Red Joan by Jennie Rooney

Author:Jennie Rooney
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2014-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

TUESDAY, 8.09 P.M.

Max is right. There are no bears in Quebec and it is scorchingly, blindingly hot. The city is light and still, with colourful pyramids of fruit stacked up in grocers’ windows. A scent of freshly baked bread and pollen hangs over the streets. Was it ever like this in England before the war? Joan does not remember. She does not think she has ever seen such colour in all her life.

They are put up in an elegant hotel by the waterfront, and are joined for dinner on the first night by Taylor Scott, the new head of the atomic energy plant at Chalk River. He used to be assistant director of the theoretical research section at the University of Montreal, but has now been promoted to lead the new plant and will be more involved in experimentation than previously. It crosses Joan’s mind that Taylor Scott might know Leo from his time at the university, and is immediately irritated that she has allowed herself to think of him.

Taylor Scott is a tall, thin man, with wire spectacles and a deep Canadian accent. He is dressed in a brown jacket and grey flannels, both of which are in need of pressing. They look borrowed, as if they are meant for someone bulkier. In that respect, he is much like many of the other scientists to whom Joan has grown accustomed at the laboratory, only his voice is louder and his shirt whiter.

‘They’ve just got in one of those new spin-washer machines at the plant,’ he announces, undoing his cuffs and rolling up his bright white sleeves. ‘It’s incredible.’

Joan imagines he is saying this for her, based on the supposition that all women are bound to be interested in laundry. ‘Oh?’

‘Incredible things,’ he continues. ‘The physics of them is quite remarkable.’ He shakes his head. ‘Quite remarkable.’

Joan glances at Max and raises her eyebrows, but Max’s face remains expressionless. This is how he has been ever since their arrival in Canada, polite but cautious. Apart from his earlier whispered warning that Taylor Scott is well known for being a terrible bore but a brilliant physicist, there have been few other moments of normal communication between them and the presence of this slow-talking Canadian has only made him more reserved. Indeed, there have been moments since they arrived in Quebec when she wonders if it really happened, if Max really came back to the cabin with her and took off her clothes, piece by piece, unbuttoning her dress and lifting her slip over her head, and then sliding his fingers under the line of her stockings so that they could be carefully rolled down and lifted from her feet in a shimmering web of silk. She remembers the colour of his skin under his clothes, oyster-shell pink, and not at all like Leo’s dark, tanned body, how he kissed her neck and then slept all night with his arm (which was heavier than you’d think) draped across her hip-bone, how they

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