Good Morning, Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

feeling cribbed, cabined and confined was a short one, in some cases taking only a matter of days. In the aftermath of break-up, Cressida always turned to her female friends for comfort. Men were only good for one thing, and that was overrated. Passion was for pubescents. Female friendship was the thing. Which sensible life-view ruled her mind until the opening of the third bottle, when a meeting of mature female minds was suddenly discarded in favour of a close encounter of mature female flesh.
    The last break-up seemed to have been even more than usually traumatic.
    “I really liked the guy,” she bewailed. “He had everything. And I mean everything. Including a Maserati. Have you ever had sex in a Maserati, Ellie?”
    Ellie pursed her lips as if running though a check list of top cars, then admitted she’d missed out.
    “Never mind,” said her friend consolingly. “The driving position’s fabulous but the shagging position’s absolute agony. But you wouldn’t believe a guy driving a car like that would turn out to have five kids and a religion that won’t let his wife entertain the idea of divorce.”
    Her eyes glinted malevolently.
    “Maybe if I had a word with his wife that would change her religion,” she added.
    “Cress, you wouldn’t.”
    “Of course I wouldn’t. Not unless provoked. And why the hell am I wasting quality time with my dearest friend talking about that sunburnt shit of a witch doctor?”
    She gave a mighty heave at the corkscrew and succeeded in hauling it out of the bottle, but only at the expense of leaving half the cork in the neck.
    Oh well, that should delay matters a little, thought Ellie, offering up a prayer of thanks to whatever it was that almost certainly wasn’t there.
    As if to reproach her for this qualification in her devotion, the phone rang.
    “Shit,” said Cressida. “See what you can do with this sodding thing, will you?”
    As soon as she left the room, Ellie pulled out her mobile and pressed her husband’s speed-dial key. He answered almost immediately.
    “Peter,” she whispered. “It’s me.”
    “What? It’s a lousy line.”
    “Just listen. I need you earlier.”
    “Ah,” he said. “Second bottle time already, eh?”
    He was quick. That was one of the good things about him. One of many good things.
    “Third,” she said. “No sign of food and she’s been dumped again. Some medic. She’s started on about the problems of sex in a Maserati.”
    “Poor thing. Can’t you tell her you’ve got a headache? Always works with me.”
    “Ha ha. Can you get here soon? Say it’s some problem with the sitter.”
    “I’m on my way. Fifteen minutes tops. Hang in there, girl.”
    She’d just got the phone into her bag when Cressida came back into the room.
    “Sue-Lynn,” she said. “My sister-in-law. Wants to know if I’ve heard from Pal. Seems he didn’t turn up for his squash with Jase and nobody knows where he is. Silly bitch.”
    In the five years of their friendship, she’d never talked in any detail about her family, not even her brother Pal with whom she was close and who’d been indirectly responsible for bringing Ellie and Cress together. He ran an antique shop called Archimagus in the town’s medieval area near the cathedral. Ellie had been in a couple of times without buying anything and without registering more about the proprietor than that he was a good-looking young man who after a token offer of help became a non-hassling background presence. On the third occasion when she expressed interest in a seventeenth-century knife box in walnut with a beautiful mother-of-pearl butterfly inlay on the lid, he’d answered her questions with an eloquent expertise that very subtly implied that only a person of the most sensitive taste would have selected this item above all the rest of his stock. Finally he suggested she took it home to see how it looked in situ, no obligation, which had made a young woman who’d just come into the shop roar