Sunstroke and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

isn’t it? He laughed with her. —The two Anns.
    —Have you told Anna?
    He shook his head. —I thought at first it was just, you know, nothing. Not worth upsetting her about.
    —But it’s something?
    He shrugged and opened his hands at her in a gesture of defencelessness, squinting in the smoke from the roll-up that wagged in his mouth. How was he to know? Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.
    Christine felt protective of Anna, although she had sometimes thought her too sweet and dull for Thomas. How clearly she could imagine this new girl: less pretty, overweight, clever, treacherous. These were all the things that she herself had been: she was on her guard at once, as if against a rival.
    —She’s different, he said. —She’s funny; she makes me laugh. She doesn’t take everything too seriously.
    —And how do you feel about deceiving Anna?
    He gulped his coffee. She saw him flooded with shame then, not able to trust himself to speak: an unpractised liar.
    —These things happen, she soothed. —We can’t pretend they don’t. Even if we were good, if we were perfectly and completely chaste, we can’t control what happens in our imagination. So being good might only be another kind of lie.
    When Christine had begun her affair with Alan, there had been a possibility of his leaving his wife and family. For a while, in fact, he had left, and they had lived together. Thomas was conceived during that time. It had not worked out, they had fought horribly, and Alan had been sick with missing his children. In the end he had taken himself home. Such storms, such storms, there had been in Christine’s life then: with Alan, and with others, afterwards. When she longed for her youth, those storms were what she missed, and not the happy times. The excitement of upheaval, a universe open with possibility, the phone calls that changed everything, the conspiratorial consultations with girlfriends, the feverish packing for surprise trips, escaping out of the last thing or rushing to embrace the next. Perhaps Thomas remembered some of those adventures, too: late-night train journeys when he had sat beside her with big sleepless eyes, sucking at his dummy, fingering the precious corner of his blanket, his little red suitcase packed with books and toys.
    Later, once he was established at school, she had settledinto a steadier routine for his sake. But perhaps now, when he found himself infatuated and intoxicated and behaving badly, at some level of consciousness he’d recognised it as her terrain, and come to her because he thought she would know what he should do next. Perhaps his coming to her with his own crisis was a kind of forgiveness, for those upheavals.
    —What about work? she said.
    Thomas looked at her vaguely. Work seemed, of course, a straw, in relation to the great conflagration of his passionate life.
    —You said there were work issues as well that you were worried about.
    —Only the old question. I mean, here I am stuffing envelopes for an MP who voted for the war in Iraq. Should I stay inside the tent pissing out? Perhaps it would be more dignified to get out and do some pissing in.
    —Dignified pissing.
    —But we’ve been over all that so many times.
    —Only now it’s complicated because she’s there at work? Annie.
    —It would solve everything if I just took off and went away by myself to live in Prague or somewhere. Budapest.
    —Leave both of them you mean? Christine said. —Woman trouble, she sighed, making a joke of it.
    She was suddenly quite sure that he would, in fact, move abroad for a while, even though he didn’t know it yet himself, and it had only popped into his conversation as a joke-possibility. After much confabulation and self-interrogation and any number of painful scenes with his two girls, this was what he would do.
    —I’d miss you if you moved to Prague, she said.
    —Get a sabbatical. Come out and stay.
    She loved having him near her in London. But as soon as