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СКАЧАТЬ him as fat, boorish and rich. Or Knobhead, for short. But he was the father of her two children, so she reserved such comments for evenings when she was out with friends and for phone calls with the man himself.

      Meanwhile, she was living in London, back on the dating scene and hating it. It was like constantly seeing bad films. She had started off excited about the prospect and then, over two years, a sort of malaise had crept over the whole thing and she had stopped worrying about matching underwear – or even matching outerwear. And as for her friends’ view of what constituted handsome …

      Here she was, for example, on yet another night out with an allegedly suitable man. Passers-by glancing into the little restaurant would have seen a couple who had probably been married for an eternity – they weren’t speaking.

      Miranda was bored again. She imagined her date as an icon on her computer that she was deleting.

      And while she was at it, she might delete some of her friends’ numbers. How on earth they could think that this pompous tit was her cup of tea … And her steak was tough. Still, at least it was giving her teeth a workout.

      ‘Sorry?’ She raised her eyebrows at her dining partner.

      ‘I asked if you wanted more wine.’

      ‘No,’ she responded baldly. ‘Thank you,’ she added. No point in adding rudeness to the patronising she had already been. Mind you, he deserved it. Right-wing. Fascist. Fat. Twat. She smiled as she thought it.

      ‘What?’ he asked suspiciously.

      ‘Nothing. I was just thinking silly words. Rhyming words. How much better they are than when they’re on their ownsome.’

      ‘As in?’ he queried, trying to get on to her wavelength, although he had almost given up. He was not a man who struggled to get women. He was rich and lived at a very expensive address in Mayfair.

      Miranda knew, as she opened her mouth, that it was going to be a hopeless conversation. The man had no imagination, the verbal dexterity of a Clanger and she honestly couldn’t be bothered to try to explain what she found amusing about rhyming words. And of course she couldn’t articulate the words she’d come up with to describe him, so she had to make up two more. ‘Numpty and flumpty,’ she said, off the top of her head.

      ‘Which means?’

      ‘Nothing. It’s the rhyme that amuses me.’ Oh, God. Now she was going to have to explain. Or feign partial death and get out of this place.

      ‘What – so Humpty Dumpty’s funny?’ He wrinkled his nose.

      As if I’d done a trouser cough, she thought, and smirked.

      ‘Is it?’ he asked, mistaking – again – her expression.

      ‘I think you either find words funny or you don’t. Have you finished? Shall we get the bill?’ He looked at his very expensive watch, clearly hoping she’d clocked its exclusivity. ‘I know it’s a bit early,’ she added, ‘but I’ve suddenly remembered I have a five o’clock start tomorrow, and perhaps tonight wasn’t the best for organising a long dinner.’

      ‘A five o’clock start? What for?’ he asked.

      ‘Erm. Flight. Early flight. Late booking. I needed to get away. Going to …’ her eyes fell on the tablecloth ‘… the Czech Republic,’ she said brightly. Like I care whether or not you believe me. She tried to look innocent and apologetic at the same time.

      To give him his due, he asked promptly for the bill, then insisted on paying. That was the one good thing about the blind dates: they hadn’t cost her anything. But they were all bankers or company directors, so she felt guilt free. In fact, with the bankers, she was practically doing the country a service.

      She was barely home and through the door before she was entirely disrobed and in front of the television. What a waste of an evening. What a waste of a lot of evenings.

      Miranda realised she was accidentally watching the news and it was all too depressing. She clicked it off and wandered up to the bathroom to wash her face and moisturise. After she’d cleaned her teeth, she looked at herself in the mirror. Put her hands to either side of her face and pulled them back to see how she’d look with a face lift. Would she have the guts to let someone literally take off her face, trim the edges and hem it again to smooth out the wrinkles? At least her eyesight was starting to go a bit. It was a relief not to be able to see the crow’s feet quite so clearly.

      She sighed and padded through to the bedroom. Odd, she still couldn’t get used to sleeping alone. For almost a quarter of a century, another body had slumbered beside hers, getting larger, taking up more space, and snoring louder as the years passed. It was such a luxury to do a starfish impression and not touch flesh.

      Tomorrow is the day I take control, she thought. Life has got to perk up, big-time. She lay between the cotton sheets trying to decide what control needed to be taken.

      Her friends would have described Miranda Blake first and foremost as a laugh. Pressed to expand, they would have said she was attractive, with a penchant for extremely high heels. Her parents would have described their daughter as wayward but tamed by a decent man, whom she had divorced for no good reason (after all, everyone has a little dalliance on the side). Miranda herself would have said she was all right, considering the alternatives. Everything was heading south and hairs were starting to sprout in strange places, but it could have been a lot worse. She had friends with prolapses, fallen arches, bad backs or bunions.

      Early in their relationship, Nigel would have described her as a cracking bit of totty. The two had met at a party in Fulham where neither knew the host. Miranda was dressed for success in a little blue dress and very high black heels, which she found surprisingly easy to walk in. Nigel was wearing what she later came to describe as his out-of-hours uniform – a Pink’s shirt and corduroy trousers with Gucci loafers. His thick brown hair fell in messy abandon to his shirt collar and his amber eyes looked admiringly into her sparkling blue ones as they shared the bottle of Château Latour he had brought, having mistakenly thought it was a dinner party.

      He had looked around for a corkscrew and she had handed him one wordlessly – she’d been on the lookout for a semi-decent bottle since she’d arrived ten minutes earlier with a girlfriend. He had walked her home afterwards and they had kissed fervently on the doorstep of her minuscule studio flat. Within a year, they had married in a picturesque church in the Cotswolds and Miranda got pregnant on honeymoon. Lucy’s birth was followed two years later by the arrival of Jack.

      It wasn’t until the children were on the verge of leaving home that Miranda realised she categorically loathed her husband. The sound of his key in the front door of the smart stuccoed building in fashionable Kensington filled her with a horrible ennui. It didn’t help that he now resembled an overstuffed pork sausage. Maybe he had actually absorbed a whole other person. Watching him tie his shoelaces was a lesson in physics: how did he bend in the middle when the middle was so much bigger than either end?

      When she’d brought up the subject of divorce he had been stunned. ‘On what grounds?’ he had demanded.

      ‘My unreasonable behaviour? Your unreasonable behaviour? Bird molestation? Giraffe bothering? I don’t really mind, but I do want a divorce,’ she had said, in a reasonable tone.

      ‘Are you having an affair?’ His eyebrows had come together.

      ‘No. And I assume you aren’t?’ СКАЧАТЬ