Blue Bedroom and Other Stories by Rosamunde Pilcher Read Free Book Online Page A

each downed a couple of whiskies, and by the time Mr. Redmay took himself home, they were the best of friends.
    â€œMind,” said Mr. Redmay, “that little wife of yours, she’s one in a million.” He clambered up into the cab of his station wagon and slammed the door. “Any time you want to get rid of her, you just let me know. I can always find a job for a hard worker.”
    But James said that he didn’t want to get rid of her. Not just yet.
    When Mr. Redmay had gone, he went into the house and upstairs, and Louisa was out of her bath, and had changed into her blue velvet housecoat with the sash tied tightly around her narrow waist. She was brushing her hair. She said, “I never asked about the report. Is it done?”
    â€œYes. Finished.” He sat on the edge of the bed and loosened his tie. Louise splashed on some scent and came to kiss the top of his head. “How hard you’ve worked,” she told him, and went out of the room and downstairs. He sat there for a little, then he finished undressing and had a bath. By the time he got downstairs, she had disposed of the basket of laundry, but he could smell, still, the fragrance of freshly ironed clothes. As he passed the dining room, he saw her through the open door, laying the table. He stopped to watch her. She looked up and saw him there and said, “What is it? Is something wrong?”
    â€œYou must be tired.”
    â€œNot specially.”
    He said, as he had every evening, “Do you want a drink?” and Louisa replied, as she did every evening, “I’d love a glass of sherry.” They were back in their usual routine.
    *   *   *
    Nothing had changed. The next morning James went to London, spent the day in the office, ate a pub lunch with one of the young copy writers, and returned—in the usual solid river of rush-hour traffic—to the country in the evening. But he did not go straight home. He stopped the car in Henborough, got out and went into the flower shop and bought Louisa an armful of fragile yellow jonquils, pale pink tulips, violet-blue iris. The girl wrapped them up in tissue paper, and James paid for them and took them home and presented them to Louisa.
    â€œJames…” She looked astonished, as well she might. He was not in the habit of bringing her home armfuls of flowers. “Oh, they’re beautiful.” She buried her face in them, drinking in the scent of the jonquils. Then she looked up. “But why…?”
    Because you are my life. The mother of my children, the heart of my house. You are the fruit loaf in the tin, the clean shirts in the drawer, the logs in the basket, the roses in the garden. You are the flowers in the church and the smell of paint in the bathroom, and the apple of Mr. Redmay’s eye. And I love you.
    He said, “No reason in particular.”
    She reached up to kiss him. “What sort of day did you have?”
    â€œAll right,” said James. “How about you? What have you been doing?”
    â€œOh,” said Louisa. “Nothing much.”

Spanish Ladies
    On a Wednesday at the beginning of July, old Admiral Colley died. He was buried the following Saturday, in the village church, and two weeks later his granddaughter Jane was married to Andrew Latham in the same little church. There were a few raised eyebrows in the village, and a few reproachful letters from distant and elderly relatives, but “That was what he would have wanted,” the family said to each other, and dried their tears and went on with the arrangements. “That was what he would have wanted.”
    *   *   *
    Because it was July and six-thirty in the morning, Laurie awoke to a bedroom filled with sunshine. It lay across her bed like a warm blanket. It conjured slivers of reflected light from the triple mirror on her dressing table, floodlit the faded pink carpet. Beyond the open window she could see