Blood Relative by David Thomas Read Free Book Online

him that easily. I opened my eyes to make the image disappear, waited a few minutes to reboot my mind, then went back to my memories of Mariana.
    People treat you differently when you’re married to a beautiful woman. It wasn’t just the winks, the digs in the ribs and the frank expressions of envy from other men: women too changed in their attitude towards me. They were more flirtatious, but also somehow more serious, as if they really meant it. Over time, I came to realize that Mariana had given me an invisible seal of approval. She wanted me, so I must be worth having.
    But why? The French have a saying: the woman chooses the man who’s going to choose her. Mariana certainly chose me, and after a couple of years I plucked up the courage to ask her why. ‘Well,’ she said, taking a step back and looking me up and down appraisingly, ‘you were the only man in the office who did not, as you would say, try it on with me. You were always very nice, very polite and respectful, the perfect English gentleman. But …’ and here she gave a flirtatious little smile, ‘… when I gave you the chance, you took it. So then I knew that you could be a man, as well as a gentleman. And I thought, yes, he is the one.’
    ‘Do you ever regret that choice?’
    She wrapped her arms around my waist and stood on tiptoe to kiss me. ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Not once.’
    I beamed with pleasure at the sheer joy of being loved by her. Mariana laughed at the sight of me: ‘And that is the other reason …’
    ‘What is?’
    ‘Your smile … When I first came to work, I would watch you in the office and most of the time you looked so serious, always frowning … the boss: always making decisions, talking to clients, arguing with suppliers. And then, just once in a while, something funny would happen and suddenly you would smile like a schoolboy, a cheeky schoolboy. I thought of how good it would feel to be the one who made you smile like that. And before you ask … yes, it is as good as I hoped.’
    When a woman like Mariana says things like that, you feel like the king of the world. Under her influence I became more confident, started dressing a little more sharply. I swapped the Disco for a Range Rover Sport, and got that top-of-the-line convertible Mini for Mariana. We could afford the cars, along with a spectacular barn conversion of our own, because the business was going through the roof.
    Part of it was just the general madness of those years as we all hurtled so merrily towards the great crash. But Crookham Church outperformed even that bull market, and the reason was not just my dogged ability to get a job in on budget and on time, nor even Nick’s undoubted flair for coming up with new and original ways to adapt period buildings in a modernist style. The real reason, I’m sure of it, was Mariana.
    One day, shopping for jeans at Harvey Nichols in Leeds, she got talking to another woman of about her age. After they’d bonded over trendy, absurdly expensive Swedish denim they went upstairs for coffee and girl-talk in the fourth-floor cafe. It turned out that Mariana’s new best friend was an actual, real-life WAG. Her husband had played for Leeds United and then been transferred after they were relegated from the Premiership. ‘How should I remember?’ Mariana replied, when I asked which club he’d gone to. ‘I have no interest in football. It begins with a ‘B’, I think.’
    The ‘B’ club was paying the WAG’s husband £50,000 a week. The couple had bought a house, torn it down and had new plans drawn up for the site, but things weren’t going well. ‘It looks rubbish,’ the WAG had said. ‘And the bloke that did them drawings is a total snob. He never listens to what we wants, just treats us like right idiots.’
    Mariana mentioned that she worked at an architectural practice. ‘Ooh,’ said the WAG, assuming Mariana was a secretary, ‘what’s your boss like?’
    ‘He’s my husband,’ said Mariana,