Read Online Made in Heaven by Adale Geras - Free Book Online Page A

out of love with Adrian, but Maureen was a different matter. What he felt for her now was complicated, but some sort of love was still bound up in there somewhere, and denying it wasn’t going to help matters.
    Their wedding had been very low-key. A couple of the nurses from the hospital as witnesses and that was it. Maureen had worn a blue suit with a wide-brimmed hat to the register office. He’d bought her some flowers. Nothing as grand as a bouquet, but a small bunch of yellow and white roses. There were a few photos of the occasion, taken by one of the witnesses on his very basic camera and that was it. Where were those photos now? He had no idea. Maureen would know but he had no desire to look at them again.
    For the honeymoon, they’d sent Adrian to Maureen’s mother and gone to Paris for the weekend. Maureen found fault with the hotel in the short intervals between fucks.
We’ll stay at the Ritz one day, darling, won’t we?
she’d asked him. He’d agreed. He’d have agreed to fly to Mars, just to get her to stop talking. Just to see her waiting for him, opening herself, legs, mouth, arms, everything, wanting him and nothing else. Remembering those days, he felt uncomfortable. Guilt, regret … it was difficult to put a name to it. All he knew was, seeing Lydia again had stirred up all kinds of complicated emotions and he wasn’t sure he knew how to manage them.Maureen was sharp, too. The last thing he wanted was for her to discover the truth. But would it matter if she did? If she left him?
    I’m a selfish bastard, he told himself. I had it all worked out. No one keeps house better than Maureen. She cooks as well as any chef. Wherever he looked, he saw a kind of beauty. The house was orderly, with not so much as a smudge on the wallpaper or a whisper of dust on the skirting-boards. She was a better gardener than any of that lot on TV. She was efficient. She kept track of his diary. She made sure his life ran like clockwork and that was something Graham needed. She knew he wrote poetry, but she left him well alone to do it, regarding it as a kind of indulgence, a silliness she forgave him. Maureen had, however, almost no claim on his heart. That had belonged to Lydia since the very first day he met her. Maureen didn’t even realize that his love had mostly been given to someone else. They still fucked often enough. More often, he thought, than other couples in their fifties, but she had no notion that behind his eyes, he was conjuring up Lydia’s pale face as it had been on that night, their one night together, when he’d actually considered how good it might be never to wake up and know what it was like not to be with her. His Lydia. The name he would always use, even though she was Jocelyn Gratrix. He went to the door. She’d be phoning him in half an hour. He had no idea what she’d say, but he had to see her. They needed to talk about this new situation. I’ll walk round the golf course, he told himself, me and my trusty adulterer’s phone. Maureen was at church. She wasn’t a bit religious but had a firm belief in the desirability of being the kind of person who was seen in a pew on Sunday and, what’s more, wearing better clothes than anyone else in the congregation.
    *
    â€˜Such a shame!’ said Edie Nordstrom, balancing a piece of
tarte aux pommes
on her fork before putting it intoher mouth and munching it with her eyes closed to indicate pure pleasure, ‘ … that your guests never got a chance to taste this. Still, their loss is our gain. Your pastry’s divine, Charlotte. As usual.’
    Edie was a small woman with sharp eyes and short grey hair, cut in a style she liked to think made her look like Judi Dench. The pinkish shade of her spectacle frames, together with a taste for the pastel in matters of dress, led people to think of her as a sweet old lady. Nothing, Charlotte knew, could have been further