Free Almost Love by Christina James Page B

don’t need to sound quite so surprised. I rode one when I was young.”
    “Sorry! But that is why I’m surprised. People do ride them when they’re young. Then they have children . . .”
    “Grow up, you mean? Or alternatively die on them, in some cases.” He chuckled sardonically. “You’re right, of course. It’s just a silly whim and I’m not going to try to defend it. It’s something that I want to do, though, and that I am going to do,” he added defensively, as if rehearsing what he would say to someone who might try to stop him.
    “What does your wife think?”
    “Krystyna? She isn’t very happy about it, but mainly because of the expense. I’ve told her that I will pay for it by backing horses, though, which has mollified her a little.”
    “Backing horses?” said Alex, trying not to sound astonished. She was really shocked this time. She knew it was prim of her, but it was the way that she had been brought up. Backing horses was sinful, according to her parents: the way of the devil. No good could come of it. She began to see Edmund in a new light. Beneath that respectable, boring exterior there was evidently an edgy degeneracy, a desire to flirt with seediness, that made him seem almost dangerous. She was half-appalled, half-fascinated.
    “I see that you’re scandalised,” he said. “For that, I do apologise.”
    She felt foolish.
    “I’m not scandalised,” she said, “but I need to adjust my ingrained prejudices slightly. My family were Methodists: swearing, drinking, smoking and gambling were all regarded as the handiwork of the Devil. Gambling, especially. I was taught that it was a pernicious habit and bound to lead to misery.”
    “Well, that’s not far wrong, actually,” said Edmund reflectively. “Krystyna would certainly agree with you.”
    Suddenly Alex felt queasy. She didn’t want to know any more about Edmund’s louche hobbies. She changed the subject.
    “I didn’t know that your wife’s name was Christina,” she said. “I always thought that it was Christine. It’s a beautiful name: poetic. It reminds me of Christina Rossetti.”
    “It’s not spelt like that, unfortunately. Krystyna is Polish. Her name is spelt with a ‘k’ and two ‘y’s.
    “Quite exotic, then.”
    “Perhaps, though you probably wouldn’t think her so if you met her. There are three of them, actually: Krystyna and her sister Birte, and a brother, Tomas. And they have an aged mother, Jelena, who is still alive. The two girls are very exercised about Jelena’s welfare. They try to rope Tomas in, but he is an evasive character: they give him tasks to carry out and, if he doesn’t want to do them, he simply disappears. They’re not an odd family, exactly, but they find it hard to fit in. Living in this country, I mean.”
    “I see,” said Alex, though she was finding this conversation increasingly perplexing. Talking to Edmund was like peeling away the layers of an onion: he was dull, then amorous, importunate, then conciliatory, then ‘wicked’ and, finally, a man who spoke of his wife in a curiously detached way, as if she were a rather unsatisfactory specimen that he had been asked to dissect. He did not heed the edge that had crept in to Alex’s voice.
    “It’s not her fault, of course,” he continued. “It’s the clash of cultures. It’s not so much that she can’t cope, as that she feels compromised. You can see it sometimes when there’s a conversation going on. You look at her, and she’s genuinely puzzled, as if she’s contributing to the dialogue, but not part of it, if you understand me. As if she’s saying what she thinks she ought to say, for form’s sake.”
    Alex nodded. She could understand what he was saying now. What remained difficult, alienating, even, was his apparent detachment from his marriage. She supposed that this conversation – it was in truth more of a monologue – could have been prompted by a not particularly subtle attempt by Edmund to