The Look of Love Read Online Free Page A

dishwasher, then rinsed her fingers under the tap, noting briefly that thebutler’s sink was looking even more crazed than usual. It probably wasn’t the only one; her post-flight skin felt like a cracked old leather sofa. ‘Maybe he had a premonition about what was coming. I got all togged up in my dress, the sheeny Joseph one, and when he opened the door for us to leave for dinner … there was the wife, leaning on the door frame with this awful “gotcha!” look on her face. I’ve always hated surprises. And skinny as she was, that was a bloody giant-sized one.’
    ‘Bastard.’ Jules sighed, looking deeply satisfied with the story.
    ‘Exactly. Bastard.’
    ‘Mum hates surprises,’ Alex reminded his father as they waited for their luggage to make an appearance at the Heathrow baggage carousel. ‘You should have called her before we left.’
    ‘Rubbish! She’ll be fine with this,’ James insisted. ‘She’ll soon get the hang of me being back in the area. I’ve missed more than enough of your and Molly’s teenage years, and there are a few outstanding things Bella and I need to touch base about. It’s great timing, the new office opening in London, and the flat I’ve rented is brand new … no-one else’s bugs and grubbiness. So all in all, it couldn’t be better. Ugh! Which is more than you can say about this place. Look at thestate of this!’ He hauled his suitcase off the carousel and on to the baggage trolley, then pulled out a perfectly folded white handkerchief from the inside pocket of his jacket and wiped a greasy smear off the case’s side. ‘Horrors!’ He shuddered. ‘The filth these bags must have been in! And all the germs too; you could catch anything …’
    Alex watched as James rolled the handkerchief into a ball and stuffed it into a small polythene freezer bag that he’d pulled from his pocket. He then took an antiseptic wipe from a travel-size pack and cleaned any last trace of residual grime off his already immaculate fingers. Alex, who more than once had been late-night hungry enough to rescue a slice of thrown-away pizza from the kitchen bin, had one of many moments of wondering if James really was his father.
    ‘Dad … do you ever think, you know, that you’re a little bit …?’
    ‘A bit what?’ James looked at him, puzzled. Alex shrugged and gave up. It didn’t matter, really. The world was full of people even madder than this Mr Clean.
    ‘Nuffin’, Dad, no worries. Let’s go. Buses are this way.’
    ‘Taxi, boy, a taxi!’ James looked pained. ‘We’ve had enough public transport for today: we’ll be coughing and sneezing by Wednesday. Thank goodness for echinacea, that’s all I can say. Come on, we need to be out of here. We’ll pick up a nice bunch of roses for Bellaon the way – that’s one surprise she will like! Women always do!’
    ‘I Really Don’t Get … Weekends in New York ’ Bella, now revived enough to think about work and revenge in the same satisfying sentence, briskly typed into her MacBook. Well, not that I exactly even had a weekend , she thought, waiting to see if the perfect opening paragraph would suggest itself to her instantly and inspiringly. An entire neat and complete seven-hundred-word article should, in an ideal world, transcribe itself effortlessly and elegantly on to the page. Her fingers almost went into auto-writing mode as she tried to assemble a sequence of events in such a way that would neither make her look a total fool nor really give away enough to have anyone calling up and suing her for libel. Some of her best work had come out of genuine fury, so she might as well allude to what could have happened, throw in some extra thoughts and get a column out of it – not to mention her fee – while it was all still fresh.
    She’d write about how so many people (OK, mostly women) treat the three-day transatlantic dash as a huge thrill, so glamorous, so full, full, full of shopping and shows and shoes and (if you’re