Cheating at Canasta Read Online Free PDF Page A

until six weeks ago, when the Institute had decided to close itself down.
    ‘Idleness is upsetting,’ she had said while they danced, and had asked the man who held her closer now if he had ever heard of Sharon Ritchie. People often thought they hadn’t and then remembered. He shook his head and the name was still unfamiliar to him when she told him why it might not have been. ‘Sharon Ritchie was murdered,’ she’d said, and wouldn’t have without the few drinks. ‘My husband was accused.’
    She blew on the surface of her coffee but it was still too hot. She tipped sugar out of its paper spill into her teaspoon and watched the sugar darkening when the coffee soaked it. She loved the taste of that, as much a pleasure as anything there’d been this afternoon. ‘Oh, suffocated,’ she’d said, when she’d been asked how the person called Sharon Ritchie had died. ‘She was suffocated with a cushion.’ Sharon Ritchie had had a squalid life, living grandly at a good address, visited by many men.
    Katherine sat a while longer, staring at the crumbs of her florentine, her coffee drunk. ‘We live with it,’ she had said when they left the party together, he to return to the wife he didn’t get on with, she to the husband whose deceiving of her had ended with a death. Fascinated by what was lived with, an hour ago in the room that was his temporary accommodation her afternoon lover had wanted to know everything.
    On the Tube she kept seeing the room: the picture of the elephant, the suitcases, the trailing flexes, the clothes on the back of the door. Their voices echoed, his curiosity, her evasions and then telling a little more because, after all, she owed him something. ‘He paid her with a cheque once, oh ages ago. That was how they brought him into things. And when they talked to the old woman in the flat across the landing from Sharon Ritchie’s she recognised him in the photograph she was shown. Oh yes, we live with it.’
    Her ticket wouldn’t operate the turnstile when she tried to leave the Tube station and she remembered that she had guessed how much the fare should be and must have got it wrong. The Indian who was there to deal with such errors was inclined to be severe. Her journey had been different earlier, she tried to explain; she’d got things muddled. ‘Well, these things happen,’ the Indian said, and she realized his severity had not been meant. When she smiled he didn’t notice. That is his way too, she thought.
    She bought two chicken breasts, free-range, organic; and courgettes and Medjool dates. She hadn’t made a list as she usually did, and wondered if this had to do with the kind of afternoon it had been and thought it probably had. She tried to remember which breakfast cereals needed to be replenished but couldn’t. And then remembered Normandy butter, and Braeburns and tomatoes. It was just before five o’clock when she let herself into the flat. The telephone was ringing and Phair said he’d be a bit late, not by much, maybe twenty minutes. She ran a bath.
    The tips of his fingers stroked the arm that was close to him. He said he thought he loved her. Katherine shook her head.
    ‘Tell me,’ he said.
    ‘I have, though.’
    He didn’t press it. They lay in silence for a while. Then Katherine said: ‘I love him more, now that I feel so sorry for him too. He pitied me when I knew I was to be deprived of the children we both wanted. Love makes the most of pity, or pity does of love, I don’t know which. It hardly matters.’
    She told him more, and realized she wanted to, which she hadn’t known before. When the two policemen had come in the early morning she had not been dressed. Phair was making coffee. ‘Phair Alexander Warburton,’ one of them had said. She’d heard him from the bedroom, her bath water still gurgling out. She’d thought they’d come to report a death, as policemen sometimes have to: her mother’s or Phair’s aunt, who was his next of kin. When she