Come Clean (1989) Read Online Free PDF Page A

tired. Another night?’ she said.
    ‘All right, love. We’ll probably bog on a bit longer, won’t we Col?’
    As she crossed the door and moved towards the stairs, she thought she heard Desmond say to Harpur: ‘Yes, bridge, very tiring.’
    Sitting in the bath, thinking over the evening, she tasted salt on her lips and became aware, suddenly, that she was weeping. It shocked her. She rarely cried, and when she did she generally
knew about it. Now, she hung her head forward something like the injured man’s in the club earlier, and let the tears drop into the soapy water, a tiny squall on a grey and white pool.
    God, what was this all about? She straightened her neck and swirled the water about with one hand, as if drowning the tears in suds would drown the pain, too. But a mix of sadnesses competed in
her head. For a moment downstairs, when Des asked her to stay and she refused, all the pain and aridity of the marriage had closed on her like an illness. Something in her had wanted to please him
and almost made her agree. Ten minutes would not have killed her. Simply, though, she had found she could not do it. The chore of speaking to him had seemed too much, much too much tonight, even
though Harpur would have been there to help out the talk and prevent any slide into coldness or abuse.
    So, was it the hopelessness of things between her and Des that had made her bawl? She could not really believe it. Hadn’t she known for long enough about that? Wasn’t it now almost
fully sublimated into a scar, no more a hurtful wound? The absence of children no longer troubled her, surely? She consulted a marriage counsellor off and on, but this was to help her make up her
mind about Ian and the rest of it, not Des.
    Perhaps she was crying about Ian, then. It had been all right, it had been lovely, back at his place. That part of it almost always was. Yet tonight those doubts about him, the anxieties, had
surfaced again. They were always there, not far out of sight, and at the Monty this evening they had become suddenly more alarming than she could remember them ever before. Did she know him? Could
she know him? He held her off, cut off the lights, doused awkward conversations.
    She climbed out of the bath, still impatient with herself for growing so gloomy and philosophical, and eager to be in bed and asleep or apparently asleep before Des came up. Briefly she examined
herself in the full-length mirror. It wasn’t bad, was it? Another few good years left? Perhaps that was one plus for having no pregnancies. She had stopped crying.

Chapter Two
    Just as Sarah reached her car in the drive next morning she saw Ralph climb quickly from a Montego parked near the house and walk towards her. Panic hit her immediately, and
her first terrified, unhinged thought was that he had no right to come up from the Monty to a decent, leafy, pebble-dash road. Christ, it broke the rules: she ran two lives and he ought to stay
stuck in that other, down-town version of herself. Boundaries should be respected, at least by him. It was like a rat in the bread bin.
    ‘Mrs Iles,’ he said, ‘well, I’ve been waiting for you, obviously. I wasn’t sure if you’d be going out, but I waited. I didn’t want to call at the house,
even after your husband, the senior officer, had left. I had an idea you wouldn’t like that.’
    ‘Probably not.’
    ‘This needed delicate handling. Luckily, in business, you get used to summing up a situation.’
    ‘It’s a knack, isn’t it?’
    They were standing near her car and she decided that the sooner they were not the better. She did not want him in the house, so she got behind the wheel of the Panda and opened the passenger
door. He joined her and she drove out of the road at once, feeling hopelessly stressed and confused.
    Her day had begun badly at breakfast, when she found Desmond civil but very distant, more than usually distant, as if some powerful anxiety gripped him. He was not easily upset,