A Bouquet of Barbed Wire by Andrea Newman

Author:Andrea Newman [Newman, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Published: 1969-09-26T14:00:00+00:00

* * *

‘How long is Prue away for?’ she asked one evening when they were lying on the bed, too lazy to dress, and she was watching him smoke just one more cigarette.

‘I’m not sure. I’ve had two postcards in three weeks, and originally they said they’d be away for a month or two, so I really can’t say.’

Sarah shivered. ‘We’d better be careful then.’

‘Oh, we’re all right for another week at least.’ He felt extraordinarily relaxed. All his anxiety about Prue had been dispersed: she was simply enjoying herself in the sun. His mother-in-law was not dying: there was no judgment of God there. He felt like a school-boy on holiday, knowing that the time would pass and term begin again, but not yet. There was another week at least before Cassie’s return, before Prue’s return. A golden week of freedom.

Sarah said anxiously, ‘What will we do then?’

‘There are always hotels.’ He stroked her shoulder. But he did not really want to think, to make plans. It was too soon to face up to the cold, real world outside.

Sarah was thinking that this would not do. She had not liked the hotel very much—she had in fact felt surprisingly self-conscious—and if it was only for a few hours instead of the whole night that feeling would surely be much, much worse. She blamed herself for being unsophisticated but could not change. She made wild plans for a place of her own, as a last resort, and yet she more than half believed that the affair would soon be over anyway. She wondered if she would have to look for another job. How did you go on working for someone who had stopped making love to you? Would her feeling of safety remain, like a legacy, or would it vanish with him, and would she be worse off than before? She looked tenderly round the room, where she had been happy, trying to imprint it on her memory, in case, as seemed likely, after another week she never saw it again.

‘You never told me,’ she said as the point struck her, ‘how you came to have a key to this place. Did Prue leave it with you?’

‘No.’ He was a little shame-faced. ‘When I took out the lease I had duplicates made. Wasn’t that reprehensible of me?’

‘And she doesn’t know?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘But why? I mean—you didn’t plan to do this, did you?’

‘Good God, no. Now you know I didn’t.’

‘Then why?’ She thought how she would feel if anyone did such a thing to her; and here she was benefiting from something she deplored.

‘I suppose I wanted to feel still in charge. Able to walk in—if anything happened.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Trouble.’

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘Anything.’

‘You mean you expected it?’

‘No. I’m just making excuses. I had to have a key because I wanted to feel I could still walk in like a father. I never meant to use the key, actually. Just having it helped.’

Footsteps passed in the corridor all the time and they were used to them.

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