had done so without the remotest suspicion of the sort of person she had turned out to be. Gentle and undemanding, she had proved, over the years, to have an almost uncanny instinct for home-making. Asked to lay an exact finger on this, James would have been defeated. He only knew that the house, although frequently strewn with children’s toys, shoes, drawings, had about it an ambience of peace and welcome. There always seemed to be flowers about the place, and laughter, and enough food for the extra guests who decided to stay for supper.
    But the real miracle was that all this was achieved so unobtrusively. James had stayed in other houses where the woman of the house spent her day looking care-worn, always cleaning and tidying, shutting herself into her kitchen, only to emerge two minutes before the meal was served, and looking exhausted and cross to boot. It wasn’t that Louisa never went into her kitchen, but people were inclined to drift in there after her, carrying their drinks or their knitting, and not minding when she gave them beans to slice or mayonnaise to stir. Children trailed in and out of the garden, and they too would remain, to help shell peas, or to make small pale biscuits out of the scraps of pastry from the apple pie.
    Sometimes it occurred to James that Louisa’s life, when compared to his own, must be very dull. “What have you been doing today?” he would ask when he got home, but “Nothing much” was all she ever told him.
    It was still raining, the afternoon sliding into early dark. Now he had reached Henborough, the last small town on the main road before turning to their own village. The traffic lights showed red, and he stopped the car alongside a flower shop. Inside he saw pots of red tulips, freesia, narcissus. He thought of buying Louisa flowers, but then the lights turned green, and he forgot about the flowers and moved forward with the rest of