Free Prey to All by Natasha Cooper

known who she was. It amused her to meet their half-doubtful smiles with a broad grin and see them rack their brains for her name.
    She got bored eventually and walked home along the south side of the river to collect her car for the drive to George’s house in Fulham.
     
    By eleven on Saturday morning they were sitting in their matching dark blue towelling dressing-gowns, having breakfast in the garden. There weren’t many flowers among the low-maintenance evergreens, but pots of pink and white lilies pumped their richly spicy scent into the air, a few late roses flopped at the end of thin spiky stalks. Daisy-like flowers spread like pools over the hand-made Suffolk bricks, which George had had laid in place of the original scrubby lawn.
    A bumble-bee was hovering between flowers, buzzing like mad, and a few sparrows quarrelled at the far end of the garden. Broken snail shells lay in a pile on the bricks, smashed by a hungry thrush, and silvery trails veining several routes to the lace-like hosta leaves showed where slugs had been.
    George leaned down to reach for his cup, without looking away from the newspaper. Trish watched him, a slow, contented smile lengthening her mouth. The smell of the coffee reached her, strong and fragrant, and she picked up her own cup to drink again. She did not run to Jamaican Blue Mountain in Southwark, but if that was how George chose to spend his money, that was his business. For herself, the thought of spending thirty-five pounds on a pound of coffee beans that tasted hardly different from any others seemed
bizarre, as did the incredible weight of newsprint he had delivered to the house.
    He liked to have all four broadsheets and sometimes two or three tabloids as well each weekend. It entailed buying a vast number of recycling bags in which to get rid of them, and hours spent reading them, but why not? It was an innocent pleasure and a tiny extravagance compared to some she’d known.
    He sneezed explosively as he opened a magazine, allergic probably to the ink on the coloured pages. Trish got up to refill her cup and collect another croissant from the basket by the pots. The fat bee droned past her, its fur laden now with gold pollen, and settled in one of the regale lilies. She brushed one of the flowers, releasing an extra strong puff of scent, lucky not to have to worry about hay fever or asthma.
    A moment later all the happy, self-indulgent peace was driven out of her.
    ‘Did you see this?’ she demanded.
    ‘Snoutrage,’ George said, looking up to grin at her. ‘What is it this time, Trish?’
    She knew he didn’t like being distracted by snippets from particularly interesting articles, but he’d given up pointing out that he’d be reading the paper himself any time now and didn’t need her to tell him what was in it.
    ‘This story here about the parents of some junkie who died in his squalid flat, while he was looking after his two-year-old son.’
    ‘Yes, I saw that. It’s in all the papers. Awful for the child, of course. But at least it survived.’
    ‘But now, after all that horror, they’re trying to find a reason to repudiate him. It’s unspeakable.’
    George turned in his chair. His expression was benevolent, but she knew what it hid. It wasn’t only uncontrolled anger he disliked; it was vehemence of any kind, especially in her.
She was coming to believe that it frightened him. Once she would have forced him to accept her as she was, but, watching him moderate habits and ways of talking that upset her, she had learned to give a little. And, after all, it wasn’t the vehemence of her thoughts he minded, just its expression.
    ‘You mean you’re angry that they’re having a DNA test done to find out if it’s their grandchild before they’ll take it into their home?’ he suggested casually, much too casually for her current state of mind.
    ‘Him not “it”,’ she said, as sharply as she ever spoke to George. ‘Exactly. How could they?’
    ‘Be