Free Lillian on Life by Alison Jean Lester Page A

his arms around me instead. So when it came to interacting with John’s two little children, I cooked.
    When I arrived in Munich I couldn’t boil an egg, and in Paris I bought pâté and cheese and salad and bread and that was dinner. London requires one to cook, so I took myself to Le Cordon Bleu and studied under the very severeMonsieur Hervé, who was totally unromantic in his approach to cooking. As a result we joked among ourselves that he was either Belgian or more likely Swiss rather than French. He taught us the many ways to present the glory of the egg. He enlightened us on other topics as well, of course, but for some reason the egg represented the most meaningful part of my Cordon Bleu education. Maybe because until then it had always been a simple breakfast with salt and pepper, a garnish, or a last resort when the cupboard was otherwise bare. Over a few weeks it became a showstopper.
    There was a party one night at the Highgate home of one of John’s journalist friends. John picked me up at my apartment on his way there. Checked shirt and cuff links, as usual. It was a Friday night, and he had the children as he did every other weekend, so we brought them along. I put them to bed in a guest room and read them
Goodnight Moon
. That book was impossible to find in London, so I’d asked George Junior to send a copy over. I felt extremely glamorous in my silk and pearls, feminine and good, sitting in the guest room of an elegant London home reading to a pair of pretty children. When I returned to the living room the air was full of cigar smoke and the conversation was being dominated by a square-headed American gesticulating with the cut-crystal tumbler of Scotch in his fist. “Ohgood, you’re back,” he said, and I felt a blast of hot prickles on my skin. “You can help us muddle something out.”
    â€œWell, I’ll try,” I said, perching on the arm of John’s chair for moral support.
    â€œYou must have some of the inside poop on the USSR.”
    I said I wasn’t very close to the source. I was secretary to the bureau chief at a weekly magazine in London, not a journalist in Berlin. Everyone was looking at me and my heart was pounding wildly.
    â€œLots in the magazine about Khrushchev lately,” he said, trying to prompt me.
    â€œWell,” I said.
    â€œAha! I
knew
it,” the guy said, bringing his drink down on the arm of his chair and leaving a splash of Scotch on the fabric.
    â€œKnew what?” I asked, then wanted to kick myself for sounding thick.
    â€œKhrushchev’s days are numbered.”
    â€œI only said ‘Well.’
”
    â€œYou hesitated.”
    â€œI suppose anything’s possible,” John said, in a way that was slightly mocking.
    â€œOh no, you mark my words, John,” the man said. “This is how they function.”
    â€œExcuse me,” I said, getting up, and hoped they imagined that I needed the restroom. I went back to the guest room, where the children were sleeping, and closed the door behind me. Once I had sat down in the dark at the foot of one of the beds and had stopped hearing the sea in my ears, I was able to listen to the two of them breathing. My eyes adjusted to the dark. Marcus, the seven-year-old, breathed evenly in the bed I was sitting on. Mariana was dreaming energetically in the other. She would have been four then. I was calming down, but now I was worried about how to go back out to the party. I couldn’t answer that question. I could only sit there and worry.
    Eventually the door opened and John looked in. He could see me in the triangle of light from the hall. I was too embarrassed to look at him.
    â€œWould you like to go home, Lillian?”
    I nodded.
    â€œWould you like to go home to
my
home, Lillian?”
    Now I looked at him. I’d never stayed the night when his kids were with him before. Tears of love and relief came to my eyes, but I knew better