Read Online The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant - Free Book Online Page B

an animal. But offerings were important. Without the smell of roasting meat from the beaches below, the gods might have turned away from the world.
    â€˜I’ll do the meat,’ Tony said. ‘I’m only juggling around with the script this morning. Did I tell you, it looks as if Susannah York might be Flora de Barral.’
    â€˜It’s not true!’
    â€˜You think she’d be right for the part?’
    I tried to give an encouraging smile, and failed. What on earth did it matter? I certainly wouldn’t be going to a press showing of that one. And at the moment, because I knew I would be leaving soon, travelling to places where, in a million years of searching, Tony would never find me, I felt a great warmth towards him, an affection filled with regret that I would be losing him too. I went over to where he was sitting and put my arms round his head. I brought my chin down on the top of his head. There was no parting in the thick brown hair, which smelled of toast. How would he manage without me? Perfectly well, was the answer as I straightened up again. He would hardly notice I had gone!
    â€˜It’s just that I don’t want lunch today,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking of going to see Gala after the film.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    â€˜You don’t mind, do you?’
    â€˜Of course not!’
    â€˜Very well then.’
    After this exchange, in which I apparently conveyed total heartlessness and from which Tony emerged downcast, I went with too buoyant a step to the door of the flat. He was watching me as I left, but there was no way to present my physical departure acceptably. If I walked like a woman cowed by thousands of years behind the veil, eyes down, erect, shuffling gait, there was no reason for me to be allowed out at all and I would be unable to get as far as the main door of the building. If I went ‘ordinarily’, as Tony would go, simply walking out of the flat with a quick wave, it would be selfish, uncaring. If I were coming back for the meat, of course, I could make a quick apologetic dash of my departure for my job. But I wasn’t. So I went with an energy that was clearly provocative. Tony’s sulky glowering face came out with me into the darkness of the stairs and hung in front of me like the after-image of a violently bright light as I groped my way towards the black plastic button. I heard his silence affect the whole building, and it hung over me like a hood until I was halfway down the street.
    Â Â Â 
    There is a wind blowing today, the air in the street is milky white, and scraps of white paper float along at first-floor level. The street is as different today from the black stillness of the night before as I, in my cotton skirt and plodding step, am changed from the creature who flew down it. Since then, the full bottles that went in to Paradise Island have been emptied and are set out on the pavement for collection. The supermarket, still closed because it’s Sunday, reflects in its plate glass windows the ghostly figures of the women who will go in and become enclosed there tomorrow. A noise comes from the wives’ shelter: children, pent up, and suffering from the misery of their mothers, pelted, like the street, with mysterious scraps of words, nervous in the hot wind which also blows white dust intothe open windows and flaking paint of the surrounds. I walk up to Notting Hill Gate, where the press showing of the film is being held. The flowers in the sloping gardens are smothered with the fine white dust. One householder, rich and proud, has a sculpture six feet wide and twice as tall in his front garden – it looks like the head of a white tulip, two of the heavy stone petals peeled back to reveal the empty centre. In a poorer street, where the railings of the houses seem to press against them, allowing only a mantrap-size descent into the basement, someone has propped a flying figure in white papier mâché at the top