The Liverpool Trilogy Read Online Free Page A

and he knew he would never get that. These days, she was barely capable of swallowing food, and he feared that she might choke to death. Her breathing was impaired and she couldn’t walk any distance without becoming completely exhausted or falling on the floor.
    ‘I’ll love you just as well if you take a mistress, Richard.’
    He was definitely a breast-and-legs man. Lucy Henshaw had two of each, and all four seemed to be in excellent condition. She also wore the air of a woman who had not been touched for some time. Children grown and flown? She didn’t look old enough for—
    ‘Rich?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I just want you to be absolutely sure that whatever, whoever or wherever, I’ll understand. But be careful. There’s a lot of disease out there.’
    ‘I know.’ He closed his eyes and pictured his beloved wife in her wedding gown, plain satin, yellow and white flowers dripping from her hands all the way to her shoes, hair loose in heavy waves down her back. He hadn’t wanted her to put it up. The severity of her clothing had served to emphasize that hourglass figure. She had been and would always be the most beautiful bride in the world. It was so damnably clumsy, this wretched disease. Steroids had affected her badly, and she had gained weight at a terrifying rate, so those particular drugs were used only in the direst of emergencies. The problem lay in the fact that emergencies were frequent these days.
    Sex had been important to both of them, and fate had now removed any chance of physical closeness. It felt akin to bereavement, because a vital part of their marriage had been killed off by an enemy that could not be defeated.
    ‘Richard?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Don’t.’
    ‘Was I thinking aloud?’
    She shook her head. ‘Only I can hear it, darling. The rest of the world is deaf.’ If she tried now, she might manage. Sometimes, her hands were almost cooperative, and she could just about find the strength to use pestle and mortar. Anyway, the coffee-grinder would make short work of it. The happy pills. A sheet of eight was all she needed, but she’d take a damned sight more – who wanted to survive with a buggered liver? They’d need to be crushed, as swallowing was hard and needed concentration. Everything did. People breathed without thinking, ate without thinking, walked and talked without worrying. Sometimes, she didn’t even have control of her speech.
    She looked at him. Love was a strange thing. It meant needing to die before he did, knowing that she daren’t choose an obvious way of self-disposal, because that would break him. Yes, her suicide would kill him, too. And with him being a doctor, the powers could blame him, pin murder via overdose on him—
    ‘Moira?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Stop it.
    It worked both ways. She could almost hear his thoughts, but he was similarly gifted – or cursed. When it came to theory, Richard was of the opinion that every man and woman owned his or her own life. Suicide was not always wrong, and he was of the school that approved of assisted and heavily supervised exit.
    But when it came to Moira, he was seriously prejudiced and out of his depth. He knew that the time had come – he would have to hide her drugs. And he suddenly thought again about the theory of dignified death. As long as it was someone other than Moira, it was a good idea. Yet all those someones had relatives who didn’t want the sufferer to kill him or herself. He’d been wrong. Again.
    ‘I don’t want to die in Switzerland,’ she said. ‘Or to endure a life in a wheelchair with my head clamped back so that it won’t droop, and a tube into my stomach, and oxygen on tap—’
    ‘I know, love.’
    He didn’t know. No one could possibly understand the dread that accompanied her from day to day along the pathway to perdition. It was hard work pretending not to care, carrying on as if she’d never felt better in her life. Only another sufferer would have an idea of the thoughts that circled in