The Body of a Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

I counted: I had a future, if not precisely mapped out, at least roughly sketched. Studying for a degree in Modern History, barely eighteen years old and inexperienced, she had happened on the very campus where
Aidan was the indisputable Big Shot currently in demand by the scholastic press and already making guest appearances on TV’s scientific programmes.
    She was flattered to have gained his notice. They had danced together twice at the Freshers’ Ball, and a week later, passing in the quad, he had impulsively stopped in his tracks, his black gown billowing heroically in the wind, and asked her out to dinner.
    There had been student gossip about him but she had taken it with quite a deal of salt. Apart from following his open lectures she had never encountered him in action, not being in the Faculty of Science. She quickly picked up that Arts undergraduates were by implication inferiors, and she accepted what seemed the common devaluation, seeing herself in every way many rungs down, while he, made of finer stuff, breathed a more rarefied air.
    She was young and untried. He delighted in her coltish beauty, in watching her opening perception, her ready enthusiasms, even sometimes her unforeseeable reactions. He felt it incumbent on him to seduce her, which he did with a deal of practised skill and an unaccustomed persistence.
    Halfway through her second year, when he was drinking overmuch, being between books and tetchily impatient for fresh inspiration, he uneasily discovered that he had actually proposed marriage and been happily accepted.
    Scarcely four months earlier Marjorie, his longtime ailing wife, had departed this life taking with her his sole irrefutable excuse for withdrawal from entanglements. Partly through the mischief of colleagues, but mainly from the romantic imagination of genuinely interested onlookers, it became accepted that a wedding was planned for the Easter vacation. With preparations increasingly made on their behalf, he had found it more onerous to block than to accept the apparently inevitable.
    So, on April 8, just over nine years back, Professor and Mrs Aidan Knightley had shaken the confetti out of their new,
matching suitcases in an Athens hotel. They settled to conduct their honeymoon, in the sticky atmosphere of an unseasonal heatwave, while attending the International Conference of Physical Chemists and Allied Scientists.
    Sex as a single girl, Leila then discovered, had been better.
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    The Saturday morning of Yeadings’ appearance, once Maggie had shown up, Leila retrieved her car from the shop’s rear courtyard and made posthaste homewards. Today was to be another of Aidan’s public occasions, so her place at his side was obligatory. Uncomfortably so, she knew in advance, because again she’d prove quite hopeless at sustaining his high level of discourse and would be passed on as intellectually inadequate to new acquaintances who would fail to find common ground. Finally she would be relegated to the dolly-bird role by any greybeards inclined to take the easy line of sexual badinage and unsuitably adolescent innuendo.
    At home she found Aidan ready dressed and huffing with impatience. He was wearing a light summer suit in a milky tea shade, with beneath it a figured satin waistcoat which she considered utterly naff. Instead, either the waistcoat with open neck and shirtsleeves - quite mod - or the suit over a conservative cream shirt and plain silk tie: but never the mix.
    It was his decision however and, equally stubborn, she let him wait while she took time over dressing.
    She wasn’t totally downcast about the engagement. It was a glorious day and, however daunting the company, there was a lot to be said for lunch at Carlton House Terrace and drinking Pimms or champagne in the Royal Society’s upper salon overlooking the Mall. This was the second year they were to be grandstand guests as the Queen reviewed her Guards at Trooping the Colour. Aidan