Free The Benefits of Passion by Catherine Fox Page A

and made off with her down the corridor like a caveman. Isobel stared after them in fastidious disapproval. I may be gone some time, Annie wanted to call to her, but had not dared. She was saving the line for her novel.
    From that moment on Annie had her work cut out. It was all she could do to prevent Libby from knocking Edward flat, sitting on his chest and licking his face. He was flirting outrageously. He pulled Annie on to his knee and fed her strawberries, letting her run her hand through his short brown hair. But he misbehaved so impeccably that there was never any real danger of her misunderstanding him. She was a super Christian girl, but she was not the future Mrs Edward Hunter. Annie was aware that he had had a little conversation with himself: Q . Do I want this woman to be the Mother of my Children? A. No. Sadly. Therefore, no entanglements. But poor old Libby couldn’t grasp this.
    After it was all over Annie lay awake till dawn. The taste of strawberries, his strong arms round her. It was so long since anything like this had happened to her, since she had been kissed. Edward’s goodnight kisses had been enthusiastic but chaste – mwah! mmm-wah! – planted one on each cheek, just brushing the corner of her mouth. And then to round things off – mmwah! – a firm kiss on the lips. His Imperial Leather soap, his hard smooth chin. Libby howled from her cold kennel outside.
    Heigh ho.
    Well, what am I going to wear tonight? She decided on her long green crushed-velvet dress. It had come from a Scouts’ jumble sale and she suspected that it had once been yellow, only someone had tried to dye it blue. She loved the gentle mottled effect that had been achieved. That dress looks like an old dishrag, Anne.
    Would it be warm enough, though? she wondered. The fabric was panne, light as a bird’s feather. It was the kind of thing she’d worn in her teens when she had been a tempestuous Pre-Raphaelite poet with clouds of raven hair every night as she fell asleep. Maybe she could wear her baggy chenille sweater over the top. It was dark blue-green. Rookwing. Annie was as colour-conscious as Dr Mowbray. It came from all those hours she had spent as a child poring over her mother’s wool catalogues, running her fingertip over the yarn samples and drinking in jade, moss, aquamarine, twilight. Colour had flooded her parched imagination.
    Mrs Brown’s choice in clothes and interior design had been governed by the twin principles of economy and serviceability. Colour schemes were a silly extravagance. Their home was a battleground where ugly browns slugged it out with orange and maroon. Annie and Damn were mocked at school for their strange clothes. One day, when her parents were out, Damn had thrown the ghastly curtains, carpet and bedspread out of her bedroom on to the landing and painted the walls, furniture and floorboards white. White sheets for curtains and bed cover, white pleated filepaper for a lampshade.
    Annie had accepted the violent swirls and dinginess with an outward submissiveness, but in her heart she treasured up all the gems of the New Jerusalem, turning them over and over and watching them flash. Jasper, sapphire, chalcedony. Sardius and chrysolite. Jacinth. Amethyst. Damn would have found the Holy City incredibly tacky, but Annie’s soul was ravished by colour. No wonder she had been drawn to Anglicanism with all its jewelled windows and winking brass.
    After a moment her thoughts returned to the rookwing sweater folded in her chest of drawers. It was new and expensive – one of her rare Isabella-type purchases. ‘Chenille comes from the French for caterpillar,’ read the accompanying rhetoric on the label, ‘because that is exactly what it is like.’ Exactly what it is like . Annie was enchanted by the notion that her sweater could be weaving a cocoon for itself in the dark of the drawer, and might one day burst out and flutter away across the