Read Online The Bed I Made by Lucie Whitehouse - Free Book Online

Australia and Canada. There had only been two for her, the County Press story I’d seen, and then another on the website of a magazine called Wight Living . The page had shown a collection of photographs taken at a charity fundraising dinner in Cowes and there was one of them, Mr and Mrs Peter Frewin. I’d clicked to enlarge it and they filled the screen. She was wearing a black dress in what looked like silk, the cowl neckline revealing the pale skin at the base of her throat and over her collarbone. Her hair had been blow-dried and hung from a side parting in a shining golden sheet which broke over her white shoulders. Her husband stood behind her in a charcoal suit and tie, his hand on her elbow. I compared his face to how it had been the night they had brought her boat in. On the quay he had been expressionless, only the wideness of his eyes hinting at the catastrophe that engulfed him. In the picture he was smiling a little for the sake of the photograph but the angle of his body, his hand, showed that his real attention was focused on Alice. She was looking more directly at the camera but it had seemed to me that there was something blank about the look in her eyes, absent, as if she was elsewhere and it was only really her body that had been there, going through the motions. Neither of them looked comfortable, I’d thought, but perhaps I was letting my knowledge of what had happened to them since then colour my interpretation.
    All the other photographs showed what I took to be pillars of the local community in various attitudes of wine-sipping, laughing, sitting at tables adorned with extravagant flower arrangements. Most were in their fifties and sixties, seventies even, but there were three or four others in their thirties. Somehow, though, they seemed to belong to a different type. Alice was current, the length of her dress and the opaque tights right up to date; they wore outfits which had evolved over their journey from the catwalk to the high street, become domesticated, and their shoes were smart but not sharp like Alice’s, whose slim ankles were bound around with heavy studded straps. The older people, too, looked jolly, pleased to be having a night out with a nice dinner, the men in sports jackets, the women in matching floral two-pieces. If the backgrounds hadn’t been the same, I might have thought that the photograph of Alice and her husband was one of a different set entirely, included by mistake.
    I walked on and a little further up the street I came across something that surprised me. One of the bay windows was filled with a set of shelves on which books were propped open to show their covers to the street. On the top level there were recipe books, a guide to dog grooming and two Jilly Cooper novels. In the middle there were thrillers by Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett, and on the shelf below that, there was a copy of Bleak House , two Thomas Hardys and a volume of Tennyson poems. A handwritten sign on the shop door said it was open.
    Inside I found myself in an L-shaped space, the foot of the shape the front room in which I was standing, the longer part running all the way through to the back of the building. The walls were covered by shelves which reached almost to the ceiling and there were Turkish rugs in reds and ochres over the varnished floorboards. In front of the sash window at the far end was a pine table with a lamp and a laptop computer at which a man was sitting. He glanced up as the bell above the door announced my arrival and looked at me over a pair of steel-rimmed glasses balanced halfway down a straight nose. He had short silver hair which had retreated a little at the temples and was sixty, maybe slightly older, I thought. There was something rather patrician about him: he would have looked as at home in a toga as he did in his plaid shirt. I gave him a quick smile and moved into the part of the shop which was out of his line of vision, not wanting to be