Larry's Party Read Online Free PDF

streets and served lunch in a tearoom called the Silken Cat. Dorrie was staunchly brave about the steak and kidney pie, leaving only a few polite scraps on her plate.
    “Take notice of these ceiling beams,” their guide instructed. His name was Arthur, a stout, broad-faced man, a Londoner with a beer-roughened voice and a school teacher’s patient explaining manner. “Late fifteenth century. Possibly earlier.”
    Dorrie copied this information into a little travel diary she pulled from her purse - “Late 15th century.”
    Larry found his wife’s note-taking touching and also surprising. Where had that diary come from? Its cover was red leather. The narrow ruled pages were edged in gold. One of her girlfriends at Manitoba Motors must have given it to her, a going-away present, something she wouldn’t have thought of herself, not in a million years. It moved him to see his Dorrie in a pose of studentlike concentration, pausing over her choice of words, and keeping her writing neat and small. That she would busy herself recording this chip of historical information — late fifteenth century — record it for him, for their life together, stirred a lever of love in his heart.
    But he remembered from school that fifteenth century really meant the fourteen-hundreds, how confusing that could be, and he wondered if Dorrie knew the difference and whether he should clarify the point for her. But no. She had already closed the diary and recapped her pen. Looking up at him, catching his eyes on her, she sent a kiss through the air, her small coral lips pushing out.
    The first night the tour group was installed in a hotel in Norwich (sixteenth century, more beams) which was said to have been visited on at least one occasion by Edward VII and a “lady friend.” There were snowdrops blooming in the hotel’s front garden. Flowers in March. This took Larry a moment to register, the impossibility of flowers — but here they were. Back home in Canada it was twenty below zero. “Snowdrops,” Dorrie wrote in her diary when she was told what the flowers were called.
    “Snowdrops are only the beginning,” Arthur told Larry and Dorrie. “You’ll be seeing daffodils before we’re done.”
    The tour, it turned out, was only half booked. The other travelers were mostly retired New Zealanders and Australians, and an ancient deaf Romanian couple who never let go of each other’s hands. “Everyone’s so old,” Dorrie whispered to Larry. She had a gift for disappointment, and now she was wrinkling up her face. “Everyone’s old and fat except for us.”
    It was true. Or close to being true. The eighteen passengers, men as well as women, shared the spongy carelessness of flesh that accompanies late middle age. The white permed heads of the wives, their husbands’ rosy baldness, framed faces that were, to Larry’s eyes at least, remarkably similar, softened, and blurred in outline, with their features melted to a kind of putty.
    “I’ll bet we’re the only ones who screw all night,” Dorrie said, looking around. “Or screw at all.”
    “Probably.” He smiled down at her.
    “Notice I said screw and not fuck.”
    “Congratulations.”
    “I’m a married woman now. Respectable.”
    “Ha.” Still smiling.
    “Ha yourself.”
    A white-haired husband and wife from Arizona had signed on to the tour. They were in England on their sabbatical leave. She, the wife, pronounced the word “sabbatical” as though the syllables were beads on a string. She explained to Dorrie, who had never heard of a sabbatical, that she and Dr. Edwards, her husband, had been to Thailand “last time” and before that to Berkeley in California. “We see these occasions as opportunities to replenish ourselves every seven years,” she said, “and take stock.”
     
    The members of the tour group were wakened early each morning in their various freezing hotel rooms by a knock on the door, then Arthur calling out an upbeat “Morning!”
    “Oh,