Read Online The ABCs of Love by Sarah Salway - Free Book Online Page B

complains about being ill, I am incredibly sympathetic. I tell him he should tell Kate to massage him gently for a long time or to cook him special meals or to go buy him expensive and elusive medicines.
    “Do you think so?” he asks, hopefully.
    “I do,” I say. “I think this is something she needs to take very seriously indeed. I would, if I were her.”
    See also Illness; Stationery; Teaching; Women’s Laughter

O
    objects
    John told me that he went round his house last night looking at all the objects he and his wife had bought together. He said he was ticking things off in his mind.
    If I go, I’ll take this, this, and this.
    That, that, and that will stay.
    It was a terrible thing to do, he said, because he realized that was all a marriage comes down to in the end. Objects. Even the children, he said. Even the children would be shared between him and Kate.
    I held him close and told him that if I had him, I would never need anything else. We stayed like that, in each other’s arms, for a long time. We were silent because he was upset, and all I wanted to ask was whether he was going to take the painting of beach huts by the sea that we once took to be reframed together.
    I have always liked that painting.
    See also Houses; Money; Property; Questions
    old
    My heart is breaking. All I can see in front of me is a dark, black corridor with nothing making it worthwhile to come out the other side. John can’t bring himself to think about leaving Kate anymore. He says it would kill her. Apparently, she’s spent too much of her life relying on him, and he has to accept the responsibility. Plus, he’d feel so guilty that he’d taken the best years of her life. Maybe if they’d both been younger? Younger like me. He told me that I’d be all right, that I had my whole life ahead. I had to live well, to make him proud.
    I felt numb. He was crying when he said all this, so I told him it was all right, that I understood, but the next day I was having a sandwich in a local coffee shop when I realized the woman sitting opposite me must be in her early forties, probably exactly the same age as Kate. I knew it wasn’t her, but I couldn’t stop staring at this woman. She was reading some papers, an important-looking document, so I felt I could stare all I wanted without her noticing me.
    I was trying to see what it was like to be that old. She had all the usual imperfections, but when I looked closely, I saw some I hadn’t thought of before. The skin at the sides of her face was puckered round her ears, as if it needed stretching. Then when she turned round to pick her coat off the back of the chair, I saw she had lines at the back of the neck as thick and deep as the thin gold chain she was wearing. The areas around her eyes were black, not just underneath as you get sometimes from lack of sleep, but at the edges of her nose, right up to her eyebrows too, so her sockets looked sunken.
    John told me once that what Kate hated most about getting old was the fact that she felt she was becoming invisible. John said that Kate was losing all her confidence and bounce. This was another thing that made him feel guilty.
    I could see that the woman sitting opposite me at the table was nervous. She apologized when other people bumped into her, she kept giving me silly little smiles, she tried to make conversation with the man who came to clear away the table even though he wasn’t interested. When I saw her start to put her things away to go, I knocked over my coffee on purpose, willing the dark brown liquid to spill over her papers.
    “I’m sorry,” I said as she whipped everything up quickly, trying to take care of the worst of the damage with a sodden paper napkin. “I just didn’t notice you there.”
    The woman looked as if she was trying not to cry. The manager came rushing over. He was about twenty-five, as dark and handsome as an Italian film star. I smiled at him, and he stopped in his tracks for a moment, then smiled