The Next Best Thing Read Online Free PDF Page A

They’d met ten years ago at a publishing party, where she got stuck talking to a miserable crime writer who had
recently left London to live alone with some cats on a Welsh mountain. ‘I gave up my full-time job four years ago,’ the writer had told her, staring moodily ahead. ‘It was a big
mistake.’ Jane was just wondering how best to sidle off and refill her flaccid paper cup when Will drifted into her orbit, the star of the party and way out of her league.
    ‘Do please excuse me,’ he had said to the cat-lover, ‘I have some urgent business to discuss with this woman.’ And he had quite simply whisked her off her feet.
    He had been wearing a beret that night. This was a detail that Jane now preferred to leave out of the story; she had her doubts about men who wore hats indoors. Or outdoors, for that matter. She
knew his name and had read his newspaper column, but not his books. Travel writing bored her on the whole, as she admitted to him after a few more glasses of wine. She took the view that if you had
nothing to say at home, you were unlikely to find anything to say a long way from home. It wasn’t as if a few thousand kilometres would change anything.
    Will took her home that night to try to change her mind with a dazzling display of learning. She’d never met anyone so brilliant, who could quote world literature in fifteen languages
including Mandarin. Looking back, you could say he’d been showing off, but she was mightily impressed at the time. She’d been used to boys of her own age, well-educated on paper but
with little curiosity beyond the sports pages. After that night, Will started taking her to parties, hip bars, restaurants where they all knew his name. She knew it was pathetic to admire the way
he asked for his usual table, but she couldn’t help it, being that much younger.
    Naturally, he came with baggage. You didn’t expect to find a brilliant, passionate man approaching forty without a past. But he was already separated from his wife, there was no question
of Jane being a home-wrecker. When his sons came to stay, she was tactful and accommodating, and made no demands for children of her own. He’d actually taken it rather well when she’d
told him she was pregnant. Though like the Chinese birth-control granny police, he had insisted that one was enough.
    Not being married was a condition Jane enjoyed. It made her feel more exciting than she feared she was, though she still hadn’t worked out what to call Will. He was too old to be her
‘boyfriend’, and ‘live-in lover’ sounded overly vigorous. The ‘father of my child’ implied they were divorced before they were even married, and
‘companion’ brought to mind a frail old person in a bath chair. The only real option was ‘partner’, although it always made her think of sex manuals like The Joy of
Sex, where a bearded man is depicted pleasing his partner like a caveman crawling over his prey.
    Mind you, nobody talked about living in sin any more, it had become as conventional as tea and toast. Only Jane’s grandmother thought it was a scam devised to bring financial benefit to
men and heap misery upon women. ‘Of course no man would get married if he didn’t have to,’ she had raged when Jane had told her she was moving in with Will. ‘Why buy the cow
if you can get the milk for free?’ This reactionary view had left Jane lost for words and sent her home to run through the reasons why she and Will had decided marriage was out of the
question. Who had presented the argument s and who had agreed? She couldn’t remember now.
    Jane packed up the ironing board and went upstairs to bed, past the galleria where Will was still sitting at his desk, head bent over his work, classical music tinkling in the. background. She
reached the top floor of bedrooms where her daughter’s Roald Dahl tape was still quietly playing in the dark. Jane switched it off and kissed her child’s silky head. A little later Will