Free The Missing World by Margot Livesey Page B

jacket?”
    Bending to kiss her, Freddie discovered, as usual, that she was smaller than he remembered. She was wearing his favourite red pullover, a black skirt, and her ever-present combat boots. Sitting at the kitchen table, she began to clean her glasses. He’d been asleep when she rang the bell. Now he put the kettle on and watched her fondly. Barefaced, she had an endearingly helpless look. “Can I make some toast?” she asked. “I missed lunch.”
    “Sorry, I’ve run out of bread.”
    “A biscuit?”
    To be sure, he checked the cupboard again. Maybe something had materialised since last time. “I didn’t get to the store today,” he explained.
    Felicity stopped polishing. “That’s what you said yesterday. Were you out on a job?”
    “Just hanging around. You know I don’t work in the rain.” He handed her the tea. “No milk.”
    “But”—she slipped her glasses back on—“how can you do nothing all the time?”
    “I’ve told you, I’m a nothing kind of guy. I wake up, have a cup of tea, sleep, look out the window, count the clouds, nimbus, cumulus, cirrus, mackerel, sleep some more.”
    “Sugar?”
    “That we can do.” He brought her the jar and urged her to heap it in.
    “I still don’t get it,” she said, taking a modest spoonful. “You’re thirty-five. You owe your dad twenty thousand dollars and you’re totally broke. Aren’t you tired of having no money?”
    Freddie sighed. More and more conversations with Felicity took this form: her demand for explanation, his attempt, her incomprehension. She had even grilled him about his not swearing. Some Catholic thing, she concluded so definitively that he could only nod. Now he said, “Sure, I’d like some dough, if it was handed to me on a plate. I’d have some shirts made, buy a good tennis racquet, eat at the Savoy. The question is, am I going to bust my ass working for that junk? And the answer is—” he did a drumroll on the table—“no way. So, what did you do today?”
    Felicity, however, was in rottweiler mode. “But just last week, the day we went to Southwark, you were going on and on about adopting children. How you’d rent a house in the country, here or Brittany, with a big garden. You had everything organised.”
    “You’re great.” He squeezed her arm. “Doesn’t all this remembering wear you out? Yeah, if someone gave me a few hundred grand, I’d be scouring the orphanages tomorrow. Ithink I’d make a good father, so long as I wasn’t genetically involved.”
    “Genetically involved? Do you know how old I am?”
    What’s come over people, thought Freddie. First Mr. Early, now Felicity. “Thirty-two?” he guessed, trying at least for the right decade.
    “Thirty-seven. I’m a thirty-seven-year-old woman.” Behind her newly polished glasses, her eyes were suspiciously bright.
    “Who doesn’t,” he said quickly, “look a day over thirty-two.” He jumped up, as if he’d just noticed Agnes noodling over her bowl, and pretended to be absorbed in measuring dog food, getting fresh water, until Felicity gave up and went to the john.
    When she came back her mood, or whatever it was, had lifted. She told him she’d finished the footnotes for a new chapter that morning; in the afternoon there’d been a crisis at work. Freddie listened and asked questions. He liked hearing the details of her day, though he was powerless to describe his own. That he could do nothing better than most people was true; still, his current hibernation was extreme, and he had no idea what would constitute spring this time around.
    The morning star was hanging over the elderberry tree when Jonathan drew the bedroom curtains; surely, he thought, a good omen. His conversations with Hogarth and Nora had left him stunned, incredulous. I’ll do anything, he had vowed—and here he was, being allowed to do it. He and Hazel would have their life together over again, the good parts without the mistakes, yet with the benefit of those