The Return Read Online Free PDF

a large perspiring frame.
     
    Over the following weeks, Sonia acknowledged that Tuesday was her favourite of all days, and her class the one unmissable commitment in her diary. What started as a distraction, grew into a passion. Salsa CDs littered the boot of her car, and on her journeys to work she mind-danced as she drove. Each week, she returned warm and flushed from the exhilaration of her lesson. On the occasions when he was already in, James would greet her with a patronising comment, bursting the balloon of her euphoria.
     
    ‘Good time at your dancing class?’ he enquired, glancing up from his newspaper. ‘How were all the little girls in their tutus?’
     
    James’s tone, though it pretended to be teasing, had a distinctively sarcastic undertone. Sonia tried not to be provoked, but felt obliged to deflect his criticism.
     
    ‘It’s just like a step class. Don’t you remember? I used to go to them all the time a couple of years ago.’
     
    ‘Mmm . . . vaguely,’ came the voice behind the newspaper. ‘Can’t see why you have to go every week, though.’
     
    One day she mentioned this new interest of hers to her oldest school friend, Maggie. The two girls had been inseparable for the seven years they were at grammar school together, and two decades on they were still almost as close, meeting several times a year for an evening in a wine bar. Maggie was full of enthusiasm for Sonia’s dancing. Could she come too? Would Sonia take her? Sonia was only too pleased. It could only make it more fun.
     
    The bond between them had been forged when they were eleven and never broken. Initially all that had brought them together was the simple fact that they had gained places at the same grammar school in Chislehurst, wore the same navy blazer that chafed at their necks and stiff flannel skirts that crackled round their knees. On the very first day of school they had been thrown together in the fourth row by the proximity of their surnames in the register: pale, little Sonia Haynes and tall, chatty Margaret Jones.
     
    From that day, they observed and admired the many differences in each other. Sonia envied Maggie’s relaxed attitude to her schoolwork and Maggie looked admiringly at her friend’s meticulous notes and neat annotated set texts. Maggie thought Sonia’s colour TV the most amazing thing in the universe, but Sonia would have swapped it any day for the platform shoes her friend was allowed to wear. Sonia wished she had liberal parents like Maggie’s, who let her stay out until midnight, while Maggie knew that she would have wanted to come home earlier if there was a dog curled up by a glowing fire. Whatever one of them had, to the other it seemed desirable.
     
    In every way, their lives could not have been more contrasted: Sonia was an only child and her mother was already in a wheelchair by the time she started secondary school. The atmosphere in her tidy semi-detached house was subdued. Maggie, on the other hand, lived in a ramshackle house with four siblings and easy-going parents who never seemed to mind if she was in or out.
     
    In their all-girls school, academic work absorbed little of their energy. Feuds, discos and boyfriends were their main preoccupations, and confessions and confidences were the oxygen of friendship. When Sonia’s mother was finally beaten by the multiple sclerosis that had been slowly destroying her for years, Maggie was the person Sonia cried with. Maggie more or less moved in with her and both Sonia and her father appreciated her presence. She lifted the terrible gloom of their grief. This happened in the girls’ lower sixth. In the following year, Maggie had her own crisis. She became pregnant. Her parents took the news badly and for the second time Maggie went to live with Sonia for a few weeks until they got used to the idea.
     
    In spite of this closeness, they went very separate ways when they left school. Maggie’s baby was born not long after - no one ever