Free Sleeping Tiger by Rosamunde Pilcher

gloves. Such an untidy-looking gel, going about without a hat.
    But Grandmother was dead. Loved, mourned, but undoubtedly dead. The voice was stilled, the dogmatic opinions would never be uttered again, and Selina was on her own, to do what she wanted, in her father’s house and a world away from Queen’s Gate. She went into the house, and stripped off her stockings and her shoes, and then, feeling cool and delightfully free, went in search of food. There was butter in the refrigerator, and she put some on a slice of bread, and took a tomato and a bottle of cold soda water. This picnic she ate on the terrace, perched on the wall, and watching the boats in the harbour. Afterwards, she began to be sleepy, but she did not want to be found asleep. There was something very unguarded about being found asleep. She would have to sit somewhere hard and uncomfortable and stay awake.
    In the end, she climbed the ladder to the gallery and settled herself, in a certain amount of discomfort, on the top step. After a little, the huge white cat came in out of the sun, and climbed up to settle himself, with an inordinate amount of purring and treading paws, on Selina’s knee.
    The hands of her watch went slowly round.

5
    Frances Dongen said, “I can’t think why you have to go.”
    â€œI’ve told you; I have to feed Pearl.”
    â€œPearl can feed herself. There are enough dead fish around that house of yours to feed an army of cats. Stay another night, darling.”
    â€œIt isn’t just Pearl; it’s Eclipse as well.…”
    â€œBut she’s ridden out one storm.…”
    â€œI don’t know that she has ridden it out, and the bad weather’s coming back.…”
    â€œOh, well,” said Frances, and reached for another cigarette. “If that’s how you feel, you’d better go.”
    Her mother had told her, years ago, when she was a girl in Cincinnati, Ohio, that the best way to keep a man was to give him the impression, at least, of being free. Not that she had yet reached the stage of keeping George Dyer, because she hadn’t even got him yet, but she was an old hand at this fascinating game of stalk and counter-stalk, and she was prepared to take her time.
    She was sitting, on the small terrace of her house, high in the old town of San Antonio. Above, only a few hundred yards or so separated her from the cathedral, and below, a maze of winding cobbled streets, tall, narrow houses, and endless strings of washing, spilled to the wall of the old fortifications. Beyond the wall lay the new town, wide streets and tree-lined squares leading to the harbour, filled with island schooners and white, tall-masted yachts, and the steamer, which had just arrived on its weekly trip from Barcelona.
    For two years she had lived in this delectable spot, ever since she had arrived in the cruising yacht of some wealthy American friends. After six weeks of their company, Frances was bored stiff, and when they all came ashore for a party, she never left again. After a three-day binge, she had woken to a monumental hangover and a strange bed, and the realisation that the cruising yacht and all its occupants had left without her.
    This troubled Frances not in the least. She already seemed to have made a lot of new friends, she was rich, twice-married, without roots. San Antonio suited her down to the ground. It was filled with painters, expatriates, writers and beatniks, and Frances, who had once lived for several months with an unsuccessful artist in Greenwich Village, felt entirely at home. Before long she had found this house, and when the initial occupations of settling-in were over, cast about for some way of filling in her time. She decided upon an art gallery. In a place where you had both resident painters and visiting tourists, an art gallery was surely a blue-chip investment. She bought up a disused fish-market on the harbour, converted it, and managed the business with