A Most Desirable Marriage by Hilary Boyd Read Free Book Online Page B

she bit the bullet and agreed to go. She could always change her mind.
    ‘But only if you promise to come too,’ Jo added.
    Donna beamed. ‘Good girl. We’ll have a laugh, a few drinks, it’ll be fun.’
    ‘Tell me you don’t fancy him yourself.’
    ‘God no!’
    ‘Why not? Is he awful?’
    ‘No, he’s gorgeous . . . just not my type.’
    As they wandered round the supermarket, Jo tried to imagine being with another man, lying beside him, smelling him, touching his skin, kissing his mouth. It was impossible. She’d met Lawrence when she was twenty-one, in her last term at college. He was working a summer job at the graduate recruitment fair they had at her campus, a large blue-and-white banner tied across his body advertising the sponsors. She’d made a joke about sandwich men – of which there were many in the seventies, wandering up and down streets clamped between wooden boards displaying anything from marketing messages to dotty religious tracts – and they’d struck up a conversation. Before Lawrence there had been two fellow-students, just awkward drunk sex which Jo had taken more as a necessary rite of passage than something significant. Lawrence, as far as she was concerned, was her first. And, indeed, her last. But sex with him had been great from the start, fun and inventive. An image – one she fought off on a minute-by-minute basis these days – of her husband in a naked embrace with Arkadius, flashed behind her eyes.
    ‘Is it just sex?’ she asked Donna, when they were seated in an open café area upstairs in the stuffy shopping centre, two tall glass mugs of coffee in front of them on the table.
    Donna looked at her blankly.
    ‘With Lawrence. Is that what’s driving him?’
    ‘You said he claimed to be in love.’
    ‘But what does that mean? Is he in love with Arkadius in the same way he was with me?’
    ‘I suppose. There’s only one way isn’t there . . . where you feel sick and mad and delightful and can’t bear to be away from each other for a second.’ Her friend’s face took on a wistful air.
    Jo winced. ‘So he looks at Arkadius and feels exactly what he felt for me?’ she repeated.
    ‘The details will be a tad different, obviously. But basically, yes.’
    ‘I just can’t imagine it.’
    ‘You’d be able to if Arkadius was a woman though, wouldn’t you? You’d just hate the bitch!’
    ‘Hate them both.’ Jo dragged some foam from the edges of her cup and stirred it into her coffee. ‘Why don’t I hate Arkadius?’
    ‘Because you don’t really believe it,’ her friend replied gently. ‘Have you spoken to Lawrence recently?’
    ‘He leaves messages sometimes. “Are you all right?” “Just checking to see how you are”, that sort of thing. But I don’t see any point in telling him I’m not. He’s hardly going to do anything about it, is he?’
    ‘Probably not.’
    ‘I just wish I could get the image of them in bed together out of my mind. How can I do that?’
    ‘Not easy. When Julian ran off with the trollop, that’s all I could see: them naked and all over each other. Torture. Only way is to get on with your own life.’
    Jo sighed. ‘Swedish Brian you mean.’
    ‘Not necessarily Brian. Or any man. Just doing stuff that totally involves you.’
    For a moment there was silence between them.
    ‘How’s the writing going?’
    ‘Nowhere. Frances at Century says I’ve got to come up with something really strong if I want another commission from them. The whole family saga thing just isn’t grabbing the YA market.’
    ‘Great sense of loyalty these people have. You’ve been with them for what, ten years? And then they just dump you.’
    ‘It’s not about loyalty, it’s about cash. And she hasn’t dumped me yet. But I can’t write about vampires, they don’t mean anything to me.’
    ‘So write about something that does . . . like bisexuality. That’s strong, and spot on for hormonal teenagers who don’t know which way is up.’
    Jo