I Remember You Read Online Free PDF Page A

you.’
    ‘What about me?’ Adam said tetchily.
    ‘That the main reason you work at the Feathers is to pick up women,’ Tess told him. ‘And that you should be in the tourist guide as a well-known landmark.’
    ‘I only slept with her a couple of times,’ Adam said, ignoring this.
    Tess hit him on the arm. ‘“I only slept with her a couple of times,”’ she mimicked, crossly. ‘God, men. You think that means it doesn’t mean anything! Oh, you are so useless. She’s mad about you! She’s been waiting for you to call her!’
    ‘Well…’ Adam said. ‘I bet that’s not true. I mean, I like her, but—’
    ‘Oh, I know, you can’t be bothered to actually talk to her, after you’ve shagged her,’ said Tess, and it came out sounding angrier than she meant.
    ‘Don’t split your infinitives,’ Adam said, brightly. ‘Call yourself a Classicist?’
    ‘It’s not funny,’ Tess said. They walked down the road towards the pub and after a pause she burst out, ‘God, sometimes I really hate men.’
    Adam glanced at her swiftly, and was silent for a moment, then said, ‘So, er—have you heard from Will?’ He patted her arm. ‘Don’t hit me again. I’m serious. I’m sorry about you two, I thought it was all going well.’
    ‘I thought so too,’ said Tess. ‘I was wrong, obviously.’
    ‘Do you know why…’ Adam began, and trailed off.
    ‘Yeah. He’s seeing someone else.’ Tess said. Adam nodded. ‘Someone called Ticky.’
    ‘I don’t know what that means.’
    Tess gazed up at the thick white January sky. ‘No, I don’t either. Except I hate her.’
    ‘You see, just like a girl,’ Adam said. ‘You should hate him, he’s the one who did you wrong.’
    ‘You sound like Mae West,’ Tess said, trying not to sound miserable.
    ‘I mean it. I never thought he was…’ he trailed off again. Tess nodded, and shoved her hand through the air in a ‘I know, I know’ gesture. Adam had met Will a couple of times and she had come to accept—so she told herself—that there were some people with whom Will was not destined to get on. Adam was one of them. He was too ready to laugh, too ready to take the piss out of Tess; they knew each other too well, perhaps, for Will ever to be the third side of the triangle.
    Will had not been a laugh-a-minute. Indeed, that was one of the things that Tess had originally liked about him. Here she was, this poverty-stricken teacher, frittering her twenties away in South London pubs, wearing too-short skirts and drinking Pernod and Black, her only claim to cultural superiority being that she taught Classics (though bribing bored fourteen-year-olds with a bloodthirsty description of the Emperor Nero’s brutal murder of his mother Agrippina as a back route to telling them about the fall of the Roman Empire did not necessarily indicate the highest levels of academic achievement, she knew). Their friend Henry, whom Tess knew from university and Will from school, had introduced them at a birthday party. It was a hot summer’s day and Tess was wearing a shirt dress which emphasized her curvy form; her eyes were sparkling, her thick dark hair shining, and she had a tan, having just returned from two weeks in Greece with Fiona, another friend from university.
    Will had been impressed with this clever, pretty girl and—height being a sensitive issue with him, since he stood less than five foot six inches high in his shoes—what he particularly loved was the way her tanned face looked up to his, her blue-grey eyes smiling at him, as she described her holiday. He had barely listened as she talked, and so he never heard that they were staying in an all-inclusive resort, and to his question, ‘Did you go to Mycenae?’ never heard the answer,‘Well, we went to a karaoke bar called Mycenae Mike.’ He merely smiled as she chattered, wondering how easy the promising shirt dress which revealed just enough of her breasts would be to remove.
    Three dates did it; by then Tess,