The Way You Look Tonight Read Online Free Page A

linguistics.’
    ‘One more,’ said Stella. ‘A fox hides in its . . . ?’
    ‘Lair!’ Jeb shouted after a moment, as he signalled right onto the freeway out of town.
    ‘Right. Put them all together and what do you get? One, two, three . . .’
    ‘Air-hair-lair!’
    ‘Which is how the Queen says: “Oh, hello”,’ Stella finished. ‘See? I told you it was easy.’
    Dorothy Rockfair clapped her hands and looked over her shoulder at Stella, her eyes sparkling.
    ‘You know what, honey? Sylvia is going to just
love
you.’
    Stella was surprised at how comfortable she felt with her hosts, so soon after meeting them. Of course, she’d heard this about Americans. Everyone knew they had a
God-given talent for relaxed, easy friendliness. But she hadn’t expected things to go quite so swimmingly from the start; the Rockfairs were, she knew, a sophisticated, intellectual couple.
She was a senior member of the faculty at Smith and he was a respected historian, author of weighty but best-selling books on nineteenth-century America. Jeb was considered an expert on slavery,
the American Civil War, and President Lincoln.
    They were utterly unlike the professors she’d known at Cambridge. Her glamorous and beautiful mother was the exception that proved the rule: most of the dons and academics they knew shared
the same dusty, desiccated air, along with the dusty and desiccated clothes that they affected to wear. And how ponderously they carried their academic titles and their learning! Some of her
lecturers at Girton were incapable of holding a conversation about anything outside their narrow fields of expertise.
    ‘Walking, talking cobwebs,’ was her mother’s usual description.
    The Rockfairs could hardly be more different. For a start, they had undeniable glamour. Dorothy wasn’t exactly what you might call beautiful, Stella decided, but she certainly drew the
eye. When Stella had passed from the baggage hall into the arrivals terminal earlier, she had spotted her hostess at once: tall and slim, with beautifully cut auburn hair feathered close to her
face, and wearing black slacks pushed into ski-boots. She held a dark green ski jacket draped over one shoulder. Stella thought Dorothy Rockfair looked like a secret agent in a Hollywood spy
thriller.
    For some reason, her husband reminded Stella of what she imagined a newspaper editor might look like. Strong jaw, already darkened by four o’clock shadow (it was barely past midday),
glossy black hair oiled back in a classic short-back-and-sides, and wearing a crisp, white tailored shirt tucked into well-pressed silver-grey trousers. The matching jacket – he’d
called it a ‘coat’ when he slipped it off earlier while they had stopped at a red light – was now neatly folded on the back seat next to Stella, and it looked suspiciously like
pure silk to her. Jeb had rolled his shirtsleeves back to the elbows. Muscles in tanned forearms flexed as he steered the car towards Northampton. She decided he played a lot of tennis.
    Stella suddenly remembered her mother telling her that, when she was staying with her hosts the year before, Jeb been invited at short notice on to one of the USA’s most popular
entertainment television programmes,
The Ed Sullivan Show
.
    ‘It’s basically a variety programme, Stella,’ Diana explained. ‘Not at all the place you’d expect to see a distinguished Professor of History pop up. Anyway, they
were doing a daft musical number based on Abraham Lincoln and afterwards Ed Sullivan did a jokey interview with Jeb, as a leading expert on Lincoln’s life. He – Jeb, I mean – was
hilarious.
Extremely dry and witty. Dorothy and I watched it from home; we were so nervous for him we were drinking neat bourbon, but we needn’t have worried. We raised our glasses
to the TV when it was over and cheered. I remember telling her you’d
never
get Jeb’s British equivalent to do something like that here. Can you imagine Dr Woodman from