Free Summer on the River by Marcia Willett Page A

out.’
    â€˜And I was hoping you might come and see my beautiful house and that you’d invite me to see your bit of a cottage.’
    She stands up, reaching for her bag and Otto’s lead, smiling a little.
    â€˜It’s not impossible, I suppose.’
    He takes out his wallet and hands her a card. ‘Just in case,’ he says.
    She takes it, hesitating, still smiling. ‘Thanks,’ she says, and hurries out, wondering if he is looking after her. She hopes that he is – but she doesn’t look back.
    Ben watches her go. He feels very much at ease; delighted to have seen her again but very calm about the outcome. This strange sense of peacefulness, of wellbeing, contains him. There is no stress; no anxiety. He can’t quite understand it, sometimes even testing it with a series of negative reactions about his failed marriage, but the feeling persists. He can’t believe his luck that his life should have fallen into such a pleasant pattern – enough work, the Merchant’s House, his card project – and Jemima Spencer, on top of all this, seems rather too much to add to it all.
    He drinks his coffee and thinks about the little girl, Maisie. He can imagine the kind of ‘you and me against the world’ scenario in which she and her mother have lived, happily dependent on each other, until Maisie was old enough to begin to discover that she quite liked the world. How difficult, then, for her mother to step back and allow her to enter into it. How hurtful to discover that, far from being angry with her father for abandoning them, Maisie blames her mother for allowing him to go.
    Ben thinks about Laura. She, too, is feeling resentful that Kirsty has chosen Iain, announced that the marriage is at an end and the family home must be sold. Part of Ben feels sorry for Kirsty. Theirs has not been a relationship ending in quarrels, shouting, arguments: it has been a quiet descent into a kind of indifference. He can’t blame Kirsty for being attracted to this man whom she’s known in another life and obviously likes enough to cause such a rift. Perhaps Iain has brought a new excitement to her life; a different dimension. But how is she to explain it to Laura in a way so that her daughter won’t be hurt, diminished and resentful on her father’s behalf?
    He and Laura didn’t inhabit the ‘you and me against the world’ scenario of Miranda and Maisie, but he was very present during her growing up: taking and fetching her from school, attending assemblies and plays, amusing her, bathing her, putting her to bed. His beautiful photographs in the well-known glossy magazines were far more easily appreciated than Kirsty’s long hours in the office and the added responsibility when she was promoted.
    When was it that Kirsty began to be jealous of his and Laura’s easy camaraderie, her natural instinct to turn to him first; to ask for his help, to tell him about her childish victories and disasters? When did bitterness begin to creep into decisions to do with home improvements, new clothes, foreign holidays? At what point did his own irritation with Kirsty’s subtle – and not so subtle – implications that without her hard work such luxuries wouldn’t be possible begin to turn into resentment? Increasingly her air of martyrdom began to colour her attitude towards him, though he still worked hard, shopped, did most of the cooking.
    It was a slow process. There were still happy moments, periods of contentment, but the spaces between them grew longer, and by the time Laura went to university there was not much left. Nevertheless, it was a shock to discover that Kirsty had been seeing Iain: that this unknown man had revived in her the love and passion that had been lost in their own relationship. When she’d told Ben that it was over, that she was going back to Edinburgh and the flat must be sold, he’d experienced a terrible sadness,