Wrote For Luck Read Online Free PDF Page B

the pleasure
…
The partners of Ernst & Young… Come to Emma’s 30th
… a picture of Lucy in a swimsuit standing uncomfortably close to a square-jawed man with wavy hair and a superior smile whose identity hadn’t yet been divulged to him, and a letter from Lucy’s mother folded inside a cutting from
Gloucestershire Homes and Gardens
.
    In the end he found the sunglasses on the hall table, half hidden under a pile of letters addressed to Mr Gavin Henderson, Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, ‘downsized’ from the premises – this was Lucy’s joke – some months before.
    There was something unsettling him, he realised as he padded back along the corridor with the sunglasses curled up in his outstretched hand like an outsize beetle, something that had nothing to do with Gavin Henderson, the supercilious hunk on the beach, or the tiredness produced by yesterday afternoon’s case work and having to drive the children back to Reading in the evening, something from long ago that was trying to force its way out.
    There were more photographs clustered on the pin-board above the telephone table: Lucy in a ballgown, at some awayday organised by her law firm, with her parents – gnarled but county-ish – outside an ivy-clad Cotswold pub. Her skin, he noticed, was extraordinary – unworn, the colour of mother-of-pearl, as if the whole of her upper body had just beenreleased from some protective shell. Slightly to his surprise he found himself quivering with what was, presumably, however middle-aged and worn-down, desire. Lucy was twenty-nine.
    In the kitchen Serena stood briskly unpacking chicken drumsticks from a series of Tupperware boxes. Feeling a sudden need to ingratiate himself with her, he reached into the fridge and started pulling out the lettuces and tomatoes he’d bought last night on the way back from Reading.
    ‘Actually,’ Serena said, ‘I was going to leave them for a bit later on. If you don’t mind.’ She was a tall, bony girl with piles of corn-coloured hair who worked in a shop that sold Art Deco furniture. Still trying to fasten on to the memory that had risen above the sight of Gavin Henderson’s unclaimed post, he collected up the salad and put it back. Outside, he could see Lucy crouched over the grill with a handful of firelighters, shooing the smoke away with her fingers.
    ‘You know,’ Serena said with the same brisk efficiency, ‘I think it’s perfectly brilliant of Lu to have discovered you. Where did she say the two of you got together?’
    For some reason, the thought of having to explain the complex chain of coincidence that had brought the legal firm where he worked and the legal firm where Lucy worked into temporary proximity was too exhausting to be borne. ‘It was a work thing,’ he temporised.
    ‘Oh, a work thing,’ said Serena. ‘I know all about work things. Now,
these
need to go out
there
.’
    He went back across the grass, jokily bearing the plate of chicken drumsticks on one hand like a waiter. Nudged into being by the picture above the mantelpiece, the memorywas taking concrete shape now: dense banks of trees moving into the distance, crumbling stone, Naomi running in front of him on the path. He’d tried to get together with Naomi again a year ago, but it hadn’t worked. It was too late now. Lucy was still bending over the grill, plump knees drawn up under her chin.
    ‘I can’t get the wretched thing to work. It just gushes smoke.’
    ‘You’ve overloaded it. Look. Take some of the charcoal out and let the air circulate.’
    ‘Bugger and damnation! It’s gone all over my shorts.’
    Scooping up some half-charred firelighters with a garden trowel, then repositioning the metal grill on its plinths, as Lucy dabbed at her knees with a paper napkin, he considered this unexpected vista of past time: Naomi’s face, the trees running on into the horizon. From nowhere, half a dozen other images from that day in Ireland fell smartly into place: driving along the wide, open