Free Muddy Waters by Judy Astley Page B

Classic. You can’t go wrong with that.’
    Toby had seen the girls looking. He was used to that. One of them wasn’t bad in a gawky-legged sort of way, but he was a methodical boy, handling his bank account with a responsible maturity that would be the envy of any middle-aged man. He had a job at a car showroom from which he was saving diligently to take the Beetle round Europe before university. All girls always proved to be expensive, a serious threat to the cash flow, however much they’d been brought up on caring, sharing and independence. Older women were better, not just better about money but not so silly and clinging and wanting reassurance. He suddenly thought of Abigail and her long slim legs the way he’d seen them from ground level. She’d arrived by taxi but he was willing to bet she flashed around Sussex in something like a BMW convertible or possibly a Discovery and hadn’t the first clue about how to open the bonnet. She’d probably never needed to. There wouldn’t be much point discussing the progress of the Beetle with her: if he mentioned a flywheel gland nut she might think he was talking dirty and start avoiding him in the house. Lucky, he thought, as he gave the girls at the bar another idle looking over, the spare room she was occupying in the attic had its own bathroom, shared only with Ruth, otherwise the scope for embarrassing clashings outside the door might just be too much. He’d have to go and crash at Nick’s. There was something about her, that just-been-shot-at look probably, that made him want her to like him. He felt like being kind to her, in the way he had been to a terrified squirrel the previous autumn when the MacIver’s Corgi had chewed off half its tail. It would be interesting to try and get her to smile properly, not just in that hard glassy way he’d seen so far, he thought cautiously, flicking unseeingly through
Volksworld
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    Abigail paced the bedroom floor and wondered how she was to be expected to manage for money if Martin never came back. After generous settlements from both Johnny and Noel she could reasonably claim to own most of the house – the children would need somewhere to live during the holidays and Martin and the blond bimbette wouldn’t want to have to entertain them. But the bills for running the house were huge, so Martin might manage to force her into selling it by simply being mean about paying them. She didn’t really have much to do with that side of things. He’d always made such a point of finding her ‘adorable’ that she’d played along with it by handing him any envelope that came through the door looking as if it might be a bill. He paid for her astronomical health club membership, her hairdressing, Harvey Nichols account, American Express charges, car expenses, blissful holidays, the Colefax and Fowler fabrics, National Trust paints and the teams of designers and artisans who came in to apply them, the garden landscapers, pool maintenance, children’s school fees – everything that made her luscious lazy life the comfortably privileged way it was. The room she now fretted and paced in was pretty in a home-spun sort of way, she thought – though if it was hers she’d have chosen a shade of yellow closer to unsalted butter than to lemon. The bed on which Cleo was curled up and purring was brass, but not the new luscious sort, rather the aged and tarnished type as if it might conceivably have been Adrian’s grandmother’s. Perhaps she’d died in it, Abigail thought, recognizing that she was getting morbidly fanciful. Abigail preferred her antiques to be scrupulously anonymous, polished and restored (authentically, of course) till no trace of undesirable age-stain was left. She liked history to be a simple matter of which century, which king and which auction room. She could not bear the fact that a linen press might actually once have contained less