The Second Woman by Louise Mey

Author:Louise Mey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

The next morning, he calls Christian and talks to him for a long time, outside in the garden, wearing a thin sweater because the weather is cooler now. She stays indoors. The windows are closed, she can’t hear his voice. Christian is a lawyer. There were times when she’d tried to give her man some advice, but he prefers to talk to Christian, his friend, and anyway, being a secretary in a law firm is obviously worthless. Obviously she knows less than he does.

Almost an hour later he ends the call, takes his jacket, says he’s going to see Christian straightaway, it’ll be easier. She asks if he’ll be back by 3 p.m. and he says, I don’t know. Perhaps he doesn’t want to face the scrutiny of all those strangers, the two cops, and the shrink, who knows. She may come again too, she’s the last straw, Sandrine can see that – he loathes shrinks.

She stands motionless, patient. She understands, she didn’t like the way the shrink looked at them both yesterday either. He has collected and checked his ID, his wallet, driver’s license and car keys, as he does each time before he leaves the house. He is about to leave but she’s still standing there, rooted to the spot. He smiles, turns and takes her in his arms, says, Listen, I don’t think I’ll be here. I don’t want to see them. I’ll be back later, about 6 o’clock.

When he’s gone, she stands by the door and stares at the empty space in the driveway. Then she clears away the lunch that she had prepared but which neither of them has touched because the quick call to Christian turned into a long call to Christian. If he plans to stay out until 6 p.m., there’s no point keeping lunch out on the table. She puts the salad in a Tupperware box – lucky she hadn’t dressed it, it will keep. She puts the cheese in the refrigerator, cuts a fennel bulb into sticks. She eats, staring out though the glass in the front door; he doesn’t come back. The knot between her shoulder blades loosens a little, her breathing is easier. It’s almost 2 p.m.

She goes upstairs. A ray of sunshine brightens the corridor, tiny grains of dust float on the air and twinkle in the light. She did a big clean this morning, everything is vacuumed, dusted. These specks are all that remain, floating away.

She hesitates for a moment on the threshold of the bedroom with the red shelves, then goes in and opens the window. She turns on the spot, imitating Caroline yesterday as she looked all around the room. There are boxes of cotton reels and buttons on the shelves. She opens them, pushes the bobbins aside with her finger. But if Caroline was concealing passports inside the lining of a padded piece of fabric stuffed inside a basket of offcuts, she would never have left anything important in a box that could be easily seen and reached on an open shelf.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.