Read Online Her by Harriet Lane - Free Book Online Page A

Verbier and Dubai, and the porridge-faced Jemima continues to put on her blazer with the green piping every morning. Is there a boater? I think there might be a boater.
    We sit there, waiting to be called for lunch, and suddenly Dirk rocks forward in his chair, barking, ‘Oh, stop fiddling!’ and Christopher is looking down at the coffee table, at the upended bowl and the spilled peanuts, a salty finger in his mouth. Uh-oh .
    On the last morning we come down and find that Christopher has risen early and balanced two cushions on the sofa, giving him access to the holy grail on the top shelf. The curtain mechanism is broken, the curtains jammed at half-mast. Dirk puts a brave face on it. ‘Not to worry,’ he says, taking the back off the remote to see if new batteries will do the trick. They don’t.
    We escort Christopher to the naughty step, out in the cold hall, next to a balled-up pair of walking socks and a copy of Peepo . He sits there mute, bearing his punishment, almost noble in his acceptance of it.
    Back in London, unpacking the children’s bag, stuffing the dirty clothes into the washing machine, I find the little green drawstring sack from the Scrabble set, and inside it the queen and the pawns.

Nina
    Sophie’s face, I think, is like the moon, cold, mysterious, remote. I look at my child now, standing there in the hall in martyred resignation – slightly knock-kneed as the fashion has it, her hair pulled in a slippery fall over one shoulder – and I’m not sure who she is.
    She puts her tongue in her cheek, turns the rope of her hair around, twisting it, tugging it, bored, waiting for the moment to pass.
    The inflections of Arnold that I notice at these moments, when Sophie’s busy hating me, are hard to bear. The weary inhalations. The lip-pressing. The holding back from saying things that I can, in any case, imagine. When she speaks, I smell Wrigley’s first, and then cigarettes.
    ‘My phone ran out of juice,’ she’s saying, ‘So I didn’t get your message.’
    ‘Well, you should have remembered to charge it up properly,’ I say, hearing my voice, shrill, reverberative, appalling. My power, already compromised, dwindling further. ‘And you could have borrowed a friend’s phone. It’s a school night! How many times do we have to go through this?’
    She stifles a yawn, the phone in her hand suddenly illuminating as a text or email arrives. ‘I just forgot. I won’t do it again,’ she says, moving her hand quickly to hide the light that confirms her deceit.
    ‘I’ve heard that before,’ I say, deciding not to take her on about the phone right now: pick your battles, first things first . ‘I was worried! Anything could have happened.’
    ‘Well, it didn’t,’ she says, and then, more quietly, ‘For God’s sake. It was only an hour.’
    I check my watch. ‘Two, nearly three, actually. Where were you, anyway?’
    ‘At Tasha’s. She asked me for supper.’
    ‘I’ll talk to her mother tomorrow,’ I say, but she interrupts: ‘Oh, don’t make a fuss, Tasha had to keep an eye on Tilly, their parents were going out. I said it would be OK.’
    ‘Oh.’ I feel my anger slackening slightly, my desire to believe.
    ‘Look, I won’t do it again,’ she’s saying, and as I say, ‘You’re running out of chances,’ she shrugs off her school blazer in an attempt to delineate the end of the episode. Her head lowered over the phone as she walks away, up the stairs. ‘Yup, yup, yup.’
    Charles has tidied up the kitchen after supper and is in the sitting room, socked feet on the footstool, reading the Evening Standard . He raises an eyebrow as I come in, nods at his single malt. ‘Can I get you one?’
    ‘No, thanks.’ I can’t sit down quite yet. I move around the room, between the white sofas, putting another log in the wood burner, collecting the Economist and adding it to the pile of last weekend’s supplements. Rain hits the window in fits and starts, as if it’s being flung in