Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

her and their experience appeared to cross over one another’s in a perfectly abstract manner with no recognition of each other’s individual natures. She was a tiny, sullen brunette, the motherof three small children. She had the gritty texture of the chronically unhappy and treated the young lover she had acquired out of spite and boredom with savage contempt, except for certain glimpses of her all-consuming discontent as she clung to him in the aftermath. ‘It is like screwing the woman’s page of the
Guardian
,’ he told Buzz but he never mentioned her to anyone else out of indifference rather than discretion.
    She made cool and practical arrangements. He went to see her twice a week, in the afternoons, when her children were at their play group and also on Thursday evenings, when they were in bed and her husband took an evening class on the concept of mind. They always made love in the spare room on a sheetless bed under a framed reproduction of a Picasso blue-period harlequin with a bloom of dust on the glass. During the entire course of the affair, she never solicited so much as a single piece of information from Lee concerning his family, his environment or his ambitions; she showed no curiosity of any kind about him at all. He thought this was very interesting.
    Anyway, she was a great convenience for him; he took a certain pleasure in coupling with the wife of a man who taught him ethics; she left most of his evenings free; and he felt, with a puritanical sense of satisfaction inherited from his aunt, that he was learning something important about the middle class. But when he arrived one Thursday evening in early February, he found her in a filthy mood and followed her, with a more than usually wary tread, into the terra incognita of the living room.
    Unknown but by no means unpredictable. On a guard before the fire, small garments steamed. He saw she had been reading
The Second Sex
, which lay face down on the floor. The walls were beige, a cerebral Mondrian print hung over the home-made hi-fi and bits of plastic toy scattered the rush matting. Lee gave himself his private grin of wry pleasure, a facial expression he preferred to conceal from the world most of the time in case it gave too much away.
    The weather remained cold; he squatted down on the matting and warmed his hands at the fire. He wondered if he should buy some rush matting for Annabel lay full lengthon the cold, hard boards for hours on end and he often thought she looked as if she were on a slab in a morgue. He did not like to be a prey to such melodramatic imagery. His other love – that is if Annabel were to be defined as his lover – anyway the other woman – and was she the Other Woman or simply another woman? – anyway, this particular woman seated herself in an armchair and drew her legs up defensively beneath her, thus making herself impregnable. She wore jeans, a checkered shirt, her feet were bare and her long, dark hair was caught at the nape by a rubber band. She twirled her wedding ring around her finger, a sure sign of repressed annoyance, and she was mute.
    Lee rocked back and forth on his heels, holding out his hands to the electric bars. Tonight, he looked like Barnaby Rudge. Mentally he wandered through his wardrobe of smiles, wondering which one to wear to suit this ambiguous occasion. At a very early age, Lee discovered the manipulative power of his various smiles and soon learned to utilize them in order to smooth his passage through life for he liked to have an easy time of it; that was what he called being happy. He selected a tentative and encouraging smile; it clicked into position so smoothly you would have sworn he wore his heart upon his face. As soon as the smile materialized, she burst into speech.
    ‘You have shacked up with some bird, I hear,’ she said.
    ‘Yeah,’ said Lee slowly, scenting trouble. ‘So what?’
    She made a dismissive gesture with her hands, got up and started to prowl around the