Other People's Husbands Read Online Free PDF

went straight to the front till. ‘Twenty Gitanes please,’ he said. ‘Oh, and a cheap lighter.’
    It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Why hadn’t anyone told her? Cassandra chucked Pride and Prejudice on to the floor, got up from the sofa and went into the bedroom to look at her six-month-old son as he slept and snuffled in his cot. She stood beside him, corkscrewing a slightly greasy strand of her hair in her fingers and watching the baby’s uneven breathing. Why couldn’t she just cut off from this mother-thing, relax and get on with something useful instead of counting the minutes to when Charlie woke up again? When would real life come back? Would it ever? When he was awake he needed all her attention. When he was asleep she was permanently tense, forever on the alert for that first stir, the involuntary upward jerk of the tiny arms, that little bleat before the baby worked out what waking up meant and started howling for food. Cassandra was guiltily aware she was supposed to use these precious few hours to catch up on her work. She had an essay on Hardy and the Industrial Revolution to write and should be working her way through Jane Austen in any spare time. Spare time? What was that?
    â€˜You should have quite an easy time of it in the early months,’ the midwife had told her in that breezy manner of the childless. ‘It’s a simple matter of feeding and sleeping and the odd bath.’
    For the baby, that was supposed to be. So, right – that was a joke, was it?
    Cassandra, several months into motherhood, could still barely fit those things in for herself. The health visitor down at the clinic had given her that look, the one that said, ‘If you approach things in an organized way it’ll all be fine.’ She was keen on the magic word ‘routine’, as if babies, mothers and their useless bloody partners ran on some infallible form of autopilot. The woman had been so wrong. That was a total joke, a cruel one; not only had Cassandra completely lost track of what ‘spare’ was in terms of time, but her ability to absorb any serious literature seemed to have gone the same way as her once-tight stomach muscles. Body and brain, she was reduced to a formless jelly. Twenty-one years old and nothing but a blubbery, exhausted lump. What would she be like at thirty ? How did people ever have more than one child? Presumably by having two of them in the active-parent mix. That would help.
    Cass lay on the bed, pulled up her top and pinched a thick wodge of her midriff flesh between her fingers. It looked mottled and felt doughy, and she was sure she could see individual clods of fat beneath the skin. It reminded her of the clayey lumps of earth on her mother’s spade last year, when she was digging the hole in the garden to bury the last of the pet rabbits. There’d been so many, one after another since Cass’s fifth birthday, and their names, and the order of their being, were fading from her memory. What were once loved pets with individual characters were now morphed into one giant, multi-shaded bunny.
    Sometimes in the stew-hot hours of the night during the last weeks of her pregnancy, while Paul was beside her deep in the sleep of the blissfully untroubled and she was lying awake with one foot out from the duvet trying to get cool, she’d gone through the rabbit names, trying to get back to sleep by remembering them in order. She could always start off OK with Blossom, then Flopsy and Moll and Steven (where had that one come from? Pandora probably – she could just see Panda’s big-sister sneer, hear her haughtily insisting, ‘ My rabbit’s having a proper name’), but from then it was a blur. Her mad aunt Lizzie had confided that she did the same getting-to-sleep trick but with old lovers, starting from the schoolboy who’d dealt with her inconvenient virginity and moving on through the one-night stands of the