Read Online Turn Us Again by Charlotte Mendel - Free Book Online

coffee table and the remains of our steak dinner.”
    â€œI understood that bit. Why?”
    â€œTo kiss you.”
    â€œThat’s not going to happen,” she said, smiling at the ludicrousness of the situation.
    â€œEventually it will, according to my experienced friend.”
    The simplicity of this remark disarmed Anne. “Someone advised you to behave like this?” she laughed.
    Samuel looked perplexed, and a little pleased at the same time. “According to my trusted friend Philip, the physical relations between man and woman resemble a primal hunt. I am prepared to go round and round the coffee table ad infinitum, but I’d be grateful if we could pretend I’ve caught you, because there’s a severe stitch in my side.”
    â€œLet’s pretend you have, and forget the whole thing. Who is this Philip, filling you with such rubbish?”
    Samuel looked sheepish. “Perhaps it works better for him, because he’s more athletic.”
    â€œChasing women around the coffee table isn’t good advice. I have to go now.”
    He gave her a stricken look.
    â€œDon’t worry, I’m not angry. We’ll see each other again, won’t we?”
    He grasped the hand she held out to him, then brought it gently to his lips.
    An important figure has entered my life , she wrote in her diary. Am I not a desert waiting for the rain? Have I perhaps found it? I have been warm all night because I spent the evening with him. It was so glorious, how I revelled in it! I know that we will again be together. We will laugh and his brow will be furrowed and he will gesticulate and I will listen and smoke and smile. Then he will tell me how beautiful I am and try to make love to me — this I know .

THREE
    I lay the manuscript on the bedcovers and look at the ceiling. My shoulders and neck ache, and I realize that I’ve been tense the whole time, attacked by a gamut of feelings: terror the manuscript was going to be awful, relief that it wasn’t too bad, wincing at the weaker lines — how pompous and stilted my father sounds!
    More than anything, amazement that my mother wrote this. My mother !
    Obviously, this is a story about my mother’s life. I had heard all about the formidable grandmothers in their starched gowns and their attitudes about sex, and I knew she’d been a nurse at Cambridge, though the flirting and pill-popping were a shock. I realize I am judging anxiously all the time I am reading. Her self-knowledge surprises me, her diary embarrasses me, especially lines like, “Am I not a desert waiting for the rain?” Like for fuck’s sake, who are you trying to impress? I imagine my mother imagining others reading this, wanting them to see her in a certain way. I just hate shit like that. I feel like I’m standing at the check-out of a grocery store, and she’s spouting this rubbish to the stunned girl behind the counter. Then the pomposity of my father’s voice — he does have a stilted way of speaking, but the effort to capture this on paper irritates me.
    Still. The main feeling is one of incredulity. I am reading a manuscript about my mother’s life. And my father’s. Just a little more, even if I regret it tomorrow.
    Matron cornered Anne just as she was emerging from the tearoom.
    â€œNurse Anne! I’d like a word with you! Please come to my office.”
    Anne sat in the hard upright chair, feeling annoyed. The caustic Matron had interrupted a daydream about the shaggy student.
    â€œYou have been in the operating theatre most afternoons for the past few weeks.”
    â€œYes Matron.”
    â€œUnder the operating table, to be precise, gathering and counting the swabs.”
    â€œA very necessary part of the process.”
    â€œYes. And the most boring part as well. I asked the ward sister why she gave a bright nurse like you such a menial job all the time, and she said you had asked to do it.