Free Road to Berry Edge, The by Elizabeth Gill Page A

you that you might want?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Are you sure?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Did you think you might find somebody else?’
    â€˜Straight away. I thought I had to, I thought I couldn’t bear not to but I didn’t. Every woman I meet is just a big disappointment. I can’t see them properly any more for want.’
    â€˜But you wouldn’t go to a whore?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Not even once.’
    â€˜Harry—’
    â€˜All right. Pretend I didn’t suggest it. You nearly broke my head earlier on. I do know when people have had enough.’
    â€˜Do you?’
    â€˜We can go back to Nottingham, any time you like.’
    â€˜Warm bedrooms, good food, wine that makes you think of Paris.’
    â€˜Oh, don’t. The beer’s good here. Let’s go and have another pint.’
    Rob hesitated.
    â€˜Where did you say she lives?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜This woman.’
    â€˜Just over the river,’ Harry said, nodding in the direction of the houses whose lights burned across from the cathedral and castle.
    â€˜Maybe we could go and see. Could we just go and see?’
    *
    When the doorbell rang Claire was downstairs making some tea.
    â€˜Claire!’ Susannah shouted. ‘Answer that, will you?’ and she went back to her book. It was a cold, wet late November evening and she was glad to be sitting by the fire. She heard the door opening, she heard voices and then Claire’s footsteps on the stairs. She came in with an envelope in her hand.
    â€˜Got two men in the hall and this,’ she said, profferring the envelope.
    â€˜Two men? What is this, a railway station? You didn’t invite strangers into the house?’
    â€˜One of them had this letter. He wanted you to read it.’
    â€˜They’re not stealing the silver while you’re up here, are they?’
    She opened the letter and read it. It was from a wealthy London businessman. She rarely saw him, but two or three times a year he wrote very politely asking if he could call. He paid well, he brought her expensive presents and he had written now to ask if she would be kind enough … and so on. Susannah sighed.
    â€˜What are they like?’
    Claire pulled an approving face.
    â€˜Real class,’ she said.
    â€˜Well, I suppose. Old?’
    Claire laughed.
    â€˜Fairly decrepit,’ she said. ‘One of them’s more friendly than the other.’
    â€˜Oh Lord. All right, send me the awkward bastard.’
    Claire went off downstairs. Susannah discarded her book and sat by the fire. She listened to his footsteps on the stairs, listened for the slow plodding sound of age and was mystified. She heard him walk into the room, and let him close the door before she looked up. Men always stared and Susannah knew without any immodesty how beautiful she was, so she deliberately didn’t look up until they were in front of her. She knew what to expect because they were all alike basically: greedy-eyed, fifty, fleshy, self-important because they were rich successful men who could afford her. They were boring, married and needed nothing from her other than the gratification which her beautiful body could give them. Sometimes they didn’t even need that, sometimes they couldn’t manage that. Mostly it was pure vanity that sent them to her. They even thought that she liked them and what they did to her.
    He said, ‘How do you do?’ in a flat, polite voice and Susannah looked up, ready to be whatever he wanted, and then she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to say or do. If he was thirty he didn’t look it, tall and slender, and she knew immediately that he was very rich because only the very rich would have dared to dress that plainly. He wore no ornament of any kind, not a ring, not a watch, nothing but a very dark suit so expensive that it made Susannah’s fingers want to touch it; and a white shirt. Men’s