Wrote For Luck Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Building right over the back of the meadow by the side of the college sports ground, I mean. And it’s not as if…’ Tom, meanwhile, was doodling with a biro on one of the paper napkins: ominous tessellations and triangles, punctuated every so often with a sightless face. By degrees, and after some spirited querying, by Anna, of the bill they debouched into the street. Here the rain had stopped; on the far side a man in a pair of red-checked trousers, a tourist escaped from one of the coach parties, was taking down an umbrella stamped with the legend
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. It was then that ‘it’, whatever it was – and afterwards Claire was unable to log the precise clash of temperaments that had caused it – happened, that Tom, who had been balancingon the foot-high wall demarcating the margin of a car park, pirouetted there suddenly for a moment and then crashed down into a heap, banging his jaw on the tarmac and bleeding copiously over Anna’s white shirt-front as she scooped him up. ‘Oh Tom, poor Tom,’ Claire said, pulling tissues out of her bag and dabbing at the blood beneath the grave stares of the children. ‘I’m sorry,’ Hugo said, directing his words to a piece of masonry far above his head. ‘I just can’t put up with this… With all this…’ He made a vague gesture with his hand, that somehow encompassed the rain, the silent, bleeding child and, Claire felt, the rest of them as they stood embarrassedly on the street corner. ‘Look,’ Hugo said to Anna. ‘You’ll just have to take him home. I can’t…’ They watched him plod slowly away in the direction of the University Parks, bandaging his head with a long scarf as he went, not looking back.
    Later, as the dusk fell across North Oxford, they returned to the Holiday Inn. The Asian taxi-drivers had disappeared. In their place a brood of dropsical women with suitcases talked melancholically into mobile phones. ‘These aren’t… they’re not… Hugo’s best years, you know,’ Jamie said by way of explanation, as they eased open the door of the family suite. ‘I mean, you should have known him when…’ He stopped and began to press his finger-tips tentatively against his forehead. Together they began the ritual search for the packets of aspirin and ibuprofen hoarded against such emergencies. ‘Are you OK?’ Claire asked. ‘I’ll be all right,’ Jamie said gloomily, ‘as long as I can lie perfectly still.’ They left him supine on the bed and went down to the swimming pool and drank mugs of hot chocolate in a deserted canteen that looked outonto a yard filled with lines of green refuse bins.
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, Claire thought. Later still, when the children were asleep, she came down to the pool again, empty now in the flaring after-hours light, and swam on unappeasably, in a succession of brisk, purposeful lengths, her mind bent for some reason which she could not fathom on the memory of Hugo’s squat, receding figure, the tide of bungalows reaching out to embrace the college sports ground in their bland, domesticating arc.
     
    —2005

 
    A s he came back through the French windows he could see the three of them perched on the bench at the end of the tiny lawn. Hemmed in on three sides – the gardens came tightly packed in this part of Putney – they looked oddly detached, unworried by the badly stacked barbecue a few feet away, which was diffusing gusts of pearlgrey smoke, or the juddering music centre beyond the fence.
    He stood looking at them irresolutely for a moment – Lucy sat a little to one side, the others were bent towards each other like conspiring sisters – and then straightened up, guiding himself and the tray through the obstacle course of protruding doorstep, scattered paperbacks, a rickety sun-lounger with a frayed canopy. The mild, but sharply accented, voices came drifting into earshot.
    ‘But of course Toby was always a flake… Didn’t Emma used to say that was the second most