Born Yesterday Read Online Free PDF

the concert held to mark the tenth anniversary of his mother’s death, singing along (so they said, and the event had been televised) to Take That’s ‘I Want You Back (For Good)’.
    After registering where she lived, he had sometimes noticed the snappers lurking in their cars in the street, which was very ‘old Chelsea’ and narrow and popular with motorbike couriers and taxis as a rat-run to the river (and treacherous because of that). They sometimes rested their coffee cartons on the roofs of each other’s cars as they stood around chatting; the cartons lay in the gutter after they had gone: the observers observed. He had never seen the girl, though. And then that Tuesday – the same Tuesday he had once more spotted Mrs Thatcher turning about the park – he had almost charged into Kate Middleton in the nearest Tesco Local on the King’s Road. It had been both their faults and they had mumbled apologies to each other: he had been going the wrong way, backtracking, against the after-work traffic, and she had been going too fast with her eyes fixed on the floor.
    She was tall; he only came up to her chin; and she had her hair scraped back in a pony-tail instead of the usual loose way she wore it in public, so he hadn’t been one hundred per cent sure at first. But there were pictures of her taken at Wembley at the weekend – Wills’ Kate , as she was described – on the covers of one or two of the freshly delivered gossip weeklies on display in the small periodicalssection in the ‘Household Cleaners and Detergents’ aisle, and a quick check against them confirmed that he was right.
    What he hadn’t expected was to come face to face with her again while he was doing this. But if she had any recollection of ever seeing him before in her life, she didn’t let on. She was wearing tight white jeans of the type routinely referred to as ‘spray-on’ in these very magazines, and the tightness meant she had to lower herself, bending from the knees, to pick up a copy of the evening paper which was stacked on the lowest shelf. She added it to a basket which already contained breakfast cereal and a two-pack of kitchen rolls.
    As she no doubt already knew, there was a colour snap of her on page fifteen, taken at the previous day’s Wimbledon. Her mouth was open in a squeal, cheering on the Spaniard, Rafael Nadal, in his third-round match on the Centre Court. But the couple in the row behind were sharing a tartan blanket draped over their knees, emulating her future in-laws who insist on a rug in the state Bentley when they are out performing royal duties in weather only slightly less than ideal. It gave a doleful aspect to the picture – a blanket in July – but also by suggesting that codgerdom, the only end of stultifying protocol, could only be a matter of a state wedding away.
    There was a woman at the next till – early twenties, blonde, bad skin, high colour in her face – who he was starting to suspect was probably bulimic. (He was hoping for a glimpse of her teeth. Doesn’t the acid in the vomitstart to strip the enamel away after a while?) At first she had just the two items: a small sliced white batch loaf and a family-size packet of Minstrels, plus a slippery stack of New!, Now, Star and other junk magazines. But then she had reached down to the display below the counter, put there to encourage impulse buys except that hers were clearly well-rehearsed and premeditated, and picked out two Turkish Delights, one milk, one plain, and then a third. And then – this as if as an afterthought, when the other items had already been scanned and bagged by the assistant – a Ripple, a box of Maltesers and two tubes of After Eight. A single-queue system was in operation for the multiple check-outs. And she glanced anxiously behind her before sliding a Galaxy, a chocolate-orange bar and a fourth Turkish Delight across the counter, covered by her hand.
    So immersed was he in the details of this innocent but