Life Begins Read Online Free PDF Page A

that, but…’ he lowered his voice ‘… even as your friend I would like to know all about you, Charlotte Turner, or at least a little more?’ he pleaded, turning the confession into a joke by holding up his thumb and index finger as if indicating a tiny portion of something edible.
    Flattered, her instincts softened by wine, at a loss as to what to make of this man with his twists and turns of tone, so unknown (so unknowable, as it seemed, after twenty years of no one but Martin), Charlotte countered feebly that there was nothing to tell and what about him? She found herself deciding in the same instant that the beard wasn’t so bad. At least there were no specks of oil or food in it; he had been careful about that, dabbing with a napkin between mouthfuls. He ate daintily, too, for a man, which she liked. Martin had gone into a sort of trance when it came to food, shovelling in forkfuls, incapable of sensible conversation until his hunger was appeased.
    ‘I asked first.’ He topped up her glass.
    ‘Okay, let me see.’ She took a sip, and then another. ‘A potted history would be roughly… born in Sri Lanka – or Ceylon, as it then was – because my father was into tea, then we moved to Constantia in South Africa –’
    ‘Tea in South Africa?’
    ‘No, wine by then.’ Charlotte laughed. ‘Okay, I’ll leave it there.’
    ‘No, no,’ he protested. ‘Don’t leave it there. Go on. I want to hear more.’ He ran his fingers across his lips in a charade of zipping them shut.
    ‘I was despatched to boarding-school at the tender age of nine. A few years later my parents came back to England for good, to Tunbridge Wells. My mother still lives there.We don’t get on too well. Er… what else? Oh, yes, my father died when I was eighteen. I had just started at Durham University. That’s where I met my husband. We had Sam, moved to London, separated last year, divorced this – I hope.’ Charlotte picked up her glass and put it down again, twiddling the stem and smiling shyly. ‘I think that’s about it. A simple thing, a life, isn’t it? The bare essentials, I mean.’
    ‘Oh, yes, so simple,’ Tim agreed, although his attention had long since drifted from the substance of the conversation. He liked the way she had left the top three buttons on her cardigan undone, drawing the eye – deliberately, he was sure – to the modest swell of her breasts. They looked in pretty good shape, too, given that she had had a kid and had to be pretty close to forty. Through the thin cream wool of the top he could just make out the edging of her bra. Or maybe it was a camisole, a piece of pretty silk with a lacy trim. And her mouth was enticing, having the natural cherry redness that so often went with auburn colouring. In his view it was even more irresistible now that the lipstick had worn off.
    It was wrong, Tim knew, to let such thoughts in. He had said he understood how she felt, so he should stick to that, play out the charade of wanting friendship. Talking was so important to women, sharing feelings and so on. Phoebe had rammed that home often enough, ticking him off for not listening to her, for having feelings that were either insufficient or never about the right things.
    ‘What about you?’
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘Your potted history.’
    She was leaning on the bar and turned towards him to await the answer, resting her left cheek in the palm of her left hand, her sharp green eyes properly alive at last. Amoment before, she had run her fingers through her hair, raking it off her face and letting it fall in two silky sweeps across her ears. Tim suddenly remembered reading somewhere – in one of his men’s magazines probably, brought out of hiding since Phoebe’s departure – that such preening by a female denoted genuine physical interest. Body language was everything, the article had said. Undisguisable, it proved that behind the elegant structures of our sentences – the so-called communication that Phoebe