Other People's Husbands Read Online Free PDF Page A

that he wasn’t physically capable of getting himself out of this position. A younger, fitter man would have no trouble scrambling up the bank. A younger, fitter man would have power in his limbs, flexibility, strength. He’d had those, rather assumed they were still there in some kind of emergency pack – where were they? Somewhere along the years they’d been used up without him really noticing. What was it he’d just been thinking, only minutes ago, about feeling much the same as usual (apart from the hip, the night peeing, the sex expiry, the longer-teeth thing)? Now he didn’t feel remotely youth-strong. When he needed it, the vitality bag proved to be empty. This was vile. Demeaning.
    â€˜You don’t want to be sitting down there, dear,’ Lilac Beret’s companion called, ‘you’ll catch a chill. Here, have a hand.’
    The two women, holding on to branches of elder, reached down and gratefully he allowed them to haul him up the bank. They were surprisingly powerful.
    â€˜At our age we have to look out for each other. No one else will,’ Lilac Beret told him. ‘Bloody runners, that girl never even looked back.’
    â€˜You could sue,’ her friend ventured, looking eager at the idea.
    Conrad thanked them, brushed mud from his jeans, called to Floss and slowly, heavily, conscious of his fast-thudding heart, retraced his steps to the path through the bracken towards where he’d left his car. At our age, he thought miserably. These could be the people he would one day be sitting alongside, parked in a care home to endure an incontinent future of wipe-clean chairs and endless blaring daytime TV. They were kind, friendly, cheerful and sweet, but he wouldn’t want to share the rest of his life with them. Would they think him a miserable git because he didn’t want to join in the sing-songs of ‘White Cliffs Of Dover’ and ‘Roll Out The Barrel’, or might they too prefer to listen to Bob Dylan and John Lee Hooker? No, he didn’t think they would. Something about the lilac beret on one and the turquoise satin jacket on the other said Cliff Richard to him – back in the late fifties they’d have thought Cliff racy but a Nice Boy, safer than Elvis. Before him they’d have been keen on Frank Sinatra.
    He added another item to his list of things he wasn’t going to do any more. Life. It was time to leave life’s party. The girls were grown-up now and more or less sorted. Sara would have time to find someone else, someone with a racing chance of outliving her, someone who wasn’t going to sap the last of her vitality by falling apart at a fair old pace, as he surely would. Leaving her a widow in only her mid-forties was the kindest, most generous thing he could do for her, to save her from having to live for years with a decaying husk of a man. It would be his final gift. It was time to go.
    To his surprise, the decision quite cheered him up. For one thing, it meant he could get back to having sex. He liked sleeping in the studio; watching old movies or cricket on TV at four in the morning was a guilt-free delight, but he did miss Sara’s warm soft body. He would somehow keep his own premises but visit her bed, the way the nation imagined royalty managed these things. With his personal expiry date sorted for the near future, he could surely count on having enough sexual gas left in the tank for the duration. Good – a cheering upside to imminent death. Now all he needed was to work out how to die.
    Conrad drove over Richmond Bridge, turned off the main street and parked under the chestnut trees on the far side of the Green. ‘Two minutes,’ he said to Floss, who was now lying in the passenger seat’s footwell, half asleep. He climbed out of the car, shoved 50p into the parking meter and hoped he could still walk fast enough to Tesco Metro and back for the time not to expire. Inside the store he