The Sudden Departure of the Frasers Read Online Free PDF Page B

possible – just – to conquer it. I had my pride; I would not have chased indifferent prey. But it was recognizably mutual, obscenely so. We were edging towards one another, millimetre by millimetre, not speaking, only staring. It was outrageous, indecent
already
.
    ‘Well, goodbye,’ I said, feeling myself frown as I turned to leave. I was confused, mildly nauseous. ‘Enjoy the wine.’
    ‘I’ll let you know,’ he drawled.
    ‘If it’s any good?’
    ‘No, when the misery starts. I’ll let you know and you can decide how you’re going to compensate me.’
    This was candid even by my standards and I blushed as I went down the stairs. There was not the sound of his door closing, I noticed: he must have stayed in the doorway or come out onto the landing to watch me depart.
    Behind Felicity’s door her music played.
    With some effort, I composed myself as I scurried the few steps home. Jeremy was on the top floor, unpacking clothing and cramming it into a chest of drawers on the landing. The room at the back, our makeshift living room, was a jumble of furniture and boxes and items unpacked and displaced: shoes, underwear, a rogue table-tennis bat I hadn’t known we owned.
    ‘Did it go OK? What’re they like?’
    ‘Fine. Both really nice.’ And when his hands next became free I took one and gripped it in mine – as if that could stop the unstoppable, the brief knitting of fingers!
    He paused to smile at me in indulgent surprise. ‘And?’
    ‘There’s an old woman with an iPad downstairs and a bloke with a hangover upstairs.’
    Typically, he ignored the latter to seize on the former. ‘When you say old, what do you mean?’ As if somehow personally exempt, Jeremy was wryly amused by societal attitudes to ageing; it tickled him when I made blithe remarks about someone being over the hill.
    ‘Oh, seventy or something. Though she’s got the iPad, so I guess she must be quite with it.’
    ‘“With it”? You’re a bit young for an expression like that.’
    ‘I must have picked it up from you. I’m entering middle age prematurely. Thanks for that.’
    ‘You’re very welcome,’ Jeremy said.
    How old was hard-living, hard-chested Rob Whalen? I wondered. My age, a year or two younger, perhaps. But he might have been ten years older for all it mattered, or twenty, for he was one of those eternal bachelors who were easy to catch and hard to keep, interested only in the pleasures of the present.
    I swallowed hard.
    Still with his hand in mine, Jeremy looked out of the window. Where the view from our old flat had contained the iconic Thames, here in Lime Park it was of an anonymous wedge of garden, complete with the children’s swings left by the Lockes. Trees whose type I could not hope to identify had yet to blossom, not persuaded by the city’s first attempts at spring. Next door, in Caroline Sellers’ garden, her children sprang about on a damp trampoline, their mouths circular with screams that our sealedwindows rendered silent, dreamlike. I pictured them rising to superhuman heights, clearing the wall in a perfect trajectory to land on the grass in the park, brushing themselves off completely unhurt.
    ‘The garden will be great for kids,’ Jeremy said, as he had when we viewed the house. ‘Looks like they’ve got three next door. The Lockes had three as well, didn’t they? The place is teeming with them. Maybe they put fertility hormones in the water.’
    ‘Urgh, what a horrible idea.’
    He grinned as if he’d said something naughty, dirty, but he hadn’t and he never would. He couldn’t alter the cleanness of him, the neat and predictable well-brought-up wholesomeness of him. He was over fifty but he was boyish, and there were times, like when you’d just been confronted with your preferred type, your archetype, when boyishness was not an aphrodisiac.
    No matter: talk of children had led logically to thoughts of creating them, and before I knew it I was being carted into the bedroom for