The Love of Her Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

bashed it repeatedly, to cause maximum annoyance to others.
    Kate never understood people who said airports were full of romance or love. Not only had no one ever met her at an airport (except her mother, and that hardly counted), she wouldn’t want them to meet her. Reunited with the love of your life under polystyrene ceiling tiles, strip lighting and grey upholstery? No thanks. She struggled with the trolley, flaring her elbows out to manoeuvre it around corners, trying not to let hopelessness and the strangeness of the situation overwhelm her. Taxi. She needed a taxi. A good old black London cab and she pushed on through to the arrivals hall, vaguely registering the expectant faces of people waiting as she went. Kate had learnt, now. She didn’t even bother to look around. She had long given up playing that game in her head.
    It was a sunny day. Warm and fresh, with a cool little breeze whipping about. It smelled of spring, of something in the air, even there at the airport. Spring had come to London, and she felt it as she crossed the tarmac to the cab rank, as a man in a blue sou’wester waved her into a cab, and nodded politely as she said ‘thank you’. He helped her in with her bags, the cab driver tutted proprietorially over her and said, ‘Mind your head, love,’ as they both heaved the heavier of her suitcases into the back with her. She thought of JFK, of how fast it all was, how the director of the cab rank barked questions at you, of how fast the cab drivers went, manically swerving from lane to lane, talking wildly to their friends on an earpiece.
    But although she kept expecting something dramatic to happen, for someone to leap at her and stop her, or yell at her, nothing did, and so the taxi moved off, gliding along smoothly. They reached the Heathrow roundabout, where the daffodils bobbed in the sunny breeze and the motorway opened up in front of her and they headed into London.
    On a grey motorway, how prosaic, but there she was, and as the redbrick streets flew past she looked for the old familiar signs, like the old Lucozade sign, but that was gone; the blue and gold dome of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Fuller’s Brewery at the roundabout. She stopped trying to think and simply sat there, drinking it all in, wondering how she’d got there, and most of all, how her father was, and what would happen now.
    And then suddenly they were there, turning off Maida Vale, into the long tree-lined boulevard, where the buds on the elms were just visible, and they were grinding to a halt outside the red-brick building, and the bin with the face painted onto the lid was still outside. Kate didn’t get out of the car. She looked around only as the cab driver pulled her bags out onto the pavement, puffing, and said,
    ‘Alright, love?’
    He opened the door, regarding her curiously. She knew he was probably thinking, Uh-oh. Is she actually a bit … mad. Kate blinked at him, suddenly, as if he were speaking Martian.
    ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
    ‘Is this where you want?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Kate, stepping out onto the pavement, though actually what she really wanted to say was, I’ve changed my mind, can we go back to the airport? ‘Yes, it is.’
    She gave him money and thanked him; he drove away, with a hand-wave out of the window. She felt like an alien, she couldn’t remember how to behave. She looked down atthe paving slabs on the pavement. Rectangular, scratchy dark grey, slightly cracked. It was silly. She’d forgotten what they were like here.
    Shoulders squared, Kate picked up the bags, and stood at the foot of the stairs up to the hallway of the flats. A bird called in a nearby tree, a large black car hummed next to her, its engine running, but otherwise it was silent.
       
    It’s strange, the things that are stored in your brain, but that you haven’t thought about for years. The black front door of her old building was really heavy, on a spring. You had to wedge your body really