Miranda's Big Mistake Read Online Free PDF Page B

with the fresh air. Anyway, it’s where Ray and I first met.’
    â€˜People will stare at you.’
    â€˜Oh well, I’m used to that.’
    â€˜You’re going to sit on Parliament Hill drinking a forty-seven-pound bottle of wine?’ Miranda said in disbelief. ‘Have you got a corkscrew?’
    â€˜I’m in a wheelchair.’ Comfortably, Florence patted her bag. ‘I’m not senile.’
    The bag, when she’d patted it, had made a clinking noise. As a minicab pulled up outside, Miranda said cautiously, ‘Two glasses. One for you and one for…?’
    If Florence said, ‘Ray,’ she would have to stop her. There was such a thing as too weird.
    â€˜You, of course.’ Florence opened the door and began to wheel herself through it. ‘Who else d’you think’s going to push me up that bloody hill?’

Chapter 5
    The view over Hampstead was breathtaking. White clouds scudded across a robin’s-egg-blue sky and the kite flyers were out in force. Miranda, feeling the cold, dug her woolly orange beret out of her jacket pocket and pulled it on, Benny Hill style, over her tingling ears.
    Florence held the glasses on her lap and Miranda wrestled the cork out of the bottle. When the wine was poured, they toasted Ray and clinked glasses. Reverently taking her first sip, Miranda tried hard—and failed utterly—to appreciate the finer points of £47-a-bottle wine.
    â€˜Mm, yum,’ she lied.
    â€˜Ha, and I’m the Queen of Spain. Doesn’t matter if you don’t like it,’ Florence said cheerfully, polishing off her first glassful and smacking her lips. ‘I’ll manage the rest.’
    To steer the subject away from her own shameful ignorance, Miranda huffed on her frozen hands and said, ‘So how did you and Ray meet?’
    â€˜Haven’t I told you before? Oh, it’s a great story.’ Florence held her glass out for a refill. ‘I was up here early one Sunday morning with Bruce. He had a new bike and I wouldn’t let him out on the roads. So of course, he set out to prove he could ride the thing—he was eight, you know what they’re like at that age—and the next minute he was hurtling out of control down that path there.’ She nodded in the direction of the narrow path curving to the left below them. ‘Poor little sod ended up going slap into a tree.’
    â€˜You’ve never told me this!’ Enthralled, Miranda leaned closer, cross-legged on the grass. It wasn’t difficult to imagine Bruce as a stubborn eight-year-old. ‘What happened next?’
    â€˜Blood and teeth everywhere. One wrecked bike, one sprained knee. Bruce was screaming blue murder and there was me without so much as a tissue to mop up the blood.’
    â€˜Poor Bruce.’
    â€˜Poor me! I was in a complete flap. Bruce wasn’t the only one in tears, I can tell you.’
    â€˜Hang on, I can guess the rest,’ Miranda said excitedly. ‘Then—trumpets, trumpets!—over the hill came Ray riding to the rescue on his motorbike’—she had heard all about Ray’s devotion to his Norton 500—‘with a first-aid kit slung over one shoulder and a big bag of false teeth on the other.’
    Florence chuckled.
    â€˜Not quite. Over the hill came Ray, on foot and hung over, making his way back to Highgate after an all-night party. But he came to the rescue, bless his heart, and he had a clean handkerchief, which was more than I did. He cleaned up Bruce’s mouth, managed to stop him screaming and insisted on giving him a piggyback home. He even carried the smashed-up bike,’ Florence remembered fondly. ‘It’s a wonder he didn’t have a heart attack there and then. Well, that was it as far as I was concerned. Love at first sight. There was Ray with his Clark Gable hair—that was when he still had hair, of course—and me trotting along carrying