The Water's Lovely Read Online Free Page B

forehead, refilling her water carafe, fetching echinacea drops and cough lozenges, and finally thrusting a thermometer into her mouth.
    â€˜You’d have thought Edmund would have done all this,’ said Marion.
    â€˜Hmm-mm-hmm-hmm.’
    â€˜After all, he is a nurse.’
    â€˜Mm-hmm-hmm,’ more vehemently.
    The thermometer reading was normal.
    â€˜It can’t be!’
    â€˜Maybe there’s something wrong with it. I’ll try again later, shall I? Or shall I run out and see if I can getanother one from the all-night pharmacist? Or I could run home and fetch mine.’
    â€˜Would you, Marion? You’re so good to me. I’m beginning to think of you as my daughter, you know. Or – dare I say it? – my might-have-been daughter-in-law.’
    Marion ran to the station, changed her mind and ran home through the winding streets to the Finchley Road. She ran everywhere, just as she talked all the time. Though she had made an attempt at courting him, Edmund’s defection hadn’t troubled her as much as Irene believed. What she wanted was not a young man’s desire but the devotion and admiration of elderly people with money. As well as Irene, she had old Mr Hussein and old Mrs Reinhardt, her sights on a couple of others and she had had old Mrs Pringle, only old Mrs Pringle had died last year. If she hadn’t bequeathed her enormous house in Fitzjohn’s Avenue to Marion, she had left her a large sum of money and some very nice jewellery. This had enabled Marion to buy the ground floor and basement flat of the house in Lithos Road she now entered to find a thermometer. Since she was obsessively neat – a place for everything and everything in its place – she found it at once in the bathroom cabinet on the shelf next to the brown bottle of morphine sulphate, and she skipped back to get the tube this time, one stop to West Hampstead and Irene.
    Heather would be shy and perhaps nervous, Edmund had believed. She might even be a virgin. As he made his way by Jubilee Line and Northern Line to Clapham, the joyful anticipation he had felt earlier in the week began to fade and he wondered if she was so inexperienced that he would have to – no, surely not, teach her. The idea was enough to chill him in highly undesirable ways. For one thing, he was sure he wasincapable of educating a woman in the art of love and for another, suppose she was unresponsive and frightened. He told himself, as the train came in to Clapham South, that he wasn’t in love with her – maybe it would be easier if he were – and that if this split them up rather than consolidating their relationship, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. There were other women to be found. Marion wasn’t the only alternative.
    But as he climbed the steps under the glass canopy he remembered the kiss she had given him and that look of utter trust when she took his hand. Here at the top the lower doorbell said, I. and H. Sealand, the upper one, Sealand and Viner. He pressed the bell and as he waited found quite suddenly that he was longing to see her, that when she answered the door he would take her in his arms.
    Things were very different from what he expected while in the train. Once he was over his amazement, he found himself with a passionate partner, enthusiastic and uninhibited. Not silent and calm as she was when they were out together or she was busy in the kitchens of the hospice, but yielding yet active, sweetly tireless and delightfully greedy, promising an inventiveness to come. If education were needful, she was the teacher, not he.
    â€˜The first time is never good,’ she said at some satiated moment. ‘Or that’s what they say. But ours was, very good.’
    From thinking of her as the ‘blocking tackle’ that defended him from Marion, a girl with a good figure and not much to say for herself, he had come to be enchanted by her. Leaving her on Sunday