Exposure by Helen Dunmore Read Free Book Online

then takes it off again. He wanders into the dining room. Lily has laid the table ready for breakfast, as she always does. Bridgie dropped her rabbit plate, but he mended it: you can hardly see the join.
    There’s a bottle of cider on the dresser, back in the kitchen. Lily must have opened it, as a treat while she listened to the play. Her frugality frustrates him sometimes, but more often it moves him to tenderness. She is absurdly careful. If there’s a glut of plums at the market, she makes jam. Their own apples, potatoes, carrots and turnips are carefully stored in the garden shed, well protected fromfrost. He takes the stopper from the cider bottle and pours himself a glass.
    The mortgage is heavy. His parents gave them nothing, and Lily’s mother had nothing to give. Her father, the mysterious father in Morocco whom Simon has never met, sent a cheque for a hundred pounds when Paul was born. A huge sum. Lily frowned at the cheque, scrutinising it as if it might be a forgery.
    ‘What a piece of luck,’ said Simon.
    ‘Let’s see if it clears.’
    It did, and she bought the pram, the twin-tub and the sitting-room carpet. Simon’s career – if you could call it that – was not exactly progressing. Now, years later, he’s begun to understand that it never will. He’ll plod on while the high-flyers flap their wings above his head. Already, some of them are a good bit younger than he is. Let them get on with it. He’d rather leave on the dot to do a tricky bit of soldering with Paul. His salary is solid, and Lily has her part-time teaching job. Her job paid for the stair carpet and the scarlet leather sofa and armchairs.
    It’s calming to think of money. It worries Lily, though. She makes lists, draws up budgets, calculates whether or not they’ll be able to rent a holiday cottage next summer. But after an hour’s frowning concentration she gets cross with herself, throws down pencil and paper and exclaims, ‘We forget how lucky we are. Look at the garden! Look at this house!’ as if she’d never expected to be allowed such things. And, probably, she hadn’t.
    Lily looks so solemn when she’s doing her sums. She must have looked like that when she was a little girl. Serious. Trying to be good. But then, suddenly, everything changes. He’s always loved those summer days of cloud and light. When he’s on a train he likes to watch the shadows fly over the landscape, chased by the sun. Lily throws down her pencil, shakes back her hair and smiles at him. You can’t make Lily smile. He used to try, but it never worked. Her smile comes when you don’t expect it, changing her face utterly.
    He pours a second glass of cider, cuts a chunk off the loaf and fossicks about in the larder for the cheese. There’s no pickle. Paul eats everything. He’ll eat pickle out of a jar, with a spoon. Lily says it’s his age and the rate at which he’s growing. Simon tries to think back to himself at that age, but cannot. Doesn’t want to. Touching on his childhood is like pressing a bruise.
    He was never much of a Callington. His brothers called him ‘Milkman’ because he was small and dark, and Callington men were big-boned, fair, blue-eyed. He told Lily that once, expecting her to laugh, but she drew her brows together. She’s never thought much of the Callingtons, and in his heart he’s glad of it.
    The briefcase squats on the kitchen tiles. He’ll have to put it away, or Lily will want to know whose it is. That damned file.
    He opens the briefcase, watching his hands as if they are someone else’s. The file is as it was.
Top Secret.
It ought to have been locked away. It certainly ought never to have left the office in Giles’s briefcase.
    But it did. Simon’s hands hesitate, move, are still. His fingers want to open the file again, and read it. No, he tells himself. It’s absolutely off to go poking about. Giles trusted him to collect the file and take it back to the office. To Brenda. Easy-peasy. Obviously