Someone to Watch Over Me Read Online Free Page B

kitchen floorboards with wood filler, the house had smelt unmistakably of rotting rat, a sweetish odour like overripe apples mingled with something more meaty and rancid. She thought that she had probably trapped a rat family beneath her floorboards. The smell didn’t subside for almost two weeks, by which time she had almost become accustomed to it.
    She stretched out underneath the pile of blankets she had heaped over herself. Some of the house noises were also due to a decrepit old boiler, which seemed to have a mind of its own. At the moment the temperamental creature was sulking and produced only enough heat to warm the very bottoms of the radiators. She hoped Max would sleep for a while longer. She knew that once he was up, she would have to marshal them both through another day. It was that exact time between night and morning when everything was holding its breath. When the new day seemed to hover in the distance, as if waiting for a sign.
    Molly couldn’t remember now exactly when she had stopped feeling happy. She sometimes wished that there was a way of recognising the end of things, so that you could properly acknowledge their passing. She always left rented holiday houses with a sense of ceremony. Thank you, she would say as she took a last look round. Thank you house, for giving us a good two weeks. I hope that I might see you again one day. She knew it was foolish and she would never say the words out loud, but it helped her to leave if she was able to mark both the happiness and its ending. She knew that being a mother set in motion a series of endings. Every child who was lucky enough to have a lap to sit in must surely also have a last time they indulged in this intimacy, but it was only when you looked back that you noticed that the last time had been and gone.
    It seemed to her now that the first years of her marriage were part of another lifetime. It wasn’t that Rupert changed suddenly, it was more as if the bits of his personality that she had previously only noticed out of the corner of her eye came into sharper focus. Living together had been wonderful at first. She loved her grown-up home with its matching china and scatter cushions. She loved her job as a teacher at a local primary school, but most of all she loved being Rupert’s wife. Molly had felt like the most blessed of people, hardly deserving of the good fortune that had been heaped upon her. Rupert seemed to make it his mission to anticipate her needs and make her happy. There would be gifts hidden around the house, loving notes pinned up on the fridge. He would administer back rubs and hot water bottles at the first sign of period pain. He would remember passing comments she had made about books and films, and bring them home for her. He put batteries in her bicycle lights, paper in her printer and credit on her phone, and made sure her bottle of Chanel No. 19 never ran dry. He even once hunted down an unusual oval blue button that had dropped off the cuff of a favourite dress, finding a replacement on an obscure website. She laughed at the thought of him searching the whole of the internet for a button, but he looked at her as if he was surprised by her levity.
    â€˜You know I would do anything for you,’ Rupert said, stroking her hair in that way he had; tugging slightly at the ends as if he was testing its strength.
    They celebrated the first anniversary of their marriage by going back to their honeymoon hotel. Molly would have liked to have tried somewhere new but didn’t want to raise churlish objections when Rupert had gone to the trouble of putting a copy of the menu from their very first meal, with flight details added, into the side pocket of her handbag. She found it at work when she was looking for her pen, and just for a moment, as she pulled it out and saw what it was, she felt breathless. She thought of him waiting for his opportunity. Waiting for her to go upstairs or out into the garden and then