Bad Girls Good Women by Rosie Thomas

Author:Rosie Thomas [Thomas, Rosie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Chick-Lit, Contemporary, Fiction, Modern, Romance, Women's Fiction
ISBN: 9780007560561
Google: M2ZcAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2014-04-23T23:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

The white house was a haven, and also a cruel taunt.

They spent four days in it together, going out to eat, or to walk in Holland Park, and coming back again to the silence, and the mocking intimacy. Julia lay beside Josh in the white bed and looked at the blank room, trying to imagine a connubial life lived between these walls, picturing her own clothes, and Josh’s, hanging side by side behind the white doors. However sharply she longed for it, the vision stayed dim.

Josh was a perfect companion as well as the breathtaking lover she remembered. His material success seemed to have rounded him. He talked to her about all kinds of things, bridging the spaces of time that had separated them, and he listened intently to her own more halting contributions. He made her laugh, and Julia knew that the fabric of immediate happiness that they wove between them should have furnished the little house for her as comfortably as it did for Josh. But it didn’t, and the failure made the happiness seem all the more desirable, and as thin as gossamer. She listened so hard for any mention of their future together that Josh’s words began to distort inside her head, changing their significance, becoming almost unintelligible. There never was any mention of it.

She wanted to shout at him, Yes, this is a magical time. But I want next week with you too. Next year. Ordinary times, Josh, like your friends will share in this house. She listened to everything he said until her head throbbed, and watched him, but there was nothing beneath the surface except a kind of wariness that frightened her. She said nothing, and she was reminded of the desperation she had felt at Montebellate. It was intensified because there was everything to lose now, and because she didn’t understand what she was trying to gain.

On the third day, at the limit of the time she had allotted herself without thinking carefully enough about what would happen when it was over, she telephoned Mattie. ‘Has Bliss called?’

‘Of course,’ Mattie said evenly. ‘Twice, yesterday. In the morning I told him you’d gone shopping. And in the evening I told him you’d bumped into an old friend and gone out to dinner. If I’d known where you actually are, I could have rung and passed on your husband’s messages. I take it you’re still with the aviator?’

‘Yes,’ Julia said. They had eaten dinners in quiet restaurants, holding hands and watching the reflections of the candles. They had filled the white bath with bubbles and soaked in it together. They had slept and woken up again, and reached out for one another. But yet not together. Julia’s fingers tightened around the white shell of the receiver. She managed to repeat, ‘Yes. I’m with the aviator.’

‘Do you want to give me some instructions about what to say next time Bliss calls? I don’t really want to tell him any more lies. He doesn’t believe them, in any case.

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