Ten Stories About Smoking Read Online Free PDF Page A

full of dips and sauces, and a hotplate onto which Daniel was transferring the meat. Christina looked approvingly at her sister-in-law.
    ‘You’ve been up there ages,’ she said, pouring Linda a glass of wine.
    ‘I was Flat Stanley -ed into submission,’ Linda replied, taking the glass and sitting down. She was starving, the last thing she’d eaten – a cold can of soup
– had been lunchtime the day before. She would put on weight here, she realized. She would have to run in the fields, swim in the pool, to burn off the lunches and the hotplates full of
meat.

    Daniel wanted to say that he hoped Linda was hungry but realized this might open onto an avenue of conversation he might later regret. It wasn’t so much Linda he worried
about, but his wife. Any chance Christina got to probe the emotional hinterlands of her sister-in-law was instinctively leapt upon. It made dinner a precarious business.
    Christina’s interest always sounded clinical, as though she was studying Linda as part of a greater body of work. At idle moments, perhaps on holiday at their place in Sardinia or when
walking out in the woods, she would say to Daniel: ‘I wonder what your sister is up to right now . . .’ And he would have to endure hours of fevered supposition.
    When the two women first met – Poppy had just turned three and Linda was back living with her parents – Christina could barely contain her curiosity. They circled each other:
Christina not wishing to scare away her prey; Linda not wanting to appear the unhinged, mad woman in the box room. When they drove home, Poppy full of talk of her new auntie, Christina looked
aggrieved, as though she had missed a great and fleeting opportunity.
    On their subsequent meetings, Christina had managed to glean more from Linda. But it was never quite enough. Daniel knew this; it was why Christina always invited her to stay, and why Linda had
always refused: even in her most fractured state, Linda was a good judge of situation, if not always character.
    So why she had accepted this invitation remained something of a mystery. It could, of course, have been that she just wanted to see Poppy for her birthday. Christina wasn’t convinced about
this, though. She believed that Linda had come because she needed a woman to talk to; as only a woman could understand the full implications of what the doctors had told her. When Christina relayed
this theory to Daniel, he sighed and told her she was probably right, even though he knew she was wrong. No one went to Christina for emotional advice. She was too practical, too logical to tackle
such complicated issues. To her everything had a solution, an action plan to put into effect. Sometimes his wife reminded him of those old war-time posters he remembered from school: Make Do and
Mend says Mrs Sew and Sew , Dig for Victory, Loose Lips Sink Ships ; complex problem, easily solved.
    Daniel watched the two women talking amiably about Poppy and as they laughed he caught glimpses of the people he had once loved: the sister who would tease him about his acne as she applied
make-up in the downstairs toilet before going out to meet her boyfriend at the Locomotive; and the woman who had walked naked across his room the first time they’d spent the night together,
paused by the door jamb and said, ‘I think I love you already.’
    He placed the last steak onto the hotplate and sat down. There were charcoal motes on his jeans and ash in his hair. He told them to tuck in and they started heaping up their plates, the food
fresh: potatoes, broccoli, carrots from the garden, the meat sourced from a local farm, the wine brought back from the Sardinian vineyard where their farmhouse was located.
    ‘Isn’t the wine good?’ he said. ‘I think it’s the best one we’ve had.’
    ‘Is it from—’
    ‘Sardinia, yes,’ Christina said. ‘We went out there at the start of the summer, it’s just heavenly. Next time we go, you should come. There’s acres