Playing Grace Read Online Free PDF

severe. My hair wouldn’t hold a bob, see.’ Lilly was jerking her head towards the stairs again. ‘Norman’s wife, she’s got a bob, evidently and she definitely wouldn’t fit in this jacket.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Silicone job.’
    Grace replied with a non-committal, ‘Oh,’ and before Lilly could add anything else felt the need to retrace her steps past the desk and up the stairs, heading for that small, dimly lit room again. It was empty of other visitors and she stood looking at the tenderness with which the baby was holding on to his mother, one foot twisted in his blanket.
    She checked again that she was alone and then bent forward.
    ‘Sorry about the American,’ she said very quietly, ‘not the Texan – the one from Rhode Island.’ She leaned in further until her nose was almost touching the paint. ‘And while I’m here, I’d like to say again how sorry I am about everything else too.’ She hesitated. ‘Desperately, desperately sorry.’

CHAPTER 3
    Grace came out of the gallery, turned left and headed off down the Strand, retracing the route the Tuscellis had puffed along a few hours earlier. Deftly she negotiated her way around the bus queues and the groups of strolling tourists, dropping some money in the cup of the woman in the striped knitted tea-cosy hat and matching blanket who, as usual, was hunkered down in the doorway of the long-gone photo-processing shop. A few yards further on, she spotted the young guy with the cans of Special Brew arranged in a rough pyramid next to his feet. By this time in the afternoon he would invariably ask her to get her breasts out, although he used a more earthy expression. It was absolutely no consolation that he did the same to any woman who passed by, even the tea-cosy lady. Grace brought her perfected avoidance technique into play: quick look over right shoulder to ensure no traffic, skip into the gutter checking nothing nasty lurking there, walk rapidly while looking into bag as if hunting for something andthen, when out of sight and earshot, a hop quickly back on to pavement.
    Once breast man had been circumnavigated, Grace was again moving rapidly. Being able to walk fast after the ambling gait necessary in the gallery felt like a kind of freedom and she breathed in deeply. Autumn was mild this year; there was, as yet, no coldness to the air and there was a brightness to the light that Grace loved even more because once October was properly underway it would be replaced by a washed-out dreariness and then early dusk. The street today had the look of a film set – buses, people, taxis – the energy of it all making a canyon of busyness rolling down to Trafalgar Square, side routes splitting off to head down to the river or up to Covent Garden.
    She inhaled deeply again. Was she the only person in London who found the smell of the traffic, the dirt, the din and the jostling of the people comfortingly mind-numbing?
    She passed Charing Cross on the left and saw the tops of the cranes stretching above the buildings opposite, signs of a new development way off to her right. Just down the road she knew there was a statue of Charles I. That was the thing about London: history was forever shifting around you. In one stretch of pavement you could be in the present,then given a glimpse of the future before being yanked right back to the past.
    The threat of being yanked back to the past spurred Grace on until she was at the heaving, noisy scrum of people and traffic and pedestrian crossings that was the junction of Northumberland Avenue and the Strand. Among those waiting for the lights to change were some Spanish college students, each wearing identical hoodies bearing the name of their college. Hanging from most of their hands were also identical carrier bags from one of the gift shops that lay in wait along this particular stretch of road. Grace guessed that within those bags lay various combinations of beefeaters, black taxis, red buses and perhaps