Free Every Good Girl by Judy Astley Page B

across the miles of wooden floor in the flat. So she
was
up already then,
and
not in the bedroom
and
dressed in proper shoes, Emily realized, feeling a snug glow of satisfaction warming her.
    â€˜I’ve got his home number and the one at work. Which do you want?’ Catherine demanded.
    â€˜Oh both please, if that’s all right, then I can be sure to catch him. It is a bit of an emergency.’ Emily, hating herself, heard herself grovelling. Never apologize, never explain, wasn’t that the saying? But who could ever live like that? Only Catherine, probably. She scribbled the number down on the back of her hand and drew a quick heart round Simon’s name. ‘Thanks
so
much,’ she purred. ‘You’ve been really kind and I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you so early in the morning. Love to Dad.’
    She put the phone down carefully and wiped her hand down the T-shirt. ‘Bitch cow from hell,’ she then said, racing up the stairs back to her room, passing Lucy on the stairs on her way down for breakfast.
    Emily glanced at her watch and smiled. Somehow she’d managed to use up the time quite satisfactorily; it was now, as her mother put it, about thirty seconds before she should be leaving for school.

    Henry looked so comfortable sprawling on the sofa, cradling his mug of coffee to his chest. Nina felt quite a pang, sharply missing the sheer rangy
bigness
of a man around the place. They took up such a lot of room, like Irish wolfhounds – you couldn’t just not notice them. Even when quiet, just like naughty children being suspiciously silent, they tended to draw the eye. Joe had been a great one for slouching around. He’d done a lot of reclining upstairs on the music room sofa, eyes closed, pained that anyone should mistakenly think he was not actually working. Even now, sometimes when she went up the stairs, she half expected to catch sight of a naked foot dangling over the sofa’s edge. Then as she came level with the door and there was just the empty room, the sofa gone to the flat with Joe’s recording equipment, there was a small shock as if she’d just realized she’d been burgled.
    â€˜So what do you think? Cream? Yellow? What about blue? Or is blue too cold?’ Nina asked the lolling bulk that was Henry. She strode around the room, stacking magazines, collecting up stray bills and school notes, trying to imagine a clutter-free, refreshingly empty space, just solid blocks of fresh flat stain-free colour. She didn’t want any twiddly, dated fancy paint finishes, no splattered stippling or wobbly dragging, not even soft and tentative colour-washing, that much she knew, but deciding which
colour
was a problem. Joe had been so very good at that sort of thing. Even when they’d settled on just plain basic white for their bedroom, when they’d first bought the house, he’d pinned up a selection of at least twenty different white shades round the room, waiting for the right light to catch the right one. This was the first major change she was planning to make to their home since he’d moved out.It seemed important to get it right, prove that her own taste was competent and confident. All the decisions were now hers and she would have to live with the results.
    â€˜You could just have white,’ Henry suggested, lazily closing his eyes and sighing. ‘Have you got a bun to go with this coffee, Nina my darling? Breakfast seems to be a long-distant memory.’
    â€˜You look as if sleep is a long-distant memory too,’ she said laughing, ‘What were you getting up to last night? You look terrible.’
    â€˜Drinking for Britain: I think I won a gold,’ he said with a groan and a hand to his head. ‘Down at the Fox – darts night. They were asking about Joe, no-one’s seen him for months. I told them he was working away.’
    â€˜You could have told them the truth,’ Nina said with