Read Online Strike Out Where Not Applicable by Nicolas Freeling - Free Book Online

their exquisite Tourangèle accents, of the odious smooth young men in préfectures, showing all comers that they were Parisian, serving a short apprenticeship in this dusty provincial corner.… When it came to tax and capital, to economic outlay and return, to planning permission and the Préfet’s Decision, he turned away instinctively, to his own people, to work his own way stubbornly through paper. And he had liked France …
    Little thanks he had had – Janine had not really forgiven him, even now – but that was neither here nor there.
    There she was, sulking again this morning, sprawling childishly on the big sofa instead of sitting straight. She was graceful and a gawk at the same time … but Robbie found this idea a bit ‘twiddly’, a bit too like a notary embroidering sonorously upon the statute of eighteen eighty-one, as amended by the law of July ninth, nineteen sixty-one, relative to Immeubles.… He did not like twiddly ideas; he liked things simple.
    Janine was thirty-two, four years younger than Rob. They had married when he was twenty-two and she eighteen, and had eaten together the bread of poverty and frustration. She had had three miscarriages, had lost two children prematurely, and now had her tubes tied; the doctor had said that there must not be another time …
    She was a silver blonde, not white, not ash, and certainly not out of any bottle, but a silky silver, cuddly and delicate, and she wore it long, in ringlets that fell in a tumble to her shoulders. In her childhood she had dreamed of the cinema, and it had been Rob who had told her bluntly that she was not the new Bardot, but that he liked her the way she was. He had given her the roses from one of his first amateur wins, a ridiculous thing called the Tour of Overijssel, and she had gone, not long after, to Antwerp for the day and reappeared with a blue rose and the words ‘Rob, I am yours for ever’ tattooed on her right hip. Rob had been profoundly shocked, and had seen to it that there were no further fantasies dating from her Bardot period. She had skin to match her hair, soft and tender with a pale bloom on it, and the French journalists – had they had a memory of a White Lady of some years before? – called her ‘Pêche Blanche’.
    And how she had worked, after they married without a penny, and her father, a skilful collector of unemployment benefit, threw her out in a rage. A stupid bicycle maniac, and from Brabant at that! He had quite believed in the second Bardot, and had indeed counted on being kept in comfort by his grateful daughter, the moment she ‘arrived’.
    She had worked as a chambermaid, as a waitress, her hair pinned up, as a hairdressers’ assistant, as salesgirl in a dress shop, as everything … everything honest, Janine would add, hotly. She wasn’t going to end as any stinking prostitute in the docks, thank you. She would never admit even to herself that she might have done … something – to keep Rob going after his first world championship – he was twenty-fourth, and starting offers were very thin on the ground.
    Her loyalty to him was total – it struck him now that he had forgotten that, lately. He put down his magazine and went to sit on the sofa awkwardly, squashing a corner of
Elle
, Poor Janine, who so hated her growing-up years that now she would only talk French, only read French – the language of her success. He wanted to show affection for her; awkwardly he started to play with the silky nape of her neck – her power.… She shook her hair irritably but did not stop him. Affection – as it does – turned into desire; he unzipped her frock. Her spine was slightly bony, but that peachlike back, cut horizontally by the black brassiere.… He fumbled a long while with the cunning hook-and-eye system and for awonder she still did not stop him. In the end, she just had to do it for him