Read Online The First Wife by Emily Barr - Free Book Online

‘I came back because I crashed the ute a bit. Need you to take me to a doctor. Then I suppose we’d better talk.’
    ‘Sure,’ she said, and she looked more like his old sweetheart than she had in years. Some cloud that he had never noticed had lifted from her face. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there’s probably a lot we need to be talking about. A lot I need to tell you, now we’ve got this far.’

Chapter Seven
    November

    I ran to their house with my anorak on and my flimsy hood pulled up over my head. I tried to jump over, or skitter around, the puddles, but it did not work. My tights were wet, my feet were wet. My hood blew down, and my hair was soon as drenched as it would have been after a lengthy swim, though I had, of course, never learned to swim. I was wearing the black trousers I always wore for work, and they were now going to stick to my thighs, heavy and cold, for hours.
    I didn’t have an umbrella, because I had never even owned one. There was no point: the branches of even the biggest trees were bent and whipped around by the wind. I saw someone on the other side of the road, struggling as hers turned inside out, trying to pull it back into shape. The rain was almost horizontal. There was nothing to do but get your head down, hurry to your destination, and long for a warm and cosy shelter.
    In their porch, I jumped up and down and shook myself like a dog. I let myself in, but when I put the first key in the top lock, it would only turn in the opposite way from usual. It took a lot of fumbling with all three locks before the door swung open, and I realised that it had not been double-, let alone triple-locked, at all.
    This meant there was someone at home. Someone who had either not heard me fiddling with all my keys, locking and unlocking with each in turn, or someone who had heard and not bothered to come and help out.
    As I stepped inside, the alarm did not beep. It had not been set. I had been cleaning here for two months, and this had never happened before.
    I called a tentative, ‘Hello?’, but there was no reply. As noisily as I could, I put my wet shoes and my socks on the hall radiator, and hung my coat in the porch outside so it would not drip all over the floor. Then I closed the front door, stood still, and listened.
    I might be in this house with Harry Summer. Or with Sarah Summer. Or with someone else, or no one.
    ‘Hello?’ I called again, into the silence. My voice was too loud and I felt self-conscious and silly.
    There was no sound at all. They had forgotten to lock up properly: that was all.
    I pulled myself together, got out everything I needed from the cupboard under the stairs, and set off to start, as always, at the top of the house. I told myself that it made sense to do this, to end up back downstairs, but really I did it this way because I could not wait for my first look at the view.

    There was a black leather bag on the floor of the top bedroom, with clothes spilling out of it. The duvet was hanging half-off the bed. One of the pillows still had the imprint of a head on it. The room had a different smell: it smelled, I thought, like men’s toiletries, deodorant and things like that.
    I stood still in the doorway, taking it in. When I was certain there was no person anywhere in the room, I knocked on the open door, stepped gingerly in, and looked around.
    A pair of pyjama bottoms was crumpled on the floor. There were, I saw, men’s clothes in and around the bag. I pulled the duvet straight. There was half a cup of coffee beside the bed, and a folded-over section of the Guardian , so I supposed that this guest, whoever he was, had come back to bed with coffee and the paper (I happened to know that the Summers had the Guardian delivered by the paper boy, who was Zac’s friend Simon, who said they gave him a ten-pound tip last Christmas). I touched the side of the coffee cup. It was still warm.
    Like me, the guest had spent some time standing at the window. I could tell,