Exposure Read Online Free

could do. Even if she had felt able to insist it wasn't boring, that she wanted to learn and be the sort of person who thought—well,
things,
she could not have risked contributing an opinion. But she would have liked to listen. She had a way of folding herself between her two white hands and looking out quietly. Sometimes people mistook this for smugness.
    Her mother idolized Philip. Everyone did—but her mother particularly because she had lost her only son when he was two, and Philip had become her favourite nephew. They had an almost flirtatious relationship and when they were on the phone, discussing Rosalind's travel arrangements to Oxford, Rosalind thought it sounded as though it was her mother who was going, not her. Her mother laughed wildly at Philip's exaggerated descriptions of the chaos of preparation going on at his college, at the students' frantic taming of straggly hair and beards, which had seemed to lend them a philosophical air only the week before. Rosalind felt like the incidental component in an arrangement between two more vibrant personalities.
    She often felt like that. She would have preferred to be more like her elder sister Suzannah, who told jokes and informed their father she was interested in Communism, or Buddhism. But when Rosalind listened to the rows Suzannah had with their mother, she buried her face in her pillow and thought how much nicer it was, really, just to be quiet.
    'Cat got your tongue, Rozzy?' her father would say at lunch sometimes. And then he would ruffle her hair as if he was pleased with her for it.
    'Sit up, darling,' her mother would remind her.
    She got out her dress and laid it on the hotel bed. It was one of Suzannah's—a pale lilac, which went very well with her dark hair. She thought of herself as pretty, but not beautiful like her elder sister. Beauty seemed to be something that required more personality. Once, she had stared for a long time at a photograph in a magazine of Marilyn Monroe, her half-closed eyes fixed erotically on the lens. The image frightened her. She wondered what it would be like for a man to kiss Marilyn Monroe—the big breasts pressing on you, the plump arms round your neck. Was that what they wanted?
    Again, she felt frightened. She got visits from this world of emotion she had not yet begun to understand. It was like seeing a ghost. The expression in Monroe's eyes belonged to it, and the time her sister had come home drunk and there was blood in her knickers and on her petticoat, leaves in her hair. Suzannah kept laughing, saying she couldn't believe
that
was all it was. She laughed all the way up the first flight of stairs, stopping outside their parents' bedroom to say, 'It's just so...
silly
—what you're expected to do. It's so ...
silly
,' and Rosalind had had to put her hand over her sister's mouth. She'd had to undress her. The next morning Suzannah had slipped a gold bracelet she knew Rosalind liked under her door with a note that just said, 'Thanks.'
    Rosalind put on the bracelet and tightened the clasps on her pearl earrings. She was pleased with the way she looked when she was all dressed up. She knew she fulfilled most of the criteria—slim, not too tall, even complexion, clear eyes. And she knew Philip was only half joking when they walked towards the college gates and he draped his arm over her and said she would do his reputation no end of good. It was a cool evening and the light rain pattered on the streamers and balloons. They got under cover as soon as possible, and Philip called out to a friend of his, who looked slightly comic in a dinner jacket several sizes too large for him. 'Al!' he shouted. The friend turned and grinned at them and they went in behind him in the queue. He had dark hair, blue eyes and very pale skin. He was so pale, in fact, that Rosalind wondered if he was all right. She watched his sharp eyes bounce from her face to the pavement to the church spire and back again.
    'Al, this