Love-40 Read Online Free

fault, he knew. When he’d made the decision ten years ago, to turn his hobby of building and repairing sound systems into an up and running business, he had failed to research the project thoroughly enough. Suffused with energy – Michael always was – he had created ambitious plans, advertised everywhere he could think of, ignored his budget, re-mortgaged his house, launched himself into the business without so much as a look over his shoulder.
    Michael frowned his perplexed frown. He still wasn’t sure how it had happened. It might have been the outlay – of business premises, brochures, advertising. It might have been the perfectionism and Michael’s seeming inability to quote the correct price for a job. He knew his faults. But whatever it was, he had lost virtually the lot, lucky, he supposed, that he had not got further into debt, that he had escaped relatively unscathed from a venture that had left him living in a rented furnished flat in Fareham, working in a factory that he loathed.
    What Michael really wanted was very different. He wanted to be a musician – a successful musician, the kind who received critical acclaim rather than hero worship (at forty he felt too old for hero worship, pleasant though it might be in small doses). And so, during every white-coated, nine to five day that led inexorably into another just the same, he dreamed of himself on stage. Sometimes in a modest venue, but more often playing Earls Court, where he had once seen the Rolling Stones. The image of Mick Jagger swinging on a rope down from a platform suspended high in the air on to centre stage, was one of his treasured memories.
    And when he wasn’t enjoying this pleasant fantasy, for Michael could swing on a rope as easily as the next man, he was waiting for Friday nights and thinking of Suzi Nichols.
    He waved goodbye to Liam and followed her out of CG’s clubhouse. Suzi Nichols dressed not in blue joggers and sweatshirt, but in a power suit with the kind of short black skirt Suzi never wore, in black stockings and suspenders that would probably compromise all her feminist principles, with pouting lips that whispered sweet nothings – not to Liam, but only and always for Michael alone.
    *   *   *
    Estelle’s feet were hot in her trainers, so when she got to the riverbank, she tugged them off, digging deep into her multi-coloured rucksack for her flat strappy leather sandals. At the same time, she pulled out an indigo wrap-around skirt and wound it round her waist, conscious of her pale legs in lycra shorts – OK on the tennis court, but not so appropriate to Pridehaven on a late Sunday afternoon in March. And it was getting chilly … She pulled on her sweater and observed the clouds, gathering quickly, as though suddenly realising it was not summer, no, not even spring, and that they should never have left the sky alone in the first place because people would assume too much.
    Estelle leaned on the parapet of the blue bridge over the River Pride. She loved this narrow river that wound its way from the Dorset hills in the north, through the town itself, past Suzi’s riverbank cottage to the south and down to the tiny harbour with its sheltered, shingle bay and sandstone rocks not quite imposing enough or pretty enough to attract hordes of tourists to Pridehaven in the summer. Thank God, Estelle thought. She loved the river, despite – or maybe because of – what it had done to her.
    To stare into the water was a therapy, she told herself, since water, and especially moving water, water that dragged along bits of twigs, reed and bulrushes, the seeds and dying flowers from wilting plants of the riverbank, made her remember too much. It would be easier, of course, not to recall events from thirty-five years ago, if that were possible. Memory played tricks – one could never be sure how experiences had been trimmed or frilled by time and other