Bookends Read Online Free PDF Page B

charge of a team of ten people, and that the only reason he manages to get home every night by seven o’clock is because he’s in the office by six a.m. every day.
    Other than that, I think he has something to do with Mergers and Acquisitions, or M & A, as I believe you’re meant to call it in the trade. I know he’s doing well enough not to have to worry about money, and I know that his public school background, minor though it was, has almost certainly helped him reach the position he now occupies.
    ‘You must work to live, not live to work,’ Josh always laughs, when Si and I tease him about having such an easy life at the age of thirty-two when he should, by rights, be working like a madman. But, although I am constantly surprised by his lack of ties to the office, I am also impressed, and I know that his family is so important to him that he would never sacrifice his life purely for money.
    My line is still ringing, and it could very well be Josh on the phone now, so I pick up, taking my chances.
    ‘ Now what do you want, Si?’
    ‘Just to tell you that’ – he pauses dramatically – ‘Mr Gorgeous has phoned!’
    ‘Fantastic! So when’s he coming over to break your heart? Oops, I mean, coming over for dinner?’
    ‘And how do you know this one isn’t The One?’
    ‘I’m sorry, my darling. You’re quite right. He might be. So you haven’t invited him over, then? Let me guess, he’s taking you to some fantabulously swanky restaurant for dinner tomorrow night.’
    ‘Nearly,’ he says brightly. ‘ I’m cooking him a fantabulously swanky meal at my place tomorrow night.’
    ‘You’re hopeless,’ I say.
    ‘I know,’ he replies, but his voice is bubbling over with excitement.
    ‘No chocolate mousse, now,’ I warn sternly.
    ‘I know, I know. And I’ve buried the onion rings in the back garden.’
    I get home at seven, cursing the fact that I haven’t got a parking space at work, and fantasizing about going freelance and never having to take the damn tube again. There are times when I really don’t mind it, when I actually quite enjoy it, but then there are times, like tonight, when there are no seats, and you’re all crushed together, and everyone is wet from the pouring rain so the carriage is filled with that awful damp smell.
    I grab a towel from the bathroom and pull the elastic band out of my hair, rubbing the towel vigorously over my head, rolling my eyes as I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I should not have been born with this hair. It is just not fair, because my hair is barely human. It is a frizzy mess that used to circle my head rather like a fuzzy halo, and, now that I have tried to grow it, looks increasingly like Marsha Hunt’s on a very bad day. It would have looked fantastic in the early seventies, but it looks ridiculous now.
    I have a bathroom cabinet stacked with various defrizzing, smoothing products that Si keeps accidentally-on-purpose leaving at my house, saying that he didn’t really need them and I should keep them, but I just can’t be bothered. Occasionally I read the labels, but invariably I forget to use them, and run out of the house with wet hair scraped back into a ponytail, which is the only way I can look halfway decent for work.
    I used to make an effort. I used to wear make-up and have highlights and flirt with strange men in bars, but the older I get the less interested I am. I used to believe in love, in passion, but now I believe that the two cannot go hand in hand, because passion is not love, can never be love, and the one great passion of my life was someone I didn’t even like, although naturally I didn’t realize it at the time.
    I was twenty-four when I met Martin. He really wasn’t anything special, not that first time I met him, at a marketing course in Luton. We were there for four days, executives from all over the country, and Martin was leading the course.
    I remember he took the stage, bounding up to one of those flip charts,