Out on a Limb Read Online Free PDF Page A

his job, that was precisely what he told me. And it did all figure. He lived here, in a flat, and his family (his GP wife, two sons and one stepdaughter) lived elsewhere. I thought – and it’s laughable, with the benefit of hindsight – that I was the only one who knew the real story. The only one close enough to know the stark truth. And I accordingly felt for him. Felt moved. Felt sorry ; poor, poor Mr Scott-Downing (or so my early thinking rattled), pretending all was well, keeping up the pretence, when in reality his marriage was in meltdown. I’d been there. I empathised. I knew how these things went.
    Of course, not being a complete simpleton, I didn’t live under that misapprehension for very long – just a couple of infatuated, intoxicating months. But that was easily enough time for it to matter. Long enough to ensure there would be damage to undo. He was lonely, unhappy, disorientated and regretful. And very much in need of a friend. And I, in the grip of the mother of all adolescent crushes, was not at all adverse to providing that friendship. I was flattered, beguiled and not a little overwhelmed. When you are five years divorced and a little light on the love front, the attentions of an attentive and charming alpha male can be pathetically difficult to resist. Thus we fell into smiling, then we fell into chatting, then we fell into both sitting in his office for whole stretches. And then we fell into meeting, and then the meetings became dinners, and then, finally, finally , we fell into bed.
    A very long, very tentative, very hesitant courtship. But a short sharp shock of a dénouement. Which happened when, one sunny Monday, I saw the light. Well, saw by the light, at any rate. His fridge light, to be precise. Which illuminated a large dish of chilli within it. And also my terrible folly.
    I recall the moment well. I was in Charlie’s little kitchen making us a cup of tea. And there was this casserole dish – this very large, hefty, family-sized casserole dish – sitting on the shelf in his fridge. I opened it – the smell was pungent, intense – and it was about a third full of the sort of rich dark aromatic chilli that had been many hours in the making. I put the lid back on the casserole. I got the milk out. I fished the tea bags from the mugs. And I thought ‘hang on. Who made that chilli, exactly?’ And then, having rejected the very first (and most obvious) thing that came to mind, I cast frantically about for other plausible reasons why Charlie, living alone in a flat, and being someone I already knew to be not particularly enthusiastic on the home-cuisine front, would have such a large vat of left-over chilli in his fridge. A proper, home-made chilli. A home-made chilli following a weekend in which he mostly spent his time not at home – travelling to Oxford to see his kids. A weekend in which he had precious little time to go and buy the myriad ingredients he would have needed to make such a thing. It didn’t figure. I added milk to the mugs, and I pondered. I would just have to make it figure, wouldn’t I?
    Perhaps his mother? No. She was in a nursing home, wasn’t she? A friend, then? His step-daughter? A neighbour, maybe? Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps he did make it himself. Or, okay then, perhaps sh e – perhaps his almost-ex-wife did? Perhaps the impression I’d been given by Charlie (that she wouldn’t make a chilli for him if he was the very last man on earth and hadn’t eaten for a month) was wrong. Perhaps they were actually on fairly good terms; post-modern, co-operative, friendly even. Perhaps they were going to have an-amicable-divorce. Perhaps she made him this chilli to illustrate the fact.
    I put the milk back in the fridge, and locked the chilli smell away again.
    Or p erhaps not, I thought. And my stomach endorsed it. Perhaps, in reality, there was to be no divorce. So I stopped casting about for reasons to be cheerful and, expecting the worst, I took the mugs into