Unnatural Order. Liz Porter

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ cramping them with fear.

      Only recently she had asked herself why she hadn’t ever confided any of these miseries to her parents. Had she known that her failings would have seemed like a reproach to them? Or was she just sure they wouldn’t have understood? ‘Never mind,’ her mother had shrugged once, when Caroline had bemoaned her failure to get into the school rounders team. ‘I don’t think we even had sport at school when I was your age.’

      In her first year at the expensive girls’ school her parents had been saving for since she was born, she felt isolated and lonely. Plagued by stomach aches, she was a regular visitor to the dispensary and its matron, a sallow-faced German woman with a strong accent, who lived in at the school and provided medical attention to the boarders.

      On one occasion the woman’s hard look had made it clear that she didn’t believe her for a minute. Yet she had told Caroline to lie down and had given her two aspirins. Lying there in a half-dream, she heard one of the boarders come in for sanitary pads. While she didn’t catch what was said next, she could tell from the intonation that the boarder had asked Matron a question. The first half of the nurse’s reply was also muffled. Then the answer separated out into hard little syllables.

      ‘The weak ones… sent them to the gas chamber,’ the woman was saying. The emphasis was wrong, gas chamber, not gas chamber, Caroline remembered. Then the nurse had laughed harshly and the boarder had tittered.

      ‘The weak ones,’ Caroline had repeated to herself over and over. ‘Am I one of those?’ How could she answer the question except in the affirmative as she lay there listening to the happy clatter of the boarders descending the stairs to the hot cabbage smells of their dining room.

      All the boarders seemed so unworried: happily sporting, apparently not homesick and impervious to the appalling food, the mere smell of which poisoned the air for hundreds of metres around the boarding house.

      After school that day she had made her usual visit next door to Zosia, but hadn’t repeated the nurse’s words. Zosia was an Auschwitz survivor, and Caroline was always careful to censor anything that might fuel her neighbour’s deep-seated fear that 95 per cent of the world was anti-Semitic. Zosia was inclined to suspect any German, regardless of age, of being a Nazi. She had already raised her eyebrows when Caroline had mentioned the presence of a German nurse at her WASPy girls’ grammar school.

      Anyway, Zosia would have laughed if Caroline had confessed to having closed her eyes, as she lay on the hard dispensary bed, and prayed that the deity responsible for such things might reincarnate her as sporty, insensitive and, above all, unthinking. ‘To be clever —that’s the important thing,’ she would say, banging her iron down on the table by way of emphasis. ‘Nobody can take your education away.’

      Caroline’s prayers remained unanswered, but they were soon irrelevant. By the next year, her angst had shrivelled to nothing in the heat of her awakening sexuality. There were boys on the tram to school, boys on the corner, boys at the beach.

      Not that they all fell at her feet. But there was enough response to give her an interest. And above all, to make her happy.

      Happy. The word sounded childish. Just like her. The excitement of the sexual chase had brought her contentment at 14. Ought it still be consuming her at 32?

      Had she sighed aloud? It didn’t matter. The pinstriped business type who had been occupying the seat next to her was still stranded, clutching his electric shaver, in the queue for the lavatory. She was safe.

      But how was she to find a way out of her present dilemma? Here she was, strapped into a seat 6000 metres up in the air and on her way to keep an arrangement that she was starting to wish she’d never made.

      What sort of woman, she asked herself, tells a man with whom she has spent precisely seven hours that she is spending her next holiday in Portugal, then gives in to his suggestion that he meet her there?

      ‘An idiot.’ That was the answer.

      She had met Karl in the hotel nightclub on the last night of her holiday on Mykonos. Sensing eyes on her as she danced, she had turned around and found herself staring up into the smile of a tall, green-eyed man with thick blond hair.

      After the first few minutes of their conversation, shouting in one another’s ears as they stood together in the crush near the bar, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that they would eventually sleep together. Two hours later she refused his suggestion that he accompany her back to her hotel, but she rather liked his cheek for asking. She told him she was flying back to London the next afternoon, and was gratified by his insistence that she meet him in the village the next morning.

      Having made arrangements for this, she now looked forward to saying a formal goodnight. She knew he would kiss her and she was curious to know what it would be like. The teasing sensation of his lips on hers was as arousing as she had hoped, awakening a warm rush that started in her stomach and moved quickly downwards. As the tip of his tongue brushed the inside of her lips, she found herself wondering how it would feel if he were pressing it into the wet warmth between her legs.

      The next day on the beach was a pleasant mix of bookish conversation and sexual tension.

      When they swam together, he pulled her to him, brushing his hands over her breasts before folding his arms around her waist. As they floated, kissing, in the water, she locked her legs around his waist and felt the delicious pressure of his erection against her. Moving gently against him as they kissed, she became aware of a building urgency. Suddenly uncomfortable, she broke the embrace and swam for shore.

      That afternoon she had wanted Karl intensely. Later, she wasn’t so sure. Over the last few weeks she had even thought of cancelling her plans for a Lisbon holiday, or telling Karl that she had done so. Then she need never see him again. But how many times, in the two years since she had asked Gary to leave, had she met a man who professed to feel real emotion for her?

      Caroline glared at her own reflection in the small, darkened window. Why couldn’t she have predicted that she might be feeling ambivalent once the immediate excitement of the first meeting had faded? For God’s sake, she was old enough to know better than to commit herself to an arrangement that she might later regret. More to the point, she was old enough to have grown out of this sort of dilemma altogether.

      At 32, when she should have been settling down, getting married and thinking about motherhood, she had a rented flat, a couple of (very) part-time lovers and a job on the sort of magazine she wouldn’t have looked at if she wasn’t working for it. At 27, she’d had a flat of her own, a long-term boyfriend who wanted to marry her and a permanent job on a quality Sydney paper. Had she been growing up or down in the intervening five years? Even her little sister Jennifer, a child of 23, was married and had announced her pregnancy on the eve of Caroline’s departure for London.

      There had been plenty of excitement in the 18 months since she had arrived in London, and her exploits on Greek Island ferries, Egyptian trains and Italian beaches had provided rich material for letters home.

      But the contrast between her own nomadic existence and the domestic stability of her friends back home in Australia had started to bother her. The enthusiastic reaction she elicited from men 10 years her junior had once been a delight to her. Now she found it irritating.

      After Mykonos she had spent a night in Athens. She had just sat down at an outdoor cafe in Syntagma Square, when a youth of about 20 strolled over to her table and smiled down at her, as if expecting an invitation to sit down. Caroline felt a surge of annoyance.

      ‘Go away,’ she had hissed in СКАЧАТЬ