Tangled Lives Read Online Free Page A

… and then Bryan insisted we go for a drink, and one drink led to another, you know how it is.’
    ‘Nightmare,’ he said, making every effort to trust what she was saying. Bryan was Emma’s boss. He’d met him. He was paunchy and old and only talked about himself. No problem there.
    ‘Listen, got to go to bed. Talk tomorrow. ’Night … love you,’ Emma was saying.
    ‘Love you too.’ And he did love her. He’d loved her – worshipped her – since he was about sixteen. But it had almost been easier before, loving her from afar, certain she’d never look at him in that way. Now he seemed to live in a perpetual state of fear that he would lose her.
    ‘Mother, it’s me,’ Annie shouted into the intercom, and, after a certain amount of predictable fumbling Eleanor let her in to her elegant first-floor flat in Cadogan Gardens, two minutes’ walk from Sloane Square.
    ‘Darling, how lovely.’ The brittle, almost stagey delivery of her mother’s greeting always made it sound false to Annie, even when perhaps it wasn’t.
    ‘Mother.’ She air-kissed the ageing, powdery cheeks, inhaling the timeless scent of Joy.
    They went through to the large, high-ceilinged drawing room, where Eleanor sat down heavily in her armchair, adjusting the navy padded hairband that held her grey bob back from her face. Her mother had been considered abeauty in her youth – or so she had always told Annie – and even now she had the air of believing that still to be true in the way she held herself erect and proud.
    The middle-aged Spanish housekeeper was dusting the rosewood table by the window, crammed with a variety of glass paperweights and silver-framed photographs.
    ‘Morning, Mercedes.’ Annie was very fond of the long-suffering woman. She was patient and kind with her tiresome mother, and she knew she would do anything, literally anything, to make sure Mercedes never left. She gave Annie a smile and discreetly disappeared, duster and spray-polish in hand.
    Annie watched as Eleanor swept the room with an imperious glance, checking, Annie knew, for any faults in the housework. Finding none, she turned her attention to her daughter.
    ‘How are you?’ Annie asked, sitting opposite on the brown velvet sofa. The room was freezing, but her eighty-two-year-old mother seemed not to notice.
    ‘No complaints, darling. I could do without the wind, but otherwise I’m as busy as ever.’
    Did she mean the April wind, or some internal complaint? Annie wondered. She’d never tell me if it was the latter, she decided, unless the situation was a dire medical emergency.
    ‘Yes, it’s been bitter for April.’
    ‘Caro and I went to a superb lecture at the V&A yesterday. It was that marvellous man you see on thatantiques programme. Can’t remember his name … Morley something. Then we had a jolly lunch in the cafeteria.’
    ‘Sounds fun. How is Caro?’
    Eleanor pulled a face. ‘Oh, you know. So-so. That woman always has something to moan about. If it’s not her knees it’s her wayward son or the price of lunch – which I thought very reasonable, if a trifle slapdash. All those tiresome help-yourself places are. But dear Caro never lets up.’
    Annie could picture the two old ladies in the V&A cafeteria, politely sniping at each other but enjoying every minute. The smile she couldn’t control received a reproving look from her mother.
    ‘Moaning is unattractive and, what’s more, it’s very bad manners. Always think of others before oneself. That was my mother’s motto and it’s been mine. Follow that rule and one can’t go wrong in life.’
    True in essence, Annie thought, but perhaps her mother wasn’t the best advertisement for this oft-repeated mantra, since she seemed to have gone through life never considering anybody but herself, except in her strict adherence to the finer points of etiquette.
    For a while they chatted about the usual inconsequential things that Eleanor always saved for her. It mostly involved