Free Made in Heaven by Adale Geras

the refuge to run away to.
    â€˜I think Mrs Ashton has some ideas,’ she said. ‘She mentioned wanting somewhere “suitable”. You can hire castles, she told me. She did strike me as the castle-hiring type. She’d want to make an impression.’
    â€˜But the young couple, what do they want?’
    â€˜Adrian will want what Zannah wants, unless his mother gets to him first. I don’t know them well enough to judge how much influence she has on him. Quite a lot, I suspect.’
    â€˜I think,’ said Val, standing up, ‘that you ought to have a say, Charlotte. After all, you’ve been like a mother to Joss and a grandma to the girls. I know what I’d choose.’
    â€˜It’s not your wedding, Val,’ Edie said quietly.
    â€˜I know, I know. You should thank your lucky stars you didn’t see mine! Cold sausage rolls left over from the previous evening in the local pub and a family who looked like gargoyles in fancy dress. I should have known, shouldn’t I? That’s why I think – well, never mind.’
    â€˜Oh go on, spit it out! You know you’ll tell us in the end.’
    â€˜I think,’ Val said, ‘that we could put on a damn good show right here. In this house. The garden would look lovely. We could have a marquee.’
    Charlotte nodded. ‘That’s occurred to me too, but young people nowadays have their own ideas, don’tthey? I swore I’d never say that:
young people nowadays
, but I do. All the time.’
    *
    â€˜Don’t hang up, Lydia, okay?’ Gray said. He’d found a place where the reception was perfect and the silver phone had been pumping whatever ghastly radiation it possessed into his right ear for more than half an hour. Lydia, he knew, was on a landline, in the telephone kiosk she’d described to him in their emails. He also had a clear picture of her surroundings because she’d sent him photos of her kitchen, her study, her garden, the view from her windows. He’d offered to do the same but she’d refused. She wanted, she said, to think of him in an empty room in front of a blue screen. She wanted to know, to see, only his face, so he sent her pictures of himself which she deleted from her computer after, as she put it,
learning them by heart
.
    â€˜Listen, just listen. I see why you’re cross.’ Wrong word. What could he call it?
Hurt, wounded, devastated?
‘But listen. All the time I’ve known you, the worst thing, the very worst thing has been the thought of you and Bob together. And you have been, haven’t you? Go on. Tell me your married life hasn’t gone on exactly as normal. You can’t, can you?’
    A silence hummed at the other end of the line. Gray continued, ‘There you are then. Now get this: all that time, I’ve had to live with images of him smiling at you, touching you, sharing jokes with you, brushing his teeth while you’re in the bath, eating breakfast with you, going to the movies with you, laughing with you, fighting with you and worst of all, in bed with you … nothing but torture. Constant torture. How would you have liked imagining
me
doing all those things? Which I’ve done, Lydia, make no mistake. All of them. I wanted to save you that, can’t you understand? I’m married to Maureen. We’re connected in ways that have to do with time and children: things you know about because theyconnect you to Bob. I wanted to be a single person in your mind. I just wanted to have a universe I could go into that had nothing but you in it. No one else. And I did. Whenever I thought of you, I knew you were thinking of me all by myself, just working and writing.’
    â€˜I know.’ Her voice was not much louder than a whisper. ‘I realize you were protecting me, but now … I can’t bear the thought of you lying to me. Not trusting me to be grown-up enough to deal with the truth. Perhaps