Read Online Jigsaw by Anthea Fraser - Free Book Online Page A

you’d done a lot of research on the history of the schools up there.’
    â€˜I suppose I have. It started as a project for eleven-year-olds and just – took off.’
    â€˜Would you have any objection to meeting her?’
    â€˜Of course not, I should be delighted. As I said, I’ve admired her work for some time.’
    â€˜Then may I give her your phone number? She couldn’t find it in the book.’
    â€˜The directory came out while I was at my mother’s.’ She opened her bag, extracted a card, and handed it across to him. ‘I’ll be in Paris for the weekend – I’ve just been collecting some euros – but perhaps we could arrange something for next week.’
    â€˜Paris? I envy you,’ Tom said. He had a sudden vision of her walking in the Tuileries Gardens, sitting at pavement cafés, going to museums and art galleries. Her visit, he felt sure, would not be the frenzied shopping trip he’d endured with Avril on their sole visit to the French capital twenty years ago. He felt a twinge of disloyalty, and cleared his throat to free himself of it.
    â€˜Yes,’ she said, unconsciously echoing his thoughts, ‘I’m hoping to see the Matisse exhibition.’ She closed her handbag and stood up, smoothing down her skirt. ‘I look forward to hearing from her.’
    â€˜Thank you.’ Tom had risen with her, casting about for ways of detaining her but unable to think of any. He took the hand she held out.
    â€˜Have a good trip,’ he said fatuously, and rang for a clerk to see her out. As the door closed behind her he sat down again, feeling oddly flat. A charming woman, he thought, and wondered suddenly who was accompanying her to Paris. The telephone on his desk shrilled sharply, and he turned to it with a sense of undefined relief.
    â€˜Tom Parish,’ he said.
    Catherine thought over the meeting as she walked back to her car. She seldom went to the bank, and as far as she could remember this was the first time she’d spoken to the manager. He seemed a pleasant man, touchingly proud of his clever daughter – and with reason. Rona Parish had a gift for making readers empathize with her subjects; though frank about their faults and eccentricities, she was non-judgemental, illustrating instead how those traits had made them the characters they were and contributed to their enduring places in history. Catherine always finished one of her biographies feeling that the subject was a friend.
    Emerging from the car park, she turned right rather than continue over the junction into the clogged thoroughfare of Guild Street. She drove as she did everything else, competently and calmly, and, having negotiated Alban Road, wove her way unhesitatingly through the maze of little streets to her new bungalow.
    â€˜Good God, Mother!’ Daniel had exclaimed on his first visit. ‘You need a map and compass to find this place!’
    For herself, she preferred her home to be tucked away in a close, rather than on a busy main road, as her mother’s had been. It afforded her the sense of privacy that, over the last fourteen years, had become so essential to her. Odd, really, to think how her character had changed since her husband’s death. When Neil had so tragically and so unbelievably died at forty-two, the torrent of emotions she’d felt had seriously alarmed her, and for a while she had feared for her sanity. Anguish, fury at the fates and searing loneliness had vied for supremacy, but for the sake of twelve-year-old Daniel she succumbed to them only when alone.
    During those terrible months she’d grown increasingly paranoid about allowing anyone other than her son to come close. Even her mother, whose open weeping for Neil at first embarrassed and then irritated her, had been held figuratively at arm’s length. She had been, she now admitted, selfish in her grief, resentful of anyone else expressing a sense of