Читать книгу Puppies Are For Life - Linda Phillips - Страница 7

Julia crawled across the mattress to her own side of the bed, her buttocks wobbling invitingly. Leaning out to retrieve her nightdress, she was careful to take her time; Harvey would get a good long – and hopefully stimulating – view. But it was no good and they both knew it, although there was nothing he would have liked more than to oblige her.

‘I’m sorry.’ He sighed, staring helplessly. Oh to feel normal again!

‘It’s OK,’ she said, and collapsed into the pillows.

‘But it’s your birthday …’

‘I said it’s OK. It can’t be helped. Forget it.’

‘But we always do something special on our birthdays.’

‘Well, we’ll have to do something else that’s special, that’s all.’

‘Oh, I’m getting o-o-old,’ he said, dragging the last word out into a long self-pitying moan. ‘Correction, I am old.’

‘You’re only as old as you feel, Harvey.’

‘Right now I feel a hundred.’

Julia knelt up beside him and began pulling the sparse folds of shiny blue satin over her shaggy, highlighted hair. She wriggled, shaking the bed as she eased the garment over her breasts. Harvey looked on morosely as he watched them bounce, rubber-like, back into place. Nothing.

‘Look,’ she said, sliding under the quilt, ‘this is only a temporary thing. It’s like – well – missing periods, you know? You get a shock in your life, a bit of bad news, and the next thing you know your body’s all up the creek. Women are used to this sort of thing. Well, I am anyway; you know what my cycle’s like.’

Harvey did know. He had had to learn to live with it.

‘It’s this being pensioned off that’s done it,’ Julia went on. ‘But we’ll get over it soon. You’ll see.’

‘Made redundant,’ he corrected through clenched teeth. ‘Don’t make it sound even worse than it already is. And it’s nothing whatever like missed bloody periods! For heaven’s sake, girl –’ he thumped the mattress with his fists – ‘don’t you hear what I’m telling you? I’m old. I’m old! They were right, weren’t they? They were right all along.’

‘Who were? What?’ Julia lay back on one elbow and considered getting up. It was probably too early for her yoga class, but anything was better than lying here listening to Harvey in one of his moods. She glanced at the clock on the bedside table, spotted a stack of cotton wool pads and a bottle of nail varnish remover among the debris, and began to take off ‘Burnished Bronze’.

‘Everybody was right,’ Harvey went on. ‘All those kind, well-meaning souls who told us we would regret it.’

‘Regret –?’ The word had caught Julia’s attention.

‘I mean,’ Harvey amended hastily, wrinkling his nose as the acetone hit him, ‘you must be regretting it. Marrying me. You’ve still got your life ahead of you. And all those things they said about finding it difficult with such a big age gap between us are beginning to make sense. There you are, in the prime of your life. And here am I –’ he looked down at the mound of his body under the covers – ‘a clapped-out husk.’

Julia regarded her husband gravely for a second. Until recently he had not been so – so – negative. Yes, that was the word to describe him these days. She had never seen him like this in all the time she had known him. On the contrary, he had always been so positive, so alive, and vital, and – what did they call it? – motivated. The way she liked him to be. She scarcely fancied him like this. Actually she’d gone off sex a bit herself just lately, so perhaps that had something to do with it …

But these thoughts disturbed her a little so she dismissed them.

‘Oh, you’re being silly, Harvey,’ she scolded. ‘Just because you aren’t in the mood for once doesn’t mean anything at all. Talk about making mountains out of molehills!’

Harvey kept his next thoughts to himself. He couldn’t tell Julia that this morning’s fiasco was the culmination of days of going off it. There had been times when he had had to exercise his imagination even more vigorously than his body, just to see him through. Up until now it had worked well enough. But this time it hadn’t worked at all.

‘I tell you,’ she said, throwing back the quilt to deal with her toes, ‘you weren’t like this when you were working. You were full of energy all the time, not lying around moaning and feeling sorry for yourself.’

She’s right, he thought, pulling the bedding back to cover the parts of him that offended right now. And that was a first, too. When did Julia last let drop a pearl of wisdom from her full, pouting lips? Must have been some time before he met her.

Annoyed with himself for his lack of charity – especially as it was her birthday – he put out his hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said, stroking the warm roundness of her left arm and finding that the feel of it under his finger-tips only brought home to him more vividly her enviable youth. ‘I don’t mean to be a pain. I’ll take you to Partridges for dinner tonight. OK?’

‘Lovely,’ she said, bending to kiss him and letting her breasts swing forward near his face. Perhaps there’s still a chance, she thought, flicking her tongue out to find his. But she quickly pulled away from him and left the bed; she could see by his eyes that he had slipped further from her than ever.

Frankly relieved that she’d gone, Harvey watched her snatch underwear from an open drawer and waggle her way around the bedroom in search of other bits of clothing. Then she disappeared into the bathroom and turned the shower on full gush. Never mind that she switched off The Time, The Place en route without asking him whether he wanted to watch it or not; he did, as it happened. And never mind that she activated a country and western cassette in the hi-fi system without asking him whether he wanted that either. He didn’t. At least she had gone.

