Turning the Tide Read Online Free PDF

now!’ he beamed. ‘I could just see you becoming one of those ladies who lunch.’
    ‘Don’t take up fortune-telling for a living, then, whatever you do, Eric.’
    Eric looked sadly at Harry’s van and Harry’s clothes. ‘Ah well, you always were a practical girl, weren’t you? Now, I’m glad I’ve caught you because I’m a man down in the committee boat for the regatta next Sunday. My regular’s gone in for bypass surgery. You’re a fit young thing; you could stand a few hours with me making sure everything’s fair and square, couldn’t you?’
    The blue eyes beseeched her from the ground cover of facial hair, like a faithful old mongrel waiting for its master. A few hours wouldn’t kill her and she could always catch up at the boat yard in the evening.
    Harry sighed. ‘What time would you like me to be there?’
    As Bella Vista gently rocked to a rhythm that had nothing to do with the tide, Lola Moult sat on deck drinking her tea and thought about the prospect of pulling pints for most of the day. It was better than thinking about her parents, just below her feet, starting the day with a bang. By now, she should have been so used to the morning ritual that she was beyond disgust; but it was like they’d just discovered sex and couldn’t stop showing off about it. Perhaps that’s what came of being such late starters. Her mother, after all, had been thirty-nine when she’d had Lola; but, even so, you’d think that after nineteen years they’d have had the grace to call it a day, instead of going at it hammer and tongs trying to make up for lost time. And her mother seemed to take such delight in pegging out her FF-cup basques and the thongs that must have been completely engulfed by the cheeks of her outsize bottom. All Lola could do was fervently hope that no one connected these shameful items in any way to her.
    When the rocking of the houseboat slackened to a close, Lola was simply relieved that it wasn’t an Old MacDonald’s Farm morning: here a ‘Royee!’, there a ‘Royee!’, everywhere a ‘Royeeeee!’ A little later they would emerge, Carmen flushed and dozy and Roy beaming with pride that thirty-five years of winkle picking had ensured that his mighty whelk had never shrivelled.
    Lola grimaced at the last of her tea swirling round her cup. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, the real tragedy – one that she could hardly bear to face – was that she was doomed, apparently, to follow in her parents’ footsteps. Already that rare creature, a nineteen-year-old virgin, if she took after her mother she would go without sex for another nineteen years; well, eighteen and a bit, she supposed, from the time of doing the deed. Almost her entire lifespan all over again! It wasn’t that she hadn’t had the opportunity, she reminded herself; she could have had sex on any number of occasions. She’d probably get a few offers today, at the regatta, once those crabby old yachtsmen, high on adrenaline from the racing, crawled into the bar, convinced they were born-again studs. And if things didn’t improve, then one terrible day she might take one of them up on it.
    Perhaps that’s what had happened to her mother? Perhaps she’d got so tired of waiting that, in the end, fat old Roy Moult, with his greasy quiff and spivvy little moustache, had seemed – hard to believe it – almost attractive? Was that her fate too? Stuck in Little Spitmarsh until she finally did it with –
    Whoa! Wait a minute! Sauntering along the bank like he owned the place, all brooding arrogance and animal beauty, was a vision of sex in Levi’s.
    Almost bored by the predictable drop of masculine jaws when they first caught sight of her, Lola knew she didn’t have to make the slightest bit of effort to be noticed. So she just sat and waited, pretending to be engrossed in deep, important thoughts whilst silently praying that her mother wouldn’t come squawking up the companionway with an armful of underwear. With her