Comfort and Joy Read Online Free

drink?’ he repeats.
    I realize that, for the second time today, my mouth is slightly open. I snap it shut, only to open it again. ‘I, er. I. No.
     I have to go. I can’t. I. Yes. NO!’ is what comes out, humiliatingly. I can literally feel the blood rising to the surface
     of my skin. I am about to become puce.
    ‘Have one more. For Christmas,’ he laughs. ‘Same again? I promise I’ll leave you alone with your, ah, paperwork.’
    I say ‘Okay’ in a weird squeaky voice.
    To me, the man is the most attractive man I have ever seen. I don’t know what else to say: it’s a simple statement of fact.
     I, Clara Dunphy née Hutt, have literally, in my life, never seen anyone so handsome. It’s subjective, of course. But … it’s
     not just handsomeness. I know handsomeness, from interviewing the odd film star and so on for work: it takes you aback initially,
     but you adjust to it very quickly and just feel annoyed when you go back into the real world and find everyone walking about
     with their plain old faces. You don’t, as I do now, feel like you’ve been winded, punched, jacked out of time. And that little
     stab in my stomach. I know what that is. That’s not good. That’s not supposed to happen to the old-lady wife and mother. I
     mean, it’s been
years
. How weird.
    ‘He’s bringing them over,’ the man says, coming back and sitting down. And then, gesturing to my ratty little list, ‘Please.
     Don’t let me put you off.’
    ‘It’s just my list, you know, for presents,’ I say, pretending to write something important down on it. What I actually write
     is ‘HELP’, not in letters so large that he could see them from across the table, but as a useful aide-memoire to myself.
    ‘Ah yes. I’ve been doing some of that too.’
    ‘I was in Oxford Street,’ I volunteer pointlessly, and then, as if that piece of banality wasn’t enough, I add, ‘I had two
     pigeons walking on either side of me. We were like a gang.’
    He looks mildly surprised by this, as well he might. Surprised
doesn’t even begin to cover how I’m feeling. A little voice in my head says, ‘Leave. Go home. It was fun, the drink in the
     Connaught, but it’s over now.’
    ‘I went to New Bond Street,’ he says. He has been smiling at me ever since he sat down. It’s a knowing sort of smile, and
     I know what it means. If I were a different sort of person – one to whom these things happened, one who didn’t find anything
     odd about being winded by strangers in hotel bars – I would smile back at him in exactly the same way. I’d be wearing stockings
     under my dress, instead of M&S tights and flesh-coloured Pants of Steel, and the whole stranger-in-a-hotel-bar scenario would
     be almost drearily familiar to me. But I am not a different sort of person, so I frown and blush and frown and stare, until
     it occurs to me that it might be an idea to compose my face, which is, as predicted, a fetching shade of scarlet.
    ‘Bobond Street,’ I say. ‘I hope it was less crowded. Bond, I mean, not Bobo … Bobond.’ I am sounding like a nutter. I have
     never stammered in my life. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Bond Street, you were saying.’
    ‘It was hideous.’
    ‘Yes. Will you excuse me?’
    I have to leave the table. I wish I could explain it properly. To be succinct: if the man, whose name I don’t know and whom
     I met maybe four minutes ago, said, ‘Let’s go round the back and do it against the bins,’ I’d say yes. This disturbs me profoundly.
     I feel like someone’s flicked a switch in my head; lobbed a bomb into my little world of domesticity and special Christmas-treat
     drinks. Actually, I feel like I’ve had a brain transplant. No – like zombies ate my brain. Because I can truthfully say that
     it has never happened to me before. I understand the concept of lust, obviously – I had entire relationships based on lust,
     when I was younger – hot monkey sex with someone who you knew was a bit