Woman to Woman Read Online Free PDF

same calm vein.
    “Her name is Jennifer Carroll and she works in an advertising agency. I only recognised her because she’s at every bloody party we go to. You know the type, goes to the opening of an envelope if she thinks she’ll get her picture in the social columns. Are you all right, Ash?”
    “Yes. Go on.”
    “I went out to dinner with the girls from the tennis club when Pat was away last autumn.”
    Fiona hesitated for a moment before continuing.
    “Michael was in Le Caprice with this darkhaired woman. I thought it was something to do with the paper. Well, he meets so many different people. I didn’t think anything of it at first, really.”
    “What happened?” Aisling’s voice was remarkably steady as she spoke. Fiona couldn’t see her digging her nails into the palm of her right hand, clenching her fist as though her life depended on it.
    They were sitting at an out-of-the-way table, but I could still see them,” explained Fiona.
    “He kissed her and it just wasn’t a platonic type of kiss, you know? When I thought about what she was wearing, I put two and two together. You don’t go out for a business dinner wearing a dress with slits practically up to your navel. God, men are all the same, aren’t they?”
    She paused and Aisling knew she was lighting a cigarette, those long, dark menthol cigarettes that looked faintly ridiculous and smelled like
    burning Polos. Michael always laughe dat them, calling them poseurs’ cigarettes and asked why she didn’t smoke real ones, like the Marlboros he was trying to give up.
    “Fiona, why didn’t you say something?” Aisling asked.
    “I didn’t know how to tell you. What could I say?” her friend answered quietly.
    “That your bastard of a husband was cheating on you as publicly as he could? That he didn’t seem to care who saw him and his bloody girlfriend because he knew that you’d never find out, stuck in your little wifey world?”
    Aisling sat with the receiver in one hand as she stared blankly outside.
    “I’m coming over,” Fiona said quickly.
    “We need a huge cup of tea and a good talk.”
    The phone clicked in Aisling’s ear and she put it down slowly before turning automatically towards the dressing table to put some lipstick on. As she twisted up the tube of pink lipstick she stopped and looked at herself in the mirror. A pale face with serious eyes stared back, the startling blue irises diminished by pupils enlarged with misery. Her eyes had always been her best feature, but lately she hadn’t bothered with make-up. Without mascara to darken her fair lashes, her eyes were undefined and pale in her bare face.
    As always nowadays, her unruly light brown, long hair was tied back with a red scrunchie. The combination of no make-up, starkly tied-back hair and a loose sweatshirt, which did nothing to flatter her generous curves, made her look tired and worn. She stared long and hard at herself in the mirror.
    She remembered the summer she had first met Michael, when her hair was long and bleached with strands of gold from ten days on an idyllic Greek island and her skin glowed thanks to hours basking in the glorious Mediterranean sun.
    He had called her beautiful then and never stopped wanting to touch her skin and kiss her lips, putting his arms possessively around her golden shoulders when they walked through the streets of Corfu town.
     
    As she held her lank hair away from her face, Aisling wished she could recapture that distant Greek summer and feel young and pretty again. Wouldn’t it be wonderful not to feel thirty-five and boring, another frumpy housewife with no prospects, no waistline and a preoccupied husband. God knows, there were plenty of women like her out there. She saw them all the time in the supermarket, listlessly pushing trolleys full of fuel for teenagers and husbands who were never home.
    She’d never wanted to become one of them, one of the women who sat on the edge of the sofa at parties trying hard to