Leather Wings Read Online Free

notice if she were to absent herself from their intimacy.
    The talking is important. In fact, what she likes about Donald is the pleasure he takes not just in her body but in her conversation. She enjoys the way he watches her mouth while she talks. “Now,” he will say greedily, arranging her opposite him like a tray of party nibbles. He prefers to get out of the car and walk to some place where they can do this, sit face to face. “Now. Now tell me about your awful life.” And she does, translating all kinds of boring domestic misery and office gossip into sentences that make him double up with joyful humour, make her double up as well, so that her life sieves down to just this, a series of comedy sketches. With Donald (not in the office, of course, but outside it) she sees herself quite differently, under strobe lighting, coloured, turning on arevolving set, offering angles that are only optimistic. Or mostly. She doesn’t like to disappoint him with real problems, not outside of work, and rarely does. The sex is better after a good laugh.
    And he does care about her. There are things he understands about Esther that Rex would never understand. Rex is too good. For one thing Donald is sympathetic about Jania, he doesn’t criticise Esther (as Rex does) for finding the child difficult.
    “You’ve been dumped on,” he said when he heard she was being dispatched to them like a parcel.
    Donald isn’t good with children himself, only consenting to know his own sons properly when they were old enough to be capable of decent intellectual discussion and a game of poker. She remembers his faint puzzlement, embarrassment even, on occasions when she became passionate about Prue, her own child. When the accident happened and Prue didn’t regain consciousness, Esther and Rex had flown straight over to Canada — the natural reaction, surely. But it had seemed to puzzle Donald; it couldn’t bring Prue back, he said, reminding her of how she had never liked her son-in-law (playing back some of her funny names for him) and pointing out that the three year old might be better off without a sobbing grandmother; she had her Dad and a perfectly good hospital staff caring for her, sympathetic and sane, which for the time being Esther was not. When Esther returned from this sad trip, Donald had avoided being on his own with her for weeks, unsure of how to behave in the face of grief. Yes, Donald isn’t without his failings, but on the plus side is his cheerful wickedness, his sense of humour, qualities missing in Rex. Rex’s heart, the doctor has explained to her. A bad heart is bad for the humour, can make a man morose. Rex has missed the message in his Readers Digest — “Laughter is the Best Medicine” — which he reads regularly and seriously enough.
    Now Donald is her only real friend. Her “thing” with him has led her to neglect her other friendships, with women for instance, until (she noticed this recently) she can lay claim only to acquaintances: workmates, members of her Thursday Reading Group, and neighbours she has got to know throughher sometime editing of the local Newsletter. Enough of these but nothing like a proper friend. It matters. When Rex had his first attack and she was so frightened, that was when she noticed it first. Donald, of course, was limited in the help he could offer her then, and perhaps he preferred it that way (she thinks now, in her sour mood).
    Other than Donald, who is there? Melanie, a faithful former schoolfriend, has moved out of her orbit into a succession of menial housewifely jobs and watches the soaps on television. Sometimes they chat at the supermarket check-out where Melanie has “landed” a job. Esther is clearly still “friend” in Melanie’s head, although they have so little in common. Melanie would have no trouble loving a grandchild.
    With her “friends” at the office Esther exchanges views on the latest news scandals and joins in a daily contest to do the