Breaking the Chain by Maggie Makepeace Read Free Book Online Page B

to women. Phoebe couldn’t see it herself. He’d never been charming to her. Perhaps it was because she wasn’t pretty. Perhaps he was snooty about the way she spoke. Perhaps she wasn’t good enough.
    ‘Fifty years ago this month,’ Peter was saying, ‘Hitler’s troopshad invaded Russia and were beseiging Moscow. By the end of November 1941, things were desperate. The temperature had fallen to minus 40° centigrade, but the severe winter weather and the arrival of special troops from Siberia combined eventually to defeat the Hun. This month the news is not as desperate, but interesting in its own right. The oil-well fires in Kuwait have been extinguished ahead of schedule. Leningrad is to revert to being called St Petersburg. The JET laboratory at Culham has achieved a high-temperature nuclear fusion. A particularly good display of the aurora borealis was visible from Shetland to Bristol – but they told us about it after it had happened, which is no damn good. Terry Waite has been released from captivity in Beirut. Robert Maxwell has apparently died in very fishy circumstances. A vast iceberg 55 miles long and 35 miles wide, covered in penguins and with its own microclimate, has broken off from Antarctica and is drifting northwards into the shipping lanes. And there was a small tornado in a village near Cambridge. Bad as well as good news.’
    Ten minutes into his speech and he hasn’t so much as mentioned his wife yet, Phoebe thought.
    ‘Fifty years is a long time,’ Peter continued. ‘How does anyone ever achieve it? In my case you may put it down to three parts inertia to one part an innate and reckless optimism. For in my book there is always hope,’ Peter said, smiling, ‘and for me, of course, Hope with a capital H!’
    Hope’s lips twitched obediently but without enthusiasm. Her grey eyes looked bleak. She must be so jarred off with jokes about her name, Phoebe thought, watching her as she stood