A Desirable Residence by Sophie Kinsella, Madeleine Wickham Read Free Book Online Page A

discomforting feeling of mediocrity. A comfortable, provincial, well-heeled existence seemed to be all he was ever going to achieve. And, in some obscure way, this had worried him. With an enthusiasm he’d never felt as a student, he’d begun to visit London night-clubs at the weekend, take a few drugs, try to experience the intensity of life that he’d missed out on. And there he’d met Anthea: young and beautiful and clever, dancing at Stringfellow’s with a crowd of undergraduates. With her pale face and long red hair, she’d attracted him even before he discovered what she did. And when she told him, matter-of-factly, that she was eighteen, and a maths scholar at Oxford, a surge of excitement, of awe, almost, had gone through him. Here was intellect. Here was excellence. The first time he’d visited Oxford, she’d arrived at her room late, from some function, and as he’d watched her running across the quad, long miniskirted legs emerging from a billowing black gown, he’d experienced a growing surge of sexual energy that he could barely control.
    During the weeks and months that followed, he would sit in his dreary Silchester office, gazing out of the window, imagining her sitting in the Bodleian Library, surrounded by piles of books, or taking high-powered notes in a huge panelled lecture hall. When she took her finals, he drove up to Oxford every night to hear how her papers had gone; on the last day, he waited outside Schools with an enormous bunch of flowers and a diamond engagement ring.
    ‘I’ll move to Oxford so you can carry on with research,’ he’d declared. ‘Or London. Or the States. Wherever you want to go.’
    ‘Really?’ She eyed her newly sparkling left hand thoughtfully. ‘I’m not sure yet what I want to do. Perhaps we could start off in Silchester and see what happens.’
    ‘Of course,’ he’d replied heartily. ‘Great idea.’
    And so Anthea moved into Marcus’s house in Silchester, and for a couple of years they kept up the charade that she was carrying out important maths research from home. Marcus took out subscriptions to a number of weighty pure mathematics journals which he left lying around prominently in the drawing-room, bought a sophisticated computer system, and frequently referred to Anthea’s work in conversation. But it was apparent even from the first week that she wasn’t really interested.
    It now struck Marcus that she’d never actually been interested in the subject at all. Her aim had simply been to be the best in the year; achieve the highest marks; beat her contemporaries. Mathematics had only been a vehicle for success. And when the spirit of competition was taken out of her work, it ceased to appeal. Now she never referred to maths except in the context of the boys’ homework.
    She looked up as Marcus poured the milk into her coffee, and smiled. Her hair, still auburn but tinted slightly darker than its natural colour, was cut short in an elfin crop which had dismayed Marcus as soon as he’d seen it. Especially as she had given him no warning that she was to have it done. That was six months ago, and the sight of it still sometimes upset him. He couldn’t explain why it affected him so much, to think of that lovely hair lying on the floor of the hairdresser’s salon; to see Anthea’s thin neck exposed suddenly to view. But after that initial, debilitating argument, he hadn’t mentioned it again, except to reaffirm how much he liked it, now he’d got used to it.
    ‘I told the boys it was OK to read a comic before bed,’ he said, as soon as he had sat down. He knew there was no point expecting the boys to be discreet and not tell their mother. Andrew, in particular, would no doubt be bubbling over with the doings of Dennis the Menace when they went in to say good night.
    ‘Really?’ Anthea’s skin was so thin and fair that, although she was still young, every slight frown produced the thinnest of lines on her brow. ‘Where did they get them