Claustrophobia Read Online Free Page B

as the boys at school would say – the truth would still be the truth.
    He had loved someone else and not her at all.
    She tried to push the thought away. Ten years: that must count for something? He couldn’t have been faking, tolerating her all that time. Why on earth would he?
    But her mother’s voice harped in her inner ear. You’ll have your work cut out … The bulk of it will fall on you. You run around after that man so much he takes you for granted. Pen had put such comments down to jealousy. But what if her mother was merely pointing out what everyone else could see?
    Pen rubbed her eyes till they stung.
    Whatever she and Derrick had now was not, had never been, what it seemed to be.
    She could force that out in the open, and it might destroy things once and for all. But that was a joke, surely. She could never leave Derrick: she had grown into him, and he into her, two inextricable elements. Which she had thought indestructible.
    No, she would wait, observe, turn it over like a curious stone and examine what squirming creatures clung to the underside, until she decided where to put it.
    She was still hard at the pruning, covered in little flakes of pale blue from the sticky plumbago, when Derrick walked up the driveway.
    â€˜Hello, love,’ he called. ‘I thought you were going to work inside today. Clear out the room.’
    Pen let the secateurs dangle, their weight suddenly alien. A momentary vision of lunging at him, screaming. It was ridiculous – these thoughts could come out of nowhere, for anyone. They didn’t mean anything. She shut the secateurs and placed them amid a thicket of spiky, lopped vines in the wheelbarrow.
    â€˜Yes. I was. But the light was poor in there. Now we’ve got a window again.’
    Derrick smiled and shook his head. Pen thought: He is being tolerant, thinks I’m scatty. She knew how he made allowances for her, especially when it was her time of the month. Usually she was grateful for it. Now she saw it in another light. She turned her face abruptly.
    Pen peered into the study, her face ghosted on the grimy exterior of the glass. She had the curious sensation that there must be two of her from this moment on, just like that, one inside and living her life, the other outside, looking in.
    She must watch Derrick, see him with a measure of detachment, understand what it was she had missed, how deep the damage lay. Whether everything was discredited, utterly, or something could be retained. She would take nothing for granted anymore.
    â€˜It’s getting chilly,’ Pen said. ‘Let’s go in and I’ll heat up the pizza.’
    She might have expected the evening to be an ordeal, but it was surprisingly easy, once you allowed for that split between the inside and the outside. Pen marvelled at how the mouth, the eyes, the body, could continue their standard operations. Once or twice, faced with a stance or gesture of excruciating familiarity, the question was nearly detonated: Pen almost blurted it out.
    It was as if he were skating around on her nerves.
    The knowledge she had unearthed today would have to go somewhere, and she must decide where, rather than letting it dictate … Every word seemed suddenly to drag with it a thousand alternative words; every movement in space alerted her to all the other movements she might take. But it was a revelation, not a trial – as if the teacher had suddenly said you could pick up the chalk and scribble anything you liked on the big blackboard. For all that her discovery had devastated her, it had also given her a strange power.
    Pen pulled the pizza tray from the oven and rummaged for the little cutting wheel. Right and left, up and down she sawed, noting the viscous stretching, the release of aromatic herbs and tomato.
    â€˜I’m alive, anyway,’ she thought, ‘and after all this time, that woman is as good as dead to him. There’s no way he could still be in