Prosperous Friends Read Online Free PDF Page A

is hell—Isabel said. He could see how she fared and silently agreed: The savage dog had been an omen of worse to come. Ned knew she was thinking this then and later from the way she gripped her knife over brunch. What was it about this girl he had married?
    “The cheese,” Phoebe said. “Try the gray cheese. Trust me, it’s delicious.” Isabel appeared wary but smeared some of the gray cheese on the rim of her plate. The minced pie looked gaunt, and she moved past it to the bowl of fruit and cut a stem of grapes, gone-by globes, the fattest of them split.
    “That’s all you’re going to have for dessert?” Phoebe asked. “Aren’t you at least going to try Oliver’s flan?” she said. Phoebe turned away from the buffet and came up behind Oliver, who was seated at the head of the table, and she kissed the top of his head and then turned back to the buffet and said, “The gray cheese, Ned, you’ve got to try it.”
    And Phoebe was right, the gray cheese—it looked like mold—was sweet, creamy. “Like brie but better,” Ned said.
    Why, Ned wondered, had Isabel bothered to come to Oxford? An assassin’s face was sweeter than hers.
    The yolk on the plates flaked off in the cleanup of the Boxing Day brunch, lunch—who cared when the food was so good? Not that Isabel had eaten much of it. Isabel was fading at the very moment everyone, and everyone at once, it seemed, had risen to help Oliver in the kitchen. Phoebe’s job was napkins.
    “Just napkins?” Isabel asked.
    “I break things,” Phoebe said and then to Straight, “and you’re not so careful either.”
    When Ned next saw Isabel, she was kicking at the pebbled driveway and talking to Straight, a man she later described as in love with Phoebe.
    “An old boyfriend,” Ned said.
    “You’re an old boyfriend.”
    “What is it you want to say, Isabel?”
    “I want to go home.”
    *
    And then they were going home, the real one! Ned had his book, working title still a working title, Lime House Stories, and she had a guest book, a record of their guests at the real Lime House, the rental near Hampstead Heath. Its owners were in Israel. “Someday I want to go to Israel,” she said to Ned, then went back to the guest book.
    I love you guys. Thanks for shelter . Jack Maas: Ned’s cousin, his father’s side.
    “Aunt Charlotte,” Ned said.
    “Yes,” she said. “The candlesticks.”
    “Do you really remember what people have sent us?”
    “Of course,” she said. “And if I’m not sure, I look it up.”
    “You’ve got a list?”
    There in the Lime House guest book she saw her mother’s adamant cursive: Mother/Beth. “Look at her signature, will you? Do you wonder I’ve got a list?”
    She looked back at the signature. “From last October,” Isabel said, “disastrous month.”
    “Let’s not revisit it,” Ned said.
    Isabel read her roommate’s message about their college pact to live abroad. “Oh, Laura! She has this gift of seeming interested in a person’s life—she is interested! Laura is curious about people outside of herself. I don’t have this gift,” Isabel said. “I’m deeply incurious. Why are you smiling?”
    Sam Solomon had signed her guest book. The weekend he spent with them he forgot he was running the tub—he was reading?—and he flooded their bathroom. And here was that friend of Ned’s from Brown with the have-it-all smile and the large trust fund. “How could I forget Porter,” she said, “but I did. Good artist, though,” and she showed Ned the sketch of a house they both loved on Church Street in Hampstead.
    “That would make a good cover,” he said.
    Isabel took back the guest book. Recipes exchanged. Phoebe’s Pâté. Cook in pan w/water. Don’t pour off oil. Can freeze. Easy, of course! Enjoy!! “Ick!” Isabel said. “I hated that liverwurst she made. You must have asked for this,” Isabel said. Then, “What is she doing with Straight when she’s marrying Ben Harris anyway?”
    “Put the