Inhuman Remains Read Online Free PDF Page B

beach.’
    ‘Please do, dear.’
    I went to my room and changed into a bikini. My aunt took a little longer, but when she emerged she was similarly dressed, with a diaphanous garment wrapped around her. Tom had gone on ahead, saying that he had arranged to meet some French kids down below. We left by the front door this time, after refilling Charlie’s water-bowl (dogs are barred from the beach in the summer), walking past the church and the old, restored foresters’ house, then down the sharp slope that leads to the sand.
    I have a deal with the nearest beach bar, a season ticket of sorts that lets me have all the sun-bed and parasol time I need. I grabbed a couple of loungers and hauled them over to an available sunshade. Almost before I knew it, Adrienne had lost the drape, stretched herself out and whipped off her top.
    ‘Bloody hell,’ I heard myself murmur. I’m rather proud of mine, but I don’t expect them to look like that in thirty years.
    She smiled as she caught my glance. ‘Silicon, dear, the finest silicon, not those awful water-filled things.’ She tapped her perfect teeth. ‘Crowns, all of them; steel-bonded porcelain set on gold posts. Nature needs some help from time to time,’ she said. ‘If one can afford it, why not?’

Five
    T om rejoined us at seven o’clock, his cut-off time for reporting back to Mum. (When he gets to be eight, it’ll be eight o’clock, when he’s nine it’ll be nine, when he’s ten . . . we’ll see.) In fact he had never been out of my sight, since he had spent his time swimming with his friends on the guarded beach, playing a slightly over-ambitious game of volleyball, and tidying up empties around the cabin bar, a labour of love for which he and his mates are rewarded with the odd free soft drink. Tom never goes off on his own: he’s a gregarious boy, and when he’s not with me he’s with friends. He always tells me where he’s going, and if it’s too far for him to cycle, or involves the public roads, I take him there and pick him up. We may have a relaxed lifestyle, but I’m a responsible mother, and nowhere near the soft touch for him that some people may believe I am.
    We let Adrienne decide where she wanted to eat, and what. From the options we laid out she chose a takeaway paella (I always leave those to the experts) from Mesón del Conde, to be eaten on the east-facing top-floor terrace that’s accessed from my bedroom. That suited me, since all the restaurants are jammed on Saturdays in the summer and also since there was stuff I wanted to ask her.
    I didn’t get round to it, though, until after ten, when Tom had gone off to bed with Charlie, and his new friend Harry Potter (I plan to allow him only one a year: I reckon that the later books are a bit too dark for pre-teen kids), leaving us old folks in the candlelight, looking out across the bay and starting on our second bottle of Palacio de Bornos, from El Celler Petit, our local wine shop.
    ‘So,’ I began, settling down into my chair, ‘what’s this crap about semi-retirement? You don’t look ill. Are you?’
    ‘Of course not.’ Adrienne snorted. ‘Why shouldn’t I ease off? I’ve passed the age I will not mention, Primavera. Am I not entitled to enjoy my golden years?’
    ‘Yes, but last time we met you told me you were fit as a tick and that you’d die in harness. It’s not in your nature to ease off. You and my mother may have lived your lives in very different ways, but you’re cut from the same genetic cloth. She worked until she died. If she’d gone on till she was ninety it wouldn’t have been any different. She couldn’t do inactive. She wrote six days a week, then dragged my dad down to church every Sunday, but it was to fill her spare day, rather than to commune with her Maker. What do you do at the weekends, Auntie?’
    ‘I review my clients’ royalty statements, and I catch up on some other book-keeping. But I go out a lot, to the Tate Modern, for example. And