Free The Kindness by Polly Samson Page B

to the green bottle wrapped in white paper on the sideboard.
    He nodded, and when she’d poured the gin and cracked the ice they clinked glasses. ‘Ah, I’m sorry, I should’ve got an earlier train.’ Jenna looked well past her bedtime. As she lifted her glass he noticed grey pouches at the corners of her mouth. The cat yawned rudely on the table between them, confident that neither of them would dream of shooing it off. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, she’d heard. He changed the subject.
    ‘So, who did you persuade to swim with you down the river?’
    ‘Oh, Michael, of course,’ she said, sloshing another couple of fingers of gin into their glasses.
    Julian snorted. ‘You’re lucky it didn’t kill him.’
    ‘I am,’ she said.
    The cat’s purr was almost deafening as he nubbled it under the chin. For a moment he found it hard to keep looking at her. She appeared so strained: thinner than at Christmas, a little deflated in her dress of worn-out-looking daisies. He used to see it when people said that he was her spitting image but not so much since her bones had started showing through.
    He stalled for a moment, unable to decide what to tell her of that glorious first night with Julia. In his haste it all came tumbling out. Leaping up the stairs to his digs, Julia behind him, scooping papers, books, socks from the chairs to make a space, wishing he had fresh milk in the fridge.
    All night with nothing to judge them but the slimmest rib of a moon. In the morning waking to Julia tiptoeing for the door. He sprang from the sheets to wrestle her back, pulling down her sundress, but she fended him off: ‘No! I can’t be late. I’ve got the hawk to see to before work. I must defrost some chicks and mice. Ugh.’ Wrinkling her adorable nose: ‘To be honest I’d rather not deal with Lucifer and his disgusting diet at all, but when my husband’s away there isn’t much choice but do it.’ Husband. It was the first time she said the word that made his spirits plummet. Husband. When he kissed her goodbye he thought that no smell would ever be more erotic than the smell of leather on her fingers, an indication that Chris, this husband of hers, was away and Lucifer in her care.
    ‘Married. Julian, what the . . .?’
    His mother’s disapproval was etched on her face and he had the sudden urge to giggle inanely. ‘She was leaving him, he was leaving her, it’d been going on for ever.’ He held out the innocent palms of his hands, but she tutted at him and looked away to the kitchen clock. ‘Anyway, it’s done now,’ he said. ‘After twelve miserable years, she’s left him.’
    She turned to him sharply then. ‘How old did you say she was?’
    ‘I didn’t.’
    She waited, her eyes still upon him.
    ‘She got married at eighteen. Yes, she’s older than me, a few years. Does it matter?’ he said as she openly did the calculation on her fingers.
    ‘So, that makes her what? Thirty?’ she said and a silence fell between them.
    ‘It’s getting awfully late,’ Jenna broke it, extending her arms, fingers linked, above her head. ‘And there’s something I really do have to tell you.’ She stretched her neck until it clicked.
    ‘But first,’ he was straining for gaiety, ‘you must open your present.’
    They both turned to the parcel leaning drunkenly against the wall beneath a hectically Blu-tacked retrospective of Julian’s artistic endeavours. On the shelves of the dresser clay animals roamed two by two in various states of expertise. He and Jenna made them every year, though he always felt discouraged when he saw his lined up beside hers. His earliest effort, age four or five, was barely more than a blob of clay with a trunk and a tail, but last year’s leopard was almost lovely. A pair of new creatures brought into being every Christmas, he and Jenna sitting together with the put-put of the portable gas heaters in the granary and frost patterning the windows, the excitement and chemical stink