A Suitable Mistress. CATHY WILLIAMS

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      CHAPTER ONE

      ANOTHER bad day. Another bad week. Suzanne sat down on the edge of the bed and wondered when things were ever going to get better. She surely must have hit rock bottom now. Surely the law of averages said that things had to improve. No one could keep going downhill for ever.

      At some point in time, one would crash-land somewhere at the bottom of the deep, dark well, and wouldn’t be able to go any further. Which, she thought tiredly, still left unanswered the question of how exactly you got out of the well, but presumably you would be so relieved not to be still falling that you wouldn’t give that too much hard thought.

      Right now, though, she didn’t feel relieved. She felt trapped and hopeless, just as she had felt for the past six months.

      She raised her head slightly and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror opposite and looked away hurriedly.

      She hated having to face what her head repeatedly told her. That she had let herself go. She hadn’t meant to; it seemed to be something that had happened when she hadn’t been looking, almost when she had had her back turned. She had put on weight, her long hair was neat enough but uninspiring and she knew that she appeared tired, even when she was forcing herself to put recent events behind her and show a smiling face to the world.

      She reached inside her handbag, extracted a bar of chocolate, and, steeling herself not to think back, painstakingly removed the wrapper and bit into it, hardly tasting the sweetness, simply content that the sheer movement of eating helped to distract her from the tears which were lurking so close to the surface.

      I’ve thrown in my accountancy course, she thought, rewrapping the uneaten bit of chocolate left with the same painstaking motions. I’ve come here to London in search of streets paved with gold, only to find that there’s no such thing, and to top it all I’ve now just lost my job. But there must be a bright side somewhere to this. She frowned and scoured her mind for the odd silver lining or two, and then told herself that she had hated that wretched job anyway.

      She had just been a dogsbody, running around and doing all those untidy, boring chores which no one else wanted to do. The downside was that, however hateful it had been, it had at least been a source of income and now, without it, she gloomily contemplated a scenario of unpaid bills, bailiffs, screaming landladies and probably a park bench somewhere with only her pillow and a blanket for company.

      It was, she admitted to herself, a fairly ludicrous scenario, since she would not allow herself to be without work, but she dwelled on it anyway, listlessly aware that she should really get out of the bedsit and do something instead of sitting like a block of lead on her bed and letting inertia get the better of her. A block, she thought with a flash of that irony which had recently deserted her, of overweight lead.

      She stood up and walked across to the dreaded mirror and made herself look at the reflection staring out at her. There had been a time once, in a past which she couldn’t bear thinking about, when she had been attractive. Long, wavy dark hair, bright blue eyes, a slim, tall figure. Look at you now, she said to herself critically. Your hair desperately needs a trim, your eyes lack sparkle and you’re hardly going to win Miss Slender of the Year, are you?

      She was still examining herself and telling herself that she really would go to the hairdressers, that she really would stop eating junk food which was doing absolutely nothing for her, when she heard someone knocking on the door. Very loud knocking. Knocking which instantly brought to mind screaming landladies. Or rather, just the one screaming landlady who seemed to have mastered the trick of avoiding complaints, while still vociferously demanding rent at least a week before it fell due.

      You are not going to cower, she told herself sternly. You live in a bedsit which is in a fairly appalling condition, with a fridge that either freezes everything solid or else insists on defrosting at inconvenient times, and besides, you’re bigger than she is.

      She strode purposefully towards the door, pulled it open, mentally steeled herself to say something about the fridge, not to mention the curtains which looked as though they were leftovers from the Stone Age, and stepped back in shock at the man standing outside the room.

      She felt her face go scarlet and she knew that she was gaping, СКАЧАТЬ