Without too much effort he managed to reach the remote control where she had tossed it, and retrieved the programme; it would at least stop him thinking. But as luck would have it what did he find? A group of po-faced people banging on about how they had had to face redundancy.

‘Terrific,’ he muttered, and was about to zap it to kingdom come when one of the speakers caught his attention. In spite of himself he was soon straining to cut out Julia’s sing-along with Tammy Wynette in the shower, and to concentrate on the tragedies of life.

Well, what should he do with the rest of his own, he wondered as the presenter signed off rapidly and the closing music began to clash with the Tammy/Julia duet. Open a restaurant with his redundancy money like that twit on the box? At least, having loaned thousands in the past for similar ventures, he knew all the pitfalls one had to avoid. That chap he’d just been watching hadn’t a clue: he was obviously grossly under-funded and going to come a cropper.

How about back-packing round the world? Even though he had all but forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other. No, better to sell the car – perish the thought – and sail round. He stared at the ceiling. He really must do something.

A cloud of ‘Obsession’ announced Julia’s return to the bedroom and unaccustomed jealousy licked through him. Julia had always found plenty to keep her occupied. Since leaving the bank where she had worked as his secretary she had, at various stages, taken up ‘hairdressing in the home’, sold underwear on the party plan, and taught aerobics, aromatherapy, yoga and more recently, reflexology. She was qualified in none of these things, it had to be said, and would have looked blank if anyone had suggested she ought to be. But she always got by, and no doubt she always would.

Harvey had often wondered whether the typing certificates that had got her the bank job were genuine.

In the early days, when she had first tripped into his office each morning trailing a blanket of powerful perfume and oozing sex, he had hardly cared whether she could type or not. She had pepped up his life no end at a time when it had begun to go stale because all his friends seemed suddenly to be married and unavailable.

He found her fascinating and different, like no other woman he knew. The fact that her lip would curl in a snarl if he dared to ask her to type something, or that his letters came back as mis-spelt missives set crookedly on the page, seemed somehow irrelevant. She would bat her long lashes at him, rendering futile any complaint, and make him feel horribly wrong for daring to be critical. He felt the need to protect her; to do things for her, when she was supposed to be looking after him! Before long he was in love and wondering how it had happened.

Re-discovering Lucy-Ann lying on the carpet Julia picked her up and sat her on the shelf where a crowd of other dolls and stuffed animals jostled for space.

‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’ she said, standing back with her head on one side. She smiled at Harvey where he lay spread out on the bed with his arms behind his head, and blew him another thank you kiss.

But Harvey knew it was the bracelet he had tucked inside the doll’s bloomers that had gone down best. It sparkled on Julia’s wrist as she dressed herself in a red stretchy body-suit and tight black jeans. He sighed. How much longer would she stay with him? Until his money ran out? He’d never felt absolutely sure of her; now he was even less certain. And she was so damned difficult to talk to. She kept her thoughts to herself – presumably in the belief that she had nothing worthy to say to a man of his superior intelligence. So he’d given up asking for her opinion, and if he were suddenly to defer to her after all these years he felt he would take a dive in her estimation.

He opened his eyes slowly. Julia had pulled on cream high-heeled boots and a matching leather jacket with fur lining. Her lips were an identical red to the body-suit, and her skin sported a false tan. Leaning towards him for a final kiss she gazed into his worried face.

‘You know, Harvey,’ she said in her earnest, oddly motherly way, ‘you really should find yourself something to do.’

The garnet and pearl bracelet clashed against the steering wheel as Julia started the engine. She clucked her tongue and secured the clasp. Really, she thought, Harvey should not have spent so much money. He might not get another job. He kept saying he would, but it wasn’t going to be that easy. She was more aware of the situation than he gave her credit for.

Huh! When did he give her credit for anything? He wouldn’t even discuss things with her – kept his own counsel about anything important on the assumption that she wasn’t clever enough to understand.

And she didn’t need to be given things like this, either, beautiful though they were. But he went on doing it year after year as if this was the only way he could hang on to her. It was annoying and somehow degrading; as if she could be bought. She loved him for himself, but he never seemed to believe it.

Her eyes fell on the pile of books in the passenger foot-well. He wouldn’t believe her capable of doing GCSEs either. Actually she could hardly believe it herself. Her tutor was constantly having to assure her that she really had it in her. Fancy! Dumb old Julia doing exams! Harvey would laugh his socks off if he knew.

But he wouldn’t know … yet. Wait until she passed and had certificates to prove it. Then he would have to laugh on the other side of his face.

She had thought the game was up when he was made redundant. How could she continue to keep her studying secret? But the past few weeks had shown how easy it was to pull the wool over his eyes, even with him being at home all day. He had simply assumed that she was out of the house so much because she had taken on more hairdressing; more yoga classes. He hadn’t objected at all. Presumably he felt he could hardly do that since what she earned would be their only income for a while.

Until recently she had wrestled with her assignments at home or in the college library, but of course home was out of the question now, and she had taken to going to the public library because it was eight miles nearer than the college and there were so many things to fit in to her day. This was undoubtedly risky but it couldn’t be helped. She just had to keep her fingers crossed that Harvey didn’t walk in one day and find her there. She would die if that were to happen. She would. She would die.