Read Online Blind Date by Frances Fyfield - Free Book Online Page A

across the bridge at seven in the morning, the mist lying on the river was beginning to disperse into nothing with the magic of a spell. The sun struggled for ascendancy in a pink and grey sky, stiking gold on the distant palace of Westminster where the clock stood to attention like a soldier, in a shroud of scaffolding. The river’s high tide, running fast and deep, covered the banks. There was nothing as calming as that savage water seen from the high safety of the bridge. The river was the sea drawn close. Patsy loved the sea.
    Benign sunlight, the splendour of the view and the hum of a city yawning awake, created a frisson of happiness. Halfway across, she leaned over the parapet, and with the efficiency of an organized woman, scolding herself briefly for her lack of gratitude, told herself she was all right really and congratulated herself on a new crop of resolutions. To be able to see water was both luck and luxury. To be alive and well on a morning such as this in a big fat metropolis heaving with beauty, dirt, grace, energy, idleness and a rampant lack of shame made her own existence comfortably small and her problems smaller still. She could take that ugly black dog of depression for a walk over another bridge and hurl the beast into the foam.
    Onwardsand upwards to the seventeenth floor. The rise of the lift reminded her of her own achievements, but she had lost in the process. Nonsense: she had lost nothing in the climb to the almost top of her world. She had gained plenty, including privileges like this, of walking down a wide corridor full of women. This range of magazines, consumed by girl teenagers on the one hand, cookery freaks on the other, was owned by men, created, and marketed by women. At any given time, half of those whom Patsy would meet en route to her own room would be pregnant. How other women, undoubtedly with mixed ambitions, found men and turned them into fathers with such apparent ease was one of life’s great mysteries. Somewhere in her life, she had lost a decade.
    â€œRight,” she said, after Angela and Hazel had closed the door behind them and the coffee machine grumbled. “Have you been thinking about this?”
    They nodded, like obedient schoolchildren. They knew what
this
was, and it had nothing to do with work; although it did, at one remove, have plenty to do with the cut-throat but cosy, all-female atmosphere in which they lived by day and often well into the night. Even though Hazel, with her square frame and careless clothes, was an expert on articles about how to please your man in bed with an insight far from theoretical, while Angela, with that halo of hair, wore pastel pinks and a look of innocence which was all too real.
    â€œSo, what news on the research, Ange?”
    She was flushed. “Well I’m still not sure this is all a good idea … I don’t know…”
    â€œOf course you know,” Hazel interrupted. “We had this argument a week ago, after the last disastrous night out, and you agreed then, and what with you in advertising and all, well you’d know best, so come on, give.” She did not add, you silly little virgin: the words merely hung unsaid, although tinged with an irritation which was also affectionate. Hazel had seen Angela’s silly little house: she had also met Angie’s mum: she understood how Ange lived in cotton wool.
    â€œWell,”Ange began in that small, hesitant voice which so charmed people on the other end of the phone and made them so reluctant to be nasty to her. “Most introduction agencies don’t last long. Plenty of people think it’s a good idea, and then go out of business, ‘cos it’s harder than they think. Apart from the very, very expensive marriage places. Somehow they last. I suppose it’s like charging a dowry. We don’t want one of those, do we?”
    â€œShit, no … Marriage? Jesus! I don’t want that, I just