The Water's Lovely Read Online Free

own.’
    â€˜Of course I’m coming with you,’ he said and when they began to walk along the edge of the Common, he took her hand.
    It was a warm hand with a strong clasp. He looked into her face under the lamplight and saw her eyes fixed on him, large blue eyes, opaque and cloudy as the glaze on pottery. Then there were the other markers, more obvious to any man, her full breasts and rounded hips, her plump lips and that hair, that glossy, dense, radiant hair whose colour varied from flaxen through cornfield to eighteen-carat gold. She never wasted words but when she did speak her voice was soft and low, and her rare smiles lit her face and made her pretty.
    The house where she lived was much bigger than he expected, a detached house in a row of others like it but the only one with a glazed-in walkway from the gates to the steps and with stone pineapples on the gateposts. Lights were on upstairs and down.
    â€˜My sister Ismay and I have the ground floor, and my mother and her sister the top.’ She stopped at the foot of the steps, keeping hold of his hand. ‘Ismay and her boyfriend’, she said softly, ‘will be away next weekend.’
    â€˜Can I take you out on Friday?’
    She lifted her face and in the gleaming half-dark he thought he had never seen anyone look so trusting. Hebrought his mouth to hers and kissed her the way he’d been kissing her these past few weeks but something new in her response made him ardent, passionate, breathless when their faces parted. She held him tightly.
    â€˜Heather,’ he said. ‘Darling Heather.’
    â€˜Come for the weekend.’
    He nodded. ‘I’ll look forward to it so much.’
    Edmund said to his mother, ‘I shall be away for the weekend, back on Sunday.’
    They had just sat down to eat. Irene lifted her first forkful, set it down again. ‘You never go away for the weekend.’
    â€˜No, it’s time I started.’
    â€˜Where are you going?’
    â€˜To Clapham.’
    â€˜You don’t have to go away to go to Clapham. Clapham’s in London. Whatever you’re doing in Clapham you can do it in the daytime and come back here to sleep.’
    Strength came to him from somewhere. From Heather? ‘I am going to spend the weekend in Heather’s flat.’
    Edmund continued to eat. His mother had stopped. She shook her head infinitesimally from side to side, said, ‘Oh, Edmund, Edmund, I didn’t think you were that sort of man.’
    He was still wary of her, but he contrasted how he now was and how he had been. There was a world of difference. His efforts had paid off and there was no doubt that now he sometimes got amusement out of their confrontations. ‘What sort of man, Mother?’
    â€˜Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.’
    â€˜I am going away for the weekend with my girlfriend, Mother. I don’t suppose you want me to go into details.’It was the first time he had referred to Heather as his girlfriend. Doing so now seemed to bring him closer to her. ‘And now I’d like to finish my dinner.’
    â€˜I’m afraid I can’t eat any more,’ Irene said, leaning back in her chair and taking deep breaths. ‘I feel rather unwell. It is probably the start of a migraine.’
    Edmund wanted to say something on the lines of, ‘You always do feel ill when I say anything to cross you,’ or even, ‘It couldn’t be psychosomatic, could it?’ But he stayed silent, unwilling to argue further with her or defend himself (God forbid). Of course she would revert to the matter again – and again.
    She did so at the moment he laid his knife and fork diagonally across his empty plate. ‘I shall be all alone in this house.’
    â€˜Unless you can get Marion to stay.’
    â€˜It’s hard when you’re my age and not strong.’
    â€˜Mother,’ he said, ‘you have a good neighbour in