Blind Date by Frances Fyfield Read Free Book Online

the road and lit a cigarette.
    A couple appeared, full of neighbourly concern. The woman signed a form and shook her head: then they all hung about in the street while the ambulanceman finished his smoke, their breath visible against the drizzle, talking without hurry, making the kind of chat which was simply the receiving and imparting of information, accompanied by nodding. Finally, the doors closed on the green blanket, to which Patsy’s eyes had strayed, again and again.
That
diesel note changed from throb to roar. The neighbouring couple went back down the steps together, pulling their coats around themselves. Whom should they inform, what could wait until morning and what should they do with the cat?
    I have no next of kin, Patsy told herself. I am entirely free to die like that.
    She would die alone like that; in the middle of the city, like this, and wait for someone to find her, subject only to the kindness of neighbours. She could have diamonds, a girl’s best friend, and still die like that.
    She hugged herself.
    I’ve gotta find myself a man.

Chapter
FOUR
    E lisabethhad always loved the story of how her mother and father had come to meet. There he had been, standing in his own jeweller’s shop, a shy man, although obstinate in his way, surveying all he owned and rearranging the display, when he had seen her outside with her nose pressed against the window. Not only Diana, with her long, blonde hair, but also the tiny child she was holding in her arms. She was pointing out the rings one by one to the baby who waved fat fingers and blew bubbles at the display of wealth.
    Dorian Kennedy had been a romantic; not the type of romantic who was in tune with the chanting for peace and free love principles of the younger of his generation, but the introverted awkward kind, growing into a bachelor, preternaturally old in his thirties and wearing exactly the same clothes as his father. Until he saw outside his window two such pieces of perfection, they made his jewellery fade by comparison. So, he had invited them in, discovered a young mother, although older than she looked, alone in the world, steeling herself to sell the ring which was the only valuable souvenir she had left from the father of the child. It was a scenario so fitting Dorian’s dream, he could not believe anything as heaven sent. The rest, as they say, was history.
    Couldthat really happen? Elisabeth had asked. Could her mother’s mother really have abandoned a beautiful daughter for the single crime of producing a bastard child? Yes, if she was old herself, sick with disappointment, and it was all in the dark ages of the nineteen-sixties, she could, she did.
    Elisabeth had so often wished she had not been that child by the window. She wished she had been Emma, the one who had brought such unqualified delight, whereas she had not. But we wanted you, her father had said, you cannot imagine how much we wanted to love you: you are a pearl beyond price, a diamond. He stuttered when he spoke thus, always giving the impression he would take back his own, scrambled words as soon as they were out of his mouth. I waited a long time for you, he had said; and the subtext of this, to Elisabeth’s mind, was, and look at what we got.
    Not that Dad came to mind very often now, or at all. In fact he might barely have tripped across her daydreams, were it not for all these idle hours of recuperation when anything and everything flooded in to fill the gap and distract her from the more recent past. After all, he had been inconsiderate enough to die just before he could see her reach twenty-one. A middle-aged fool to take up sailing so late, desperate to get out of the house and remove his tired eyes from the contemplation of cheap engagement rings, watch batteries and all the things he was forced to sell. He was also a clumsy man when not handling a pair of tweezers or looking into a spectroscope. Inept with his borrowed dinghy, he came home one