Someone to Watch Over Me by Madeleine Reiss

Author:Madeleine Reiss [Madeleine Reiss]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-six

When she heard that Carrie was taking Peter to a session with the medium, Pam insisted on going along too, saying that since Simon was her discovery she wasn’t going to be left out. Carrie wondered why her mother, who manifested an unhealthy scepticism about most things, including the ability of her daughter to manage her own affairs, so readily believed in the possibility of an afterlife. Pam rushed upstairs to assume her grey costume, this time accessorising it with a powder blue silk scarf and matching kid gloves;

‘Did you know that it has been scientifically proven that men are most attracted to powder blue above all colours?’ she said, preening herself in the hall mirror while Carrie tapped her foot impatiently and thought longingly of her fire-warmed sofa.

As Carrie plodded wearily along over the railway bridge between her two companions, she heard the plaintive toot of a train pulling out of the station. The melancholy sound was like a lament and made her feel gloomier than ever. The trees by the bridge looked stark against the evening sky, the occasional ragged nest hanging between the high branches like a blood clot in an artery. Her life was not shaping up well. She was hurtling towards forty, her mother was apparently permanently ensconced in her spare room, she was sleeping with her ex-husband and wasn’t sure she should be and on top of all this, her sense of duty towards her bereaved friend was so overdeveloped that she was willingly subjecting herself to an evening with the cardiganed and credulous.

The thought of Oliver Gladhill rose unbidden to her mind and Carrie wondered what he would think about what was about to take place in Romsey Community Hall. He would probably make Simon Foster into his mentor and then the pair of them could cut a swathe through the neighbourhood, hoodwinking the desperate and the big breasted. She wondered what had happened to him to make him so keen to continually prove his sexual credentials. He wasn’t bad looking if you liked that kind of sexy, slightly rumpled thing he had going on. What was it he had said he did? She thought it was something in conservation and she remembered again the practised way he had held the bird. He had told her that it had made a full recovery after spending the night in a shoe box. ‘He flew away like a bat out of hell,’ Oliver had said, demonstrating the bird’s trajectory with an exuberant swing of his arm. He was full of vitality, and yet his vigour was cut through with a certain reserve, as if there was a side to him that he kept hidden.

Heading towards the hall, Carrie saw that Peter was looking sideways at her and remembered why it was that she was putting herself through the next two hours. She could see that he was getting far too attached to her and she knew she was in no way the solution to what ailed him.

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