The Latecomer by Sarah Aldridge

Author:Sarah Aldridge
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781602821743
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2009-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART II

It was unaccountably odd to be back in her normal surroundings. Usually, when she returned from a summer’s absence to her apartment in a building at the edge of the campus, there was a feeling of comfortable familiarity. There was a certain sense of ease at picking up small daily habits again. Really, she supposed, she felt most at home when she was alone and absorbed in the details of her professional life. Her apartment afforded her the undisturbed orderliness in which she was most relaxed, free to give her attention to the scholarly pursuits that interested her.

Any interruptions of this intellectual calm came at scheduled and predictable times—the hours she spent in classrooms and seminars, with students or fellow faculty members, or with friends with whom she mingled in a more or less fixed pattern of small dinners, concerts, theater parties.

But this time she was aware of a sense of uneasiness. It was as if there was still unfinished business that hovered just over the horizon. She found herself, in the midst of dealing with her normal concerns, half distracted, as if she were on the watch for some half-expected interruption, as if she were listening for the telephone or waiting for some other communication from outside this quiet, familiar routine. She tried to shake off this strange feeling of expectancy, this undercurrent of restlessness. She had never been restless like this before when she had returned from travel.

She lived in a pleasant garden court building that gave the illusion of a house with a garden, surrounded by trees, shrubs and plants. Living alone for so long she had acquired fixed habits, and she had come to dislike any interference with them. She resolutely tried to reestablish them, getting her own breakfast, tidying the slight disorder of the living room, making her bed. These were things she did not do when traveling and she enjoyed the contrast.

But now, as she dusted briefly in the room she used as a study, she found her mind straying constantly to the voyage home and the short, intimate interlude of her life aboard with Kay. Again and again she found herself dwelling on some detail of their moments together, on some phrase or statement of Kay’s. After the hundredth time of catching herself doing this she thought, with annoyance, it was just because I’ve never done anything like that before; it was the only time I’ve ever had to share day-to-day living with a stranger like that.

Whenever, in traveling, she had before this been forced to share a room with someone else, a discreet wall had always remained up between herself and the other woman, a wall that had been carefully maintained by both of them. It was Kay who had demolished it—Kay who had believed as if no such barrier existed.

She found herself remembering Kay in sudden vivid glimpses—Kay in a mini-skirted dinner dress with her long hair caught up in a swirl on top of her head, standing naked in the bathroom brushing her teeth or rummaging in the wardrobe for a change of clothes.

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