Chance Developments Read Online Free PDF Page B

a sculptress,” explained Marjorie in an aside to Flora. “Hence the intensity.”
    “Are they?” asked Flora, looking across the room at Lizzie.
    “Are who what?”
    “Sculptresses…are they intense?”
    Marjorie looked at her as if she had asked the most obvious of questions. “But of course they are, dear.
Very
intense people, I’ve found.”
    Flora thought:
I’ve never met a sculptress. Here I am, thirty-two, and I’ve never met a sculptress.
She wondered what Sister Frances would make of a sculptress: they would be chalk and cheese, she thought, with poor Sister Frances’s complete lack of intensity.
    Marjorie gave everybody a glass of sherry and then, fifteen minutes later, announced, “
Alla tavola!
”
Flora smiled: she could work out what that meant, although she had never heard it before. So that was what people said in sophisticated circles:
alla tavola
.
    They sat down. She found herself with Richard Snow on her right and Geoffrey Inver on her left. Geoffrey spoke to her first, as they started the soup.
    “So,” he said. “Glasgow.”
    As he spoke, she noticed that a small rivulet of courgette soup dribbled down his chin; soup was a challenge to some people, she thought:
sent by the Lord to try us
, as Sister Beatrice was fond of saying of any irritation, from traffic lights to the more recalcitrant members of Senior Four.
    She was not sure how to respond to Geoffrey Inver, but decided to say, “Yes.” It was not enough, she felt, for somebody simply to say “Glasgow” and leave it at that.
    It was as if he realised that himself. “I must spend more time in Glasgow,” he said. “There it is, only forty miles away, and one spends so little time there. Perhaps next year. Who knows?”
    “There’s a lot going on in Glasgow,” said Flora.
    Geoffrey nodded. “So they say.”
    “There’s the Citizens’ Theatre,” she ventured. She had never been there. Nuns did not go to the Citizens’ Theatre, but for a few moments she imagined Mother Superior sitting in the front row with Father Sullivan on one side of her and Sister Frances on the other. Poor Sister Frances would have difficulty understanding the play and would have to have it explained to her by Father Sullivan, who had a reputation for being able to make things understandable.
    She continued a desultory conversation with Geoffrey, but realised that he was bored. At first she was discouraged, but then she thought:
What does it matter if he finds me boring? What does his own life amount to? Being a lawyer in Edinburgh, going to lunch parties like this? What’s so special about that?
    She was able to turn to Richard Snow once the soup plates had been taken away. He seemed keen to engage in conversation, beginning by asking her how she knew Marjorie. “Jenners,” she replied, without thinking much about it. She had not intended it to be taken as a witty answer, but it was.
    He smiled. “That’s the place to meet,” he said. “I can imagine people saying to themselves: ‘Oh, I need to go and buy a pair of socks and make a few new friends—I must go to Jenners.’ ”
    She laughed. “It wasn’t quite like that.”
    “Of course not.”
    She looked sideways at him; a quick look of appraisal. He was forty-something, she thought, and he had weathered well. His complexion was tanned and healthy—as if he enjoyed hill-walking or sailing, or something else that took him out into the open air. Her gaze slipped to his left hand: there was no ring.
    He asked her what she did.
    “I used to teach,” she said.
    “What a wonderful job.”
    She was surprised, but pleased at his response. “Sometimes,” she said.
    “I wouldn’t have the patience,” he said.
    “They can try such patience as one has,” she said, thinking of Senior Four, and of Natalie MacNeil in particular. She hesitated, and then continued, “There’s a girl called Natalie MacNeil. She tried my patience more than any of the others. Dreadful girl.” It was