Weekend Read Online Free PDF Page B

supportiveness of the cloth. It wasn’t just that clothes could accentuate your good points and minimise the bad ones. Used carefully, they could amount to a kind of temporary cosmetic surgery. These jeans not only made her look more attractively tensile from the back, they also made it hard to imagine the cellulite underneath. Still, if this weekend fulfilled the promise she saw in it, she might have to take them off in company. Love me, love my cellulite. But perhaps by then the shadowy, faceless man would be too preoccupied to notice.
    The thought returned her to the glass of white wine on the dressing-table. She took another sip, fully aware of what she was doing. She was keeping her recently acquired sense of abandon topped up. She was grateful now that she had hardly ever drunk. It meant that it didn’t take too much to shift her mood from brooding to carefree. There must be a lot of bottles of self-confidence she could take before any physical damage caught up with her. Whatever she died of, it was unlikely to be cirrhosis of the liver, she thought bitterly.
    The idea released her from any self-criticism she might have felt in sitting here, watching herself in the dressing-tablemirror as she took the wine. She toasted herself in the glass. If she was going to free herself from dead behaviour, she would have to uncork a few more bottles in the process.
    She was missing Jason already. But her worry about him was diminished by the realisation that he seemed perfectly happy to be away from her. When she had phoned for the second time tonight, under the pretence of reminding him that he had forgotten his football boots (although she had known already that he wasn’t going to the training tomorrow), he had seemed impatient with her interruption of his evening. It was almost as if he knew she was just fussing and felt she was an embarrassment to him in his different context, spending the weekend with Alan and his new wife.
    There was a strange emotional law in broken marriages, she thought: the one who spends less time with the child or children is the one who is valued more. Wasn’t that a swine of a law? The more time you spent ironing clothes and making packed lunches and helping with homework and nursing colds and delivering them to mud-caked playing-fields on winter mornings, when the wind chafed your cheeks to soreness, the more you merged with the furniture. You became an incidental fixture in their lives, about as sensitively treated as the doormat they usually failed to wipe their feet on. But vanish for weeks at a time and you were much thought of. The rarity of your appearances turned them into greatly appreciated events.
    There had been stretches of many months in the three years since they had divorced during which the occasional phone-call from Alan was his only presence in Jason’s life. He had maintained his alimony payments, it was true. But direct contact had been subject to his personal whim. He turned up only when he chose, like a wayward uncle who had so manyother things to do. He always arrived with the air of someone doing them a favour. The incredible thing was that Jason seemed to agree with him. He made excuses for his father, no matter how many times he had promised to come and didn’t turn up.
    Now Jason seemed to think Christmas had come early when his father suggested they all spend some time together, Alan and Maureen and Jason, to get to know one another. The enthusiasm with which Jason welcomed the idea had hurt her and she was surprised at the jealousy she felt for Maureen. But she had bartered her misgivings in exchange for the time the arrangement gave her to come to terms with the new sense of herself she wanted to find before it was too late. It also gave her next week free for what she had to do.
    She leaned close to the mirror and stared into her own eyes, as if waiting to see slowly surface there the confident woman whose clothes she was wearing. She knew she still looked good but