Exposure Read Online Free Page B

was standing a little way off with a girl she had been to school with. Two nervous girls under a litde galaxy of fairy-lights strung up in a tree. Was there anything less approachable?
    'Come on, I'll distract the other one—she won't remember who I am but we won't let that matter.'
    Somehow Alistair asked and somehow she accepted. It was an agonizing few moments, but Rosalind was unsophisticated enough to make it obvious that she was pleased, and this encouraged Alistair. He noticed the schoolfriend grin and raise her eyebrows, and saw Rosalind return a faint smile.
    They walked away together towards the river where couples were going out in punts, the girls sitting on rugs, tilting their heads to look up at the sky as if they were drawn to do it by some irresistible romantic force. Everyone was putting on a beautiful show.
    'You know, I'm sure Philip's never met Veronica,' Rosalind said, as they walked over a little footbridge. Philip had rushed up to the girl with his arms open wide and told her he'd missed her. Alistair looked at Rosalind and wondered if she was going to laugh about it, but instead, she visibly gathered the implication of Philip's pretence and blushed. She looked away towards the river, pulled her glove on more tightly. 'It's very beautiful, isn't it? The trees, I mean ... with all the little lights,' she said.
    He was impressed by her. He respected her capacity to regain her composure. She smiled at him as they got into the punt, and as he watched her smooth out her dress beneath her, he thought she was the neatest and most ordered person he could imagine. The river glistened and rocked the boat as they moved out into it. What would it be like to be around that neatness, to feel reassured by the action of those elegant hands? She was the opposite of his humiliating rehearsals in front of the mirror: Alistair smoking a cigarette, Alistair drinking a toast, Alistair reading a newspaper and looking up as someone brought him a cup of coffee
in his club.
The scenes he played out! She was the proof that he was nowhere near fooling anyone. She had been born into it all. She had lived the life he was piecing together from talks with Philip—of Sunday lunches followed by walks in Wellington boots, the opera at Glyndebourne in summer, drinks parties on crisp rainy evenings in London, quiet talks with your father over a glass of port. When he imagined Rosalind's life, he often forgot to include the fact that she was a girl. Sometimes this meant that as he sent her out into the dream a detail jarred. He would see her suddenly, and it made him feel oddly disappointed, so that he turned to dreaming about Philip's life instead, with which he could more closely identify, rather than wondering what Rosalind's might be like.
    She did not have Philip's custodial air but she had his deeply impressive way of not being at all surprised that something delicious was waiting for her, so that when they got back from their punting she greeted a table covered with bottles of champagne, scattered with flowers, with a simple 'How nice to come back to,' and a quick smile. He wondered if he was in love already.
    They had not talked about much as they punted along, past the other couples, sometimes close enough for Alistair to be embarrassed to hear the same male speech, 'And that's Magdalen Tower where they have the singing on May Day,' and so on. Mostly he had just told her about the different colleges and received the incredible reassurance of her nods and smiles. She seemed fascinated. She was so unlike the girls from Dover Grammar, who rolled their eyes if you 'harped on'. They thought he was dull and the books with which he had scrupulously characterized himself (often trying three different tides under his arm before he left the house) had made him unpopular with them. Books were a self-fulfilling prophecy—he saw that now.
    For the first time, though, at Oxford, he had felt respected—because he was a scholar and