Wrote For Luck Read Online Free PDF

important thing you had to remember about him?’
    ‘What was the first thing?’
    ‘Darling, it’s not really a fit subject for the back garden.’
    He moved slowly across the patch of uncut, emerald-shaded grass into the shadow thrown by the garden’s solitary ash tree. Three months into knowing Lucy, a month into being elevated to the status of Lucy’s ‘partner’ (forty-two seemed a bit old for being described as somebody’s boyfriend) hisantennae were finely tuned to this kind of conversational shorthand.
    He had a feeling that ‘flake’ meant something different from the usages of his own late twenties. Like ‘smart’, ‘solid’ and ‘clever’, ‘flake’ was a word that Lucy could coat with layers of an irony he’d not yet been able to penetrate.
    There was an upturned flagstone next to the bench, where somebody had left a packet of Silk Cut and a paperback called
Bitchpack Confidential
. He lowered the tray gingerly on to the rough surface and stood up, leaning one arm on the dolls’-house-sized garden shed, shading his eyes against the strong Easter Bank Holiday sun.
    Seeing him for the first time, the girls looked up.
    ‘Well done that man,’ Serena said.
    There was no point in denying that Serena made him uncomfortable. Not only was she younger than the others – twenty-six, maybe, or twenty-seven – but she reminded him of Naomi, his ex-wife. A much younger Naomi, that ghost from his early London days, sunbathing on the roof of the Clerkenwell flat or watching
Live Aid
on TV, dressed only in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, before the Nineties nonsense had gathered them up and defiled the memory of it all.
    Curiously enough, he still had Naomi’s last letter – two years old now, predating the final ransom demand from the lawyers – in his jacket pocket back upstairs, a disintegrating talisman of past time, never to be surrendered.
    He stood there a bit awkwardly, feigning an interest in the grill, until he noticed that Lucy was patting the unoccupied nine inches of bench between her and Charlotte.
    Lowering himself warily into it, he caught Lucy’s eye. It was the usual glance, one he remembered from the small hours: friendly, complicit, meaning; so far as he could deduce,
Don’t worry about my friends
, or
All this is incidental to us
. Like ‘smart’, ‘solid’ and ‘clever’, you could never be quite sure that your interpretation was the correct one, that some important part of the linguistic equation hadn’t escaped you.
    ‘Oh no!’ Lucy said suddenly. ‘Bugger and damnation.’
    ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘Left my sunglasses inside somewhere.’
    That was another thing about this tribe of twenty-somethings, he reflected – their habit of framing momentary irritations in the language of cataclysm. Really serious things, on the other hand, featured high up on the roster of evasion and concealment: ‘rather an upset’ (a written-off car); ‘a little problem at home’ (somebody’s mother’s cancer).
    ‘I’ll get them,’ he announced.
    ‘There’s really no need,’ Lucy said.
    ‘And the other thing about Toby,’ Serena volunteered breathlessly, ‘was that you never knew whether to take all that stuff about his parents abusing him as a child seriously or not.’
    Back inside the house he made his way stealthily along the cramped corridor that ran from the kitchen to the sitting-room. Here it was unexpectedly cool, and the Sunday papers lay strewn across the sofa. He flipped one or two of the sheets over – there was nothing there except the keys to Lucy’s BMW – then began to riffle through the pile of oddments on the mantelpiece.
    Long experience had told him that mantelpieces – this was a jumbo-sized version running beneath a Claude-style landscape of rolling woods and hillside bowers – were an infallible guide to personality. This one harboured several invitations couched in varying degrees of formality:
Brigadier and Mrs Tom Slater-Sutherland request