Free Spiderweb by Penelope Lively

vaguely companionable, the touch of his silky fur against her leg or hand was pleasant. But the dog did not like Stella – he adored her, he worshipped her, she was the pivot of his existence. Thrust into a position of unwilling exploitation, she felt an irritable guilt. There was an appalling imbalance of feeling. It was like associations in the past with men who had fallen for her but for whom she could feel nothing more positive than a mild affection. The dog watched her every move with liquid, fearful eyes lest she might be proposing to go out and leave him. Each time she approached the front door he would scrabble imploringly at her knees. If she did go out without him, she could hear his desperate howling as she got into the car, and when she returned he greeted her with an enthusiasm of welcome and forgiveness that left him too breathless to bark. Each time she passed him in the cottage he wagged his tail in propitiation. When she patted him he collapsed in ecstasy. Did all dog-owners spend their time subjected to this relentless emotional pressure, she wondered?
    ‘I’m not sure that this is working,’ she told him sternly, at the end of the first week. But by then there was no going back.

Chapter Six
    ‘If you’ve had your fill of writing articles, try something more punchy,’ says Judith. ‘A memoir. Do a
fin-de-siècle
Malinowski.’
    Stella pulls a face.
    ‘No material?’ This is guile.
    ‘Oh, I’ve got diaries and stuff like that stacked up somewhere. Photos, even. Cuttings …’ Stella’s voice trails away.
    ‘I didn’t mean that sort of material. I meant, surely it was interesting enough.’ The guile now is transparent.
    ‘Of course it was interesting,’ says Stella hotly. ‘Good grief, one hasn’t spent half one’s life pigging it in disagreeable climates for no good reason.’
    Judith smiles complacently.
    ‘Oh,
you,’
says Stella. ‘Winding me up … All right, yes, I suppose I could write a memoir. But I haven’t the slightest inclination. And that’s not false modesty, either.’
    Judith shrugs. ‘Suit yourself.’
    ‘Come to that, what about you?’
    For Judith too has served her time in disagreeable climates. She is an archaeologist. When Stella first set eyes on her, she was squatting in a trench somewhere in Malta, so caked in dust and sweat as to be apparently wearing camouflage. She had squinted up into the sun from under the brim of a grubby bush hat and told Stella kindly to push oft, they weren’t taking on any more labour. Thus began an abiding friendship.
    ‘No way,’ says Judith. ‘Though I grant you that I may be in need of occupation. I have it in mind to cash in on the tourism boom in these parts – up-market archaeological tours. A kind of West Country Swan Hellenic, in a luxury minibus. Trouble is, where do I get the cash for the minibus?’
    Judith and Stella have dropped in and out of each other’s lives according to circumstance for the last thirty years. Their friendship is elastic. It has withstood long periods when they have not set eyes on one another, and weathered also spontaneous holidays with shared rooms in spartan hotels.
    Judith Cromer lives in Bristol with her partner Mary Binns. She has sporadic work with an archaeology unit, work which may well run out due to shortage of funds. Archaeology is not a growth area these days, tourism or no tourism. Mary Binns is better placed, as a radio producer. Stella is not all that keen on Mary Binns, who has green eyes and is convinced that there is something going on between Stella and Judith, which is far from the truth and ever has been.
    Years ago Judith said to Stella, ‘Have you honestly never ever fancied another woman? Not even
a frisson?’
    Stella reflected, trawling through a lifetime of sexual responses of varying degrees of fervour, and had eventually been able to come up only with the head girl at school on whose account she had felt weak at the knees for the whole of one term. ‘What