Someone to Watch Over Me Read Online Free

headed for town. The build-up of traffic had not yet begun along Mill Road. In another hour or so there would be a line of car windscreens framing pale, Monday faces. A woman with neatly curled hair was unlocking the doors of the Co-op. In the newly refurbished church someone was shifting a font on castors across the laminated floor.
    Trove
was situated about fifteen minutes’ walk from the centre of Cambridge and was tucked down a side street in a largely residential area of expensive Victorian terraces. It was in the middle of a small row of shops; a delicatessen whose clientele accepted the overpriced olives and mozzarella in exchange for the rakish charm of the owner who wrapped up their loaves of bread in tissue paper with exaggerated reverence, a greengrocer who had a tendency to use organic as his excuse for limp leaves and shrivelled carrots, a betting shop and small Chinese supermarket. Although the street was a little out of the way, it was on the main route into town and the shops benefited from the footfall of local customers.
    Jen was there when she arrived, and had already turned on the feather-fringed lamps that were placed strategically around the shop. She had also sprinkled orange and clove oil on the radiators so that the place smelled delicious. She was engrossed in the task of dressing the old wire dummy that stood next to the racks of vintage clothes Carrie had sourced from charity shops, fairs, eBay and her own extensive hoarded wardrobe. With her head buried under the folds of silk, she struggled to pull the narrow-hipped dress down over the wire frame.
    â€˜I didn’t know you were going to get here so early,’ said Carrie, taking off her scarf and gloves.
    â€˜Gnnf … too excited to sleep,’ Jen replied, the words muffled. She emerged from the fabric with her hair mussed and her eyes bright.
    Carrie had met Jen at college on the very first day of term. She had been a young eighteen-year-old then with no experience of being away from home, let alone living in London, which seemed terrifyingly large and noisy to her and full of people who talked too fast or who looked at her strangely. She had seldom been to the capital and wasn’t really prepared for the homesickness that engulfed her in the first months. Her mother had despatched her briskly at Coventry station with the words, ‘Remember, the best way to avoid loons on the tube is to sit with a bit of string trailing out of the corner of your mouth. Works every time.’
    Although economical in her farewell, Carrie’s mother, Pam, was devastated by her daughter’s departure and remained on the platform, hidden from sight behind the newspaper stand in WH Smith to watch the train pulling out of the station. Not usually given to public displays of emotion, she found to her surprise that tears were running down her face and gathering inside the collar of her pink cashmere coat. To cheer herself up she went to John Lewis and bought three skirts, four pairs of shoes and a hat for which she had no wedding.
    Jen was older than Carrie and had spent the previous two years travelling and working. She had seemed very sophisticated to the other girl who had attended one school, dated one boy and had been drunk only once, after drinking half a bottle of peach schnapps taken from the back of her parents’ kitchen cupboard. Unlike Carrie, condemned to live in smelly university accommodation, Jen had also been the proud possessor of a flat in Clapham, bought for her by her father just before he had absconded to France with a young lawyer who worked at his firm. After knocking down a few walls of their chateau and indulging in the purchase of some enamel jugs, the young lawyer (who it turned out was somewhat susceptible to rashes) decided that Jen’s father wasn’t, after all, quite what she had expected and she returned to home to Surrey and set up a sanctuary for maimed hedgehogs.
    Jen had looked after Carrie