LITMIR.BIZ

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habit that she had continued even after he and Carole-Ann were married.

      ‘Look, I don’t give a shit if she disturbs your sleep,’ Carole-Ann had yelled at him once in the middle of a row, ‘but I won’t have the crazy bitch disturbing me, and waking up the kids.’

      ‘She loves me—’ Lloyd had started to protest.

      But Carole-Ann had cut him short, telling him in angry disgust, ‘She’s mad, obsessed, possessed by what she feels for you, but as for love … I don’t think she’s capable of knowing what that means. If she really loved you, she’d want you to have a proper life of your own….’

      That had been one of the worst summers, the worst years, of his life.

      Six weeks after his return home from the island, he had received a hysterical telephone call from Margot.

      ‘But you can’t be pregnant,’ he had protested in shock, his hand tightening sweatily around the receiver, his heart pounding sickly and heavily.

      ‘I’m five weeks late,’ Margot had screamed. ‘Five weeks! Oh, God, Lloyd, what are we going to do?’

      In the end, it had turned out to be a false alarm, but it had been after that that Margot had announced to him her decision to be sterilised.

      ‘Margot, no,’ he had protested instinctively, telling himself that the tight sensation he could feel in his throat was the anguish of his love for her rather than that of any psychological sense of a noose tightening around his neck. ‘You could meet someone else, marry, have children with him …’

      ‘No,’ she had howled, the sound a primal protest. ‘I shall never marry, never. The only man I want to marry is you, the only child I want is yours. You’re just saying that because you don’t love me any more,’ she had accused him. ‘You don’t care. You—’

      ‘Of course I love you,’ Lloyd had protested.

      At the end of the year, Carole-Ann informed him that she was filing for divorce. She had met someone else, she told him, shrugging aside his shock.

      He had kept in touch with the girls although he had said nothing to Margot about doing so. She had, after his divorce, begun cross-questioning him about the places he went and the people, the women, he met. His was a lonely life; he had friends, of course, but his relationship with Margot had to be kept a secret from them. She at least had her family, their family, around her.

      He glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. His meeting with Dr Jamie Friedland was at two-fifteen. Danny, his assistant, had made all the arrangements. Since the professor was apparently still looking for an apartment, having spent his first term at UCLA in someone else’s spare room, it made sense for their meeting to take place at Lloyd’s apartment. Normally, he preferred to see potential authors away from his own home, but Danny had been so thoroughly excited about the professor’s manuscript that Lloyd hadn’t had the heart to remind him of that.

      Certainly his work made very interesting reading—what Lloyd could understand of it, which wasn’t very much. But according to Danny, who could, it was a definitive work on its subject, breaking new ground and raising questions about established procedures other academics were going to find hard to answer.

      Out of the corner of his eye, Lloyd saw a car turning into his driveway, a small European convertible sports model, driven by a redhead, her long hair mussed by the wind.

      Frowning, Lloyd watched as she parked the car and got out. Tall and fashionably voluptuous, she moved with a confidence, an inherent liking of herself, that momentarily took his breath away. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a woman so completely at peace with herself. She was, he decided, the complete antithesis of Margot. His frown deepened as he saw her look up at his window before heading for the entrance to his apartment. Ten seconds later as his intercom buzzed, he heard her announcing her arrival.

      Dr Jamie Friedland to see Lloyd Kennet.

      As he activated the automatic lock and let her in, Lloyd had the oddest sensation of being on the brink of something so fateful and portentous that for a moment, he almost felt half-afraid to meet her.

      Irritably, he pushed it away. So he had made a mistake assuming that she was a man. Why should that matter?

      6

      No one paid any attention to the fashionably dressed, elegant woman parking her car on the sunny residential London street. Why should they? The BMW might have been a more expensive, more up-market model than the others of its breed parked outside their owners’ smartly painted front gates, but it fitted neatly alongside the wide variety of chunky four-wheel-drive vehicles that had become the nineties’ version of the more traditional Volvo estate as the favourite vehicle for the school-and-shopping run.

      The large double-fronted house close to which she had parked had recently been converted into a small hotel—the kind patronised by ladies of a certain age up from the country to spend a few days shopping and catching up with old friends. It might not have the éclat or the convenience of its Knightsbridge sisters but, ‘My dear, one gets … feels … so comfortable there—and safe….’ and its prices were, of course, so much cheaper.

      But it wasn’t the hotel that was Claudia’s destination even though she spent several minutes staring at it.

      The street, her surroundings, once so familiar to her, had changed dramatically from the days when she and Garth had rented a flat in one of the shabby and rather run-down terraced houses that had lined it. Since then, they had been smartened up and gentrified out of all recognition, their gleaming paintwork and shiny, clean, linen-draped windows confusing and bewildering her.

      The flat she and Garth had rented had been at number twelve on the top floor—or rather in the attic—up a flight of rickety stairs covered by a piece of dust-filled, ancient, dark red patterned carpet—or at least they assumed it had once been dark red.

      They had found it at the end of a long week of scouring the city for somewhere suitable to live that they could afford, and with Garth having only hours of his leave left before he was due to return to his regiment, they had pounced in relief on the opportunity to rent a place that was within their budget.

      ‘At least we’ll have our own bathroom and kitchen,’ Claudia had murmured when Garth shook his head over the grimy shabbiness of the small rooms, ‘and decorating it will give me something to do while you’re away.’

      ‘You’ll be working,’ Garth had reminded her before adding protectively, ‘and besides, I don’t like the idea of your climbing about on ladders when I’m not here.’

      They had still been very much at the honeymoon stage of their marriage then, still very protective of their love and their privacy, and Claudia had been adoringly proud of the way Garth had refused both his and her own parents’ offer of financial assistance towards providing them with a better home.

      ‘No, we must start as we mean to go on,’ Garth had told her firmly while they were discussing the subject. All the protests she had been about to make melted beneath his kisses, just as her body did, when he added, whispering the words against her mouth, ‘I want to look after you myself, sweet. I want to take care of you.’

      It might have been the seventies, she might have had her own newly burgeoning career, but Claudia had been brought up in a household by parents who adhered to the old-fashioned values of their own parents, and while she would have hated Garth to be domineering or bossy, to expect her to treat him as some kind of superior simply because he was a man, she made no bones about the fact that she enjoyed being pampered by him, being shown that he loved and cared about her; that he wanted to protect her and look after her. It was, after all, exactly the way her father treated her mother, and her parents had been happily married now for over twenty-five years.

      They had moved into the flat one rainy weekend, good-humouredly assisted by some of Garth’s friends from the regiment, who had helped carry the sturdy pieces of furniture, given to Claudia and Garth by their parents, up to their new home.

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