LITMIR.BIZ

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Jude had known him some twenty years before when he was called Al (short for Albert) Sinclair, still living in Morden with his first wife, an actress called Megan. And if marrying her had been the ‘mistake’ he had made when he was ‘young and foolish’, Jude reckoned that, during the marriage, Burton’s irrepressible habit of trying to get into bed with every other woman he met had possibly been another mistake.

      She had not been surprised when she heard, through mutual friends, that Al and his wife had split up after four years. Soon after they got married, Megan had gone through one of those moments in the sun which happen in actresses’ careers. A supporting role in one television series had led to a starring role in another, and for a couple of years Megan Georgeson (her maiden and professional name) was everywhere on the box.

      Though Al Sinclair claimed to be delighted by his wife’s success, it was not an easy burden for someone as egotistical as he was. After a few experiences of accompanying her to premieres and awards ceremonies as the ‘token spouse’, increasingly he let her do that kind of stuff on her own. He was sick of being seated next to show-business successes and being asked the question, ‘And what do you do?’ To reply that he was a writer risked being asked the supplementary question, ‘Do you write anything I would have heard of?’ And since his first novel had yet to be published, the answer to that had to be ‘No’. It was not an admission Al Sinclair enjoyed making. And he compensated for his sidelining in the marriage by various and continuing infidelities.

      Megan Georgeson, dark-haired, petite and with ‘surprisingly blue eyes’, was often described as ‘waiflike’ or having ‘a fragile beauty’. Unfortunately, she was equally fragile and needy in her private life. It had only been a matter of time before she found out about one – or more – of her husband’s betrayals. And to someone as sensitive as Megan, such a revelation would have been a severe body blow, which the marriage could not survive.

      Still, Jude was by nature a generous woman and prepared to take at face value that evening’s assertion that Burton had found emotional stability with his new wife. From Jude’s point of view, that was good news. It meant that, if she and Burton were ever again alone together, she wouldn’t have to face the tedious necessity of deterring his wandering hands.

      And she tried to banish from her mind the unworthy thought that, as again she had heard through mutual friends, this new marriage to Persephone was very new indeed. Less than six months old. There was always the possibility that Burton’s old behaviours might reassert themselves. But, for the moment, she was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

      Time changed people, she knew, occasionally for the better. And it had been a long time since she, Burton and Megan had spent much time together.

      The event was taking place in Fethering Library. Though the radiators were turned up to full, the place still felt draughty. The Edwardians who had designed its gothic dimensions must have been a hardier breed than their twenty-first century descendants, pampered from birth by central heating. Outside it was a bitterly cold January evening. A pitiless wind from the Channel assaulted the seafront of Fethering, which still called itself a village, though it had the dimensions of a small town. And the sudden rainbursts of the day, undecided whether they should be falling as snow, had compromised by turning to face-scouring sleet.

      Jude had been lucky. Nothing had fallen from the sky during her half-mile walk from Woodside Cottage to the library. Optimistic by nature, she hadn’t bothered to take an umbrella and, as outerwear, put on one of her favourite patchwork jackets, confident that brisk movement would keep her warm.

      The route had taken her along the seafront. She had seen very few people. In the winter, when darkness fell, most of the denizens of Fethering scuttled inside and closed their curtains. As she passed by, from one of the seaside shelters, which afforded little protection because most of the glass panes in its metal structure had been smashed, she heard sounds of dispirited carousing. She could see the blurred outlines of three or four figures inside. Bored teenagers, she assumed, for whom there was not much entertainment beyond drink and drugs in a West Sussex seaside village.

      Or maybe the people in the shelter could be described as – a term that was anathema to the righteous locals – ‘vagrants’. The use of the word implied the unspoken qualifying adjective ‘foreign’. The appearance of such people in the genteel environs of Fethering had been the cause of much apocalyptic brooding in the village’s only pub, the Crown & Anchor. And had even prompted a couple of letters to the Fethering Observer. There was dark talk of ‘slippery slopes’ and ‘uncontrolled immigration’. There’s a nasty substratum of racism very close to the genteel surface of the English country village. Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians are never quite welcome in the world of cricket pavilions, warm beer and roses round the door.

      Jude was pretty cold by the time she reached the library and, feeling the chill once she stepped inside, wished she’d put on a more substantial top layer.

      As she looked around the fine, though rather grubby, Edwardian interior, Jude felt a pang of guilt. To her shame, Fethering Library was not somewhere she visited very often. Though vaguely aware of headlines in the Observer about threats of the library’s closure, she still tended to resort to the seductive simplicity of buying books from Amazon. She justified this to herself on the grounds that most of the books she bought, in the Mind, Body and Spirit category, were essential to her work as a healer and needed to be permanently available for reference on her shelves at Woodside Cottage. Also, she justified to herself, buying a book was putting money directly into the pocket of the author, which had to be a good thing.

      But she still knew she ought to have given more support to her local library.

      Her next-door neighbour Carole used to be equally absent from the place, but that had changed with the appearance of her granddaughter, Lily. As the little girl grew, her parents Stephen and Gaby – like all middle-class parents – were very keen for her to develop a love of books, and enrolled her in their local library in Fulham. So, for the precious days when Carole looked after her granddaughter in her home, High Tor, it made sense to get the little girl a ticket for Fethering Library. In order to effect this, Carole had had to get an adult ticket for herself. From then on, visits to the library could provide the focus for a major excursion, which would always end up with an ice cream or a millionaire shortbread – depending on the time of year – at the Seaview Café on Fethering Beach. (Carole would have preferred to take Lily to the rather more genteel Polly’s Cake Shop, but that had closed, to be replaced by a Starbucks. And there was no way Carole Seddon was going to take her granddaughter into one of those.)

      Jude had asked her neighbour whether she wanted to come along with her to hear Burton St Clair’s talk, but had received the predictably frosty response that Carole had better things to do with her time than ‘listening to some writer moaning on about what hell it is being a writer.’ Carole Seddon was wary of anything that might involve pretension or ‘showing off’, so treated everything to do with the creative arts with considerable suspicion. She was not a Philistine but found, now she lived in Fethering, that books and television supplied her cultural needs.

      There had been a time, in the early days of her marriage to David, when the two of them had seen a lot of London theatre and cinema, but such excursions had been curtailed by the arrival of Stephen. And then things had started to go wrong between husband and wife; wrong to the extent that they put more effort into avoiding each other than arranging mutual cultural visits. And, after the divorce, Carole Seddon never again picked up the habit of theatre- and cinema-going. Not that she ever talked about such things. Even Jude, the nearest Carole had to a close friend, had never been told much about her neighbour’s life before she’d moved to Fethering full time.

      The relationship between Carole and Jude was a complex but enduring one. Brought together by geography when Jude moved into Woodside Cottage, next door to Carole’s home High Tor, they had got off to a slow start.

      Carole Seddon had always kept her life very circumscribed. She both resented and envied her new neighbour’s more laid-back approach. Much more fragile than her brusque external manner might suggest, Carole was constantly anticipating disasters and very resistant to sharing her feelings with anyone. For her any activity,

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