Love in a Warm Climate Read Online Free PDF

sunflowers. Each flower had its own scent, and I spent hours gazing at them and inhaling their sweetness. The owner was apparently mad about gardening and planted flowers to celebrate his wife and children’s birthdays every year.
    One night I dreamt of a house surrounded by roses. They grew inside and out. They intrigued me, but when I tried to go into the house the thorns grew into monster thorns and created a barrier. I tried to force my way in and found blood on my hands.
    That was the night before our final house-hunting trip. The dream was the culmination of my worst ever week in London.
    I was out for a drink with my friends Sarah, Carla and Lucy one evening. Carla is a recent addition to the group, a mum I met at school who is Italian. She has three children too. Lucy is another friend from university. She is the sort of woman I would usually avoid; she has that kind of easy perfection that makes you want to curl up in a ball and die. But she is also one of the nicest people I have ever met, so we are still friends. She works in publishing and lives with her investment banker husband and two children on the posh side of the river. Her husband is called Perfect Patrick. Or at least he was Perfect Patrick until he lost his job and Lucy became the sole provider. Not so perfect any more.
    Up until that evening, I hadn’t really realised that anyone else would notice the extent of my post-children decline. I felt invisible, I suppose – something that I think happens to a lot of women when they have children, age and put on weight. The latter two in my opinion being a direct consequence of the first one.
    We went to Drake’s, the London hotel I used to run before I had the babies. We were having a lovely time, chatting, bitching about old college friends and enemies, comparing nail varnishes (I, for once, had some on; Sarah of course had the latest colour, which was yellow for no other reason, I concluded, than that was the only colour no woman had at home and hence was profitable for the sellers of nail varnish. It looked terrible.) Lucy was telling us about her latest Booker prize nominee, Carla was about to embark on an affair with her tennis coach, and Sarah had just been assigned to help with the re-launch of a magazine that was being overseen by the CEO of the publishing company she works for, so we had a lot to talk about.
    There were two men sitting at the bar who sent over a waitress with four glasses of champagne. We didn’t want to be interrupted because were having a lovely time together, so we sent it back. One of the men, who hadobviously had too much to drink, stumbled over to tell us how rude we were to refuse his generous gesture.
    “And it’s not like you’re anything special,” he slurred. “Look at you,” he added, pointing at me, “with your mummy breasts.”
    “Yeah,” his friend joined in laughing. “The phrase ‘beached whale’ comes to mind.”
    I was wearing quite a low-cut top, which I had thought was fairly attractive when I put it on at home. Okay, so I know I am not Elle McPherson, but I’m hardly what Sarah calls “boilingly ugly” either. Suddenly I felt terribly exposed and unattractive – a feeling that has not really left me since. Luckily I still knew the security guard at the hotel and he threw the men out for me – not before Lucy, who studied Law when we were at university, had threatened to sue them for defamation and disturbing the peace.
    But even that didn’t help my self-esteem or restore any pride I might once have had in my ‘mummy breasts’. In fact, I wondered how much luck Lucy would have suing for defamation; they were pretty mumsy-like.
    The following day I was mugged on my way from Sainsbury’s to my car, in broad daylight. Someone just bashed into me and grabbed hold of my handbag; it all happened so quickly I didn’t stand a chance. It was like a gust of wind arrived and suddenly I was standing there without my bag. I felt like such a fool. I