Read Online Death in Disguise by Caroline Graham - Free Book Online

heard out her sorrows, and the cruelties of the outer world beat on the clinic walls in vain. Nothing was real. She felt like an imprisoned princess in a high and mysterious tower. The phenomenal cost had not even grazed the surface of her fortune.
    They called it a nervous breakdown. A neat phrase explaining many antisocial actions—from bursting into tears at Harrods to clawing one’s face in a convulsion of self-loathing. She had done both and in the same day, too. A terrifying escalation of abandonment and despair. But that was all in the past. All in the past, Felicity.
    She said her name aloud a lot. It helped to counteract the frequent sensation that she was constituted so vaguely as hardly to make a complete person at all. Artificially brisk, she strode down to the basement, her heavy cream satin robe slapping at her calves.
    In the huge Italian-designed hi-tech kitchen, the smell of chocolate brioche hung melting on the air. Verboten if she was to stay size ten. Guy had eaten four. Weight looked good on a man.
    He’d been lean and hungry when they’d first met; slinking round, low-bellied like a starving cur. All she’d had to do was crouch down, extend the palm of her soft white idle hand, show him the words ‘McFadden and Latymer’ and smile. In those days there’d been a quick lightness in the turn of his head and a neck-or-nothing set to his wide, slightly turned down lips. He’d reminded her of a handsome frog. A young Edward G. Robinson.
    Felicity grabbed at still warm pastry and rammed it into her mouth, knuckling in the overhanging fragments, hurting her lips. She chewed and chewed and sucked and chewed, voraciously extracting all the buttery, chocolatey vanillary essence, then spat the pulp into the disposal unit and ground it away. Then she lit a cigarette and stared up through the basement bars at the sad pollarded plane trees. She pictured them growing straight and tall, tender leaves uncurling high above London’s muck and murk. All these poor things had were a few twigs sprouting from scaled-over wounds. Someone walked by glancing down. Felicity dodged away and hurried upstairs.
    Her bedroom was on the third level. She locked her door and sank, panting, on Guy’s bed as if she had been pursued. They still shared a room, whether out of cussedness or malevolence on his part she could never quite fathom. It was not a comfortable experience. Guy was restless, his face on the pillow usually expressing some extreme emotion. Sometimes he laughed in his sleep and Felicity was sure he was laughing at her. On his bedside table was a photograph of their daughter in a mother-of-pearl frame. Felicity never looked at it. She knew it by heart. Or would have done if she had a heart to know it by. This melodramatic reflection made her eyes sting with self-pity and she screwed them up tight.
    Foolishly she picked up the frame and slid further into ruinous introspection. As she stared into the wide hazel eyes the face seemed to dissolve, regressing in a flowing series of images into babyhood. Sylvie’s first clumsy efforts at ballet class, her bewildered tears at being sent away to school and terrible anguish when Kezzie, her adored pony, died. Felicity slammed the photograph down, splintering the glass and thought, Christ I need a drink.
    A drink and a couple of Feelgoods. The brown bombers. They should do the trick. Strictly for emergencies the clinic had said, but if being alone and in despair at nine on a terrible bright sun-ridden morning in deepest Belgravia wasn’t an emergency what the fuck was? And a bath. That should help jolly things along. Felicity wrenched at the delicate golden taps and scented water gushed out.
    She drew on her cigarette and saw her mirrored cheeks cave into corpse-like hollows. A web of fine lines spun out from the corner of her eyes. So much for the embryonic serum for which so many unborn lambs had given up any chance of skipping about