More Than You Know Read Online Free PDF Page B

happy …”
    Sarah’s heart lifted in spite of herself as she listened. It did sound wonderful. And Eliza was only eighteen, was still a little too young to think about getting married …

    “Look! Isn’t it lovely?”
    They all looked obediently at the square-cut sapphire surrounded by small diamonds, glittering in its appointed place, the fourth finger of the left hand, specially manicured for the occasion.
    “Oh, it’s gorgeous.”
    “It’s beautiful.”
    “How terribly exciting. Congratulations!”
    “Marvellous!”
    “Thank you. I’m so happy! I don’t know how I’m going to get through the day. Thank goodness it’s Friday; we’re going down to the country tonight, to talk plans with Mummy and Daddy.”
    “Well …” Eliza hated to break the charmed circle of beaming rosy faces all peering down at Susannah Godley’s ring, in the kitchen of the shared flat, but … “I’m already late. Sorry. Susannah, congratulations again. Let me give you a kiss.”
    “Thank you, Eliza. Thank you so much. Work hard! As if she wouldn’t,” she added to the other girls, as the door closed on Eliza’s back. “That job is just too important to her. Well, when she does get married, she’ll have to give it up; I mean, no man’s going to agree to his wife working the sort of hours she does.”

    Eliza ran out into the street, feeling the now-familiar mixture of irritation and mild depression that followed any announcement of an engagement among her friends. Irritation because she couldn’t understand how they could all get so excited about it, seeing it as the be-all and end-all of their lives—it would be the end as far as she was concerned—and depression because however much she told herself that, and that she was right and they were wrong, she was beginning to feel just a bit of an outsider. Everyone, absolutely everyone was getting married, even Princess Margaret—to a photographer called Antony Armstrong-Jones. Everyone except her, that was. Not that she wanted it, or certainly not at the moment; she was far more interested in her career.
    But it was beginning to feel a bit lonely out there, more so with every friend’s engagement.
    Anyway, at least she wasn’t a virgin anymore; she’d seen to that, rather unsatisfactorily but with great relief, a few months earlier, at a country house party. He had been the brother of an old friend, they had both been rather drunk, and she had … well, seen a golden opportunity, really.
    Her relief was tempered with disappointment that it hadn’t been more pleasurable; how could that, which had been uncomfortable rather than anything else, possibly have anything in common, she wondered, with the surge of rapture that Lady Chatterley had clearly experienced with Mellors? The book had just become available on the open market and was being passed from nice girl to nice girl all over England. She told herself that everything required practice, presumed it must get better and that when she found the right person, it would.
    She did, of course, feel considerable guilt that she couldn’t yet give her mother the pleasure—and the satisfaction and relief—of seeing her safely engaged to someone rich and appropriate. She was well aware of the investment in her season and how the whole point of the ritual—and it was a ritual—was to pave her way to the altar, as it was for all the girls.
    But she had something far more important, in her opinion, the sort of job she had dreamed of: in the publicity department of Woolfe’s, a medium-size, high-fashion Knightsbridge store. Eliza had gone to Woolfe’s as a secretary, but she had recently, and to her great pride, beenpromoted to publicity assistant. She absolutely loved her work, which consisted mostly of driving round London in taxis, delivering clothes that fashion journalists had requested for photographic sessions; she was also sometimes allowed to show the more junior journalists clothes herself, and even suggest