The Pleasure Quartet Read Online Free PDF

remained of the light filtered over trees and buildings in eerie long fingers of blue and grey, cold and ominous.
    When I turned onto our street the light from the kitchen window over the lemon tree shone like a beacon and I hurried towards it.
    I turned my key in the lock and heard voices.
    A man’s voice, and Iris’s, but hers was full of high notes, tinkling like water running over broken glass. I hadn’t heard her sound so excited since the night of the Ball and
the morning afterwards, when we’d still been drunk on each other.
    I pushed open the door.
    Iris was wearing my favourite dress, a canary yellow shift adorned with rivers of gold braid that swam and danced over her body as she moved. She wore white high heels on her feet, the only
party shoes she owned, and her left hand was encased in a short ivory glove that closed with a button at her wrist. Her hair was pulled up into a bun at the back and a pink feather perched gaily
behind her hair. It looked suspiciously as though it had recently adorned a feather duster. In her right hand she held a champagne flute, half full of bubbling amber liquid. She threw back her
head, exposing her long, bare throat, and took a sip. Then she saw me.
    ‘Moana!’ she cried, as though she hadn’t just seen me as recently as that same morning. ‘You must meet Thomas. His father works at my law firm,’ she added, by way
of explanation, and perhaps to mitigate the fact that a man whom I had never met was draped over the double bed that we shared together. ‘And it’s his birthday tomorrow. He’ll be
twenty-two. Twenty-two, can you imagine!’
    Since we were both now nineteen, I could easily imagine, but I refrained from pointing out that he was not so much older than we were.
    I nodded politely towards Thomas, put my bag down, and walked in the direction of the stove top to turn the kettle on.
    ‘Oh no,’ Iris cried, grabbing my hand with her gloved one. ‘You must have a drink with us, mustn’t she, Thomas?’
    ‘Oh yes, of course,’ he said with exaggerated politeness. ‘Do forgive me.’ His voice was all plums and honey, as smooth and silky as a hot chocolate with a rich lilt that
sounded like someone from the television. When he sat up I noticed that his clothing was as bright as the dress that Iris had borrowed from me, a look that I wasn’t used to seeing on a man,
although I knew that I was still adjusting to the different fashions here. New Zealanders typically wore sombre tones, black and grey and navy and olive green, colours that would meld into the
native bush that covered the country as easily as a sparrow’s wing disappearing on the backdrop of a tree branch. His trousers were tight and the vivid red of a post box and his collared
shirt was the watery, lake-like blue of a cloudless sky. His top two buttons were opened and revealed just enough of his bare chest to indicate informality. He reached towards the bedside table and
picked up a tan corduroy flat cap, tossing it over the bed to reveal the champagne bottle in a bucket of ice beneath. A flash of gold lining revealed itself as the cap streaked through the air. On
the ice bucket was Iris’s other glove, hanging limply over the side. I imagined Thomas pulling it from her hand, bringing her bare fingertips to his lips.
    ‘Do you have another glass?’ he asked.
    ‘No,’ I replied curtly.
    ‘Oh, we can share, darling,’ Iris piped in. She never called me that. ‘So how was the play?’ she asked me as an afterthought.
    ‘’Twas Jack the Ripper that did it.’
    I tried to mimic an East End accent but knew I was making a poor job of it. Thomas was too polite to mention the fact, and Iris too tipsy.
    ‘Wow!’ she exclaimed. It was the first time that either of us had ever been to the theatre, and I realised then how much I had been looking forward to coming home and telling her
about it. All of the exciting things that happened to us always seemed to begin with Iris. It was rare