Gifted and Talented Read Online Free Page B

shape and rounded at the ends, it was possibly an inevitable one.
    He could see her absorbing this. The coarseness of student humour seemed as much a revelation as the Turd itself.
    ‘Let’s go into town,’ Olly suggested. ‘I can show you where the good pubs are.’
    ‘I’ve got to unpack first.’
    ‘Here then?’ Olly pressed eagerly. ‘About seven?’
    She nodded, waved with her free hand and disappeared through the farting airport doors.

All these excited teenagers, Diana thought. Arriving for the new term, full of hurry and excitement. They seemed to flow like a vital river in and out of the lacy buildings. Their youthful shouts and laughter wove like ribbons round the older sound of bells.
    It should, she felt, have cheered her, but her spirits remained flat. If only she was starting this new job – this new life – at a time of year other than autumn. Spring, perhaps, with its new growth. Or among the glossy grass, daisied fields and blossom-weighted bushes of early summer. In the sparkling wastes of winter, maybe.
    But the end of her marriage, the loss of her home: there seemed parallels to it all in the October bonfires in the college gardens. The sad, slow blue spirals of smoke, the rotting sweetness in the air.
    Feeling the familiar pricking behind her eyeballs, Diana blinked hard. Tears were out of the question, at least until she was alone. She had to keep cheerful, for Rosie’s sake.
    And here was something cheerful. Diana stopped at a zebra crossing for a beautiful, smiling girl with red hair that rippled like a flag. Panting after her was a young man in a suit – an amusingly shiny suit. It was with some difficulty that he raised a creased sleeve to acknowledge Diana, staggering as he was under the weight of an enormous rucksack. He was carrying it for the girl, quite obviously.
    Young love, Diana thought, half envious, half despairing.
    ‘Mum?’ Rosie piped up from the back. ‘Your face looks all red. I can see it in the mirror.’
    ‘I’m hot,’ Diana muttered, although the mellow October sun was not as warm as all that and their ancient car had no heating. As Rosie was probably about to point out. She missed nothing. Diana could see, in the reflection, the vivid little face of her nine-year-old daughter in its frame of wavy brown hair.
    On the grass outside a gilded college gate a thick carpet of brilliant yellow leaves lay in a circle below a naked maple. It was a quietly spectacular sight, the thick pool of gold surrounded by emerald grass. Every leaf seemed to have dropped at once, in a blaze of glory. ‘Look at that!’ Diana said.
    ‘It looks as if its dress has fallen off,’ remarked Rosie. ‘It looks cold.’
    Following its grand autumn gesture, the denuded tree looked thin and vulnerable. But it would survive, Diana knew. Even now, beneath the earth, things were stirring for next year. The cycle would start again: new buds would form on the cold brown branches; she and Rosie would drive down this road next spring and see the trees shimmering with vivid new green.
    If they were still here, of course. But they had to be. She could not afford for anything else to go wrong.
    ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said firmly, to her daughter, but really to herself.
    Rosie nodded and returned her attention to Matilda . She could read anywhere. In a car, in a train, in – as had often been the case recently – the foyer of a solicitors’ office.
    The divorce had been horribly painful. Lots of people got divorced, of course, but she had never imagined it happening to her. Her disappointment and sense of failure were crushing.
    The familiar questions pressed in. How could she not have known? Or even suspected? Not just the affair, which was bad enough, but the money? The split had exposed how much higher on the hog they had been living than Simon could afford. He had never talked money with her, and now she could see why. The villa in Provence, the first-class travel, the expensive cars. They