Hot Water Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

Led by the nose: who was leading whom?
    â€˜Do I have a pimple?’
    â€˜Sorry.’ Christine blushed. ‘I was just looking at that diamond. Who wears them here?’
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜I mean – is it something to do with being unmarried, or grown-up . . .’ She struggled with cultural images. Always it was the women who were marked – wedding rings, those red blobs Hindu women wore. Marks of ownership, sometimes by husbands and sometimes by God.
    â€˜Heaven knows.’ Shamime laughed. ‘I only had it done last month. A little man at the Intercontinental.’
    â€˜Ah.’
    â€˜You’d look lovely with one, but I think a sapphire with your skin. Shall I tell you his name?’
    â€˜Donald would have a fit.’ Christine put her hand to her mouth. ‘I mean, it looks gorgeous on you, but . . .’ This was worse. But Shamime just laughed, her jewel winking.
    Christine switched off the air-conditioner. It was lunchtime. Outside the window a midday breeze had found its way into the garden; in the silence branches scraped back and forth against the wall. Who was confining whom? She thought of her mother, back in the lounge at Mill Hill. She loved her mother with deep exasperation; these feelings were mutual. ‘The Larches’ was always home; a grassy bank separated it from the Al dual carriageway, busy day and night. Signs led off in all directions,
Dover, Folkestone, Hatfield and the North.
During Christine’s childhood the M1 was being built half a mile beyond the existing road; the giant legs of a flyover grew up with her over one autumn. When she was seventeen she took driving lessons.
    Her mother had learnt to drive before Daddy died but she did it helplessly, gripping the wheel like a sinking woman. At first glance her mother was far from subjugated. She was slim, active and full of bright observations. She worked on the board of the local school, she brought up her daughters, she cleaned up before the cleaning lady arrived just as she, Christine, now hurried from room to room before Mohammed reached them. Yet she lived behind a purdah of the small and the personal. Setting the world to rights meant sorting out the sock drawer. ‘Silly old me,’ she would say, comfortably refusing to change. She invited indulgence; Christine’s father fondly narrowed his topics when she took part in the conversation. If he had minded he never let it show. Wearied of confrontations Christine too had ended up by making allowances for her; in other words, by treating her as less. This had saddened her. Though easing the atmosphere her mother had noticed it too and treated Christine with the brightness of a hostess. She was settled in her domestic life, bound by her received ideas of what a wife and mother should be.
    Christine had struggled free of all that. She had taken the M1 motorway up to university; she had travelled further. She had tried to escape what she had realized was the prison of her sex.
    â€˜What about the prison of mine?’ Donald had asked once, mildly. ‘All this lib thingy. Do they think I adore going to the office every day?’ He had paused. ‘I don’t understand why women are such slaves. I mean, I am so you needn’t be.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜I mean, I can’t afford having a bash at being a teacher and then deciding I don’t like it – wait a second, Chrissy – and then going into advertising and deciding it’s too trivial, and then taking time off with all that yoga business, and then being a part-time waitress for one’s experience of life with a capital L – wait a sec – then trying to write about life with a capital L but getting a lovely tan instead, then working in that clothes cupboard for a pittance. I mean, if I miss one repayment to the old Abbey National it goes down on a little file and if I miss any more they stop our mortgage.’ He paused for breath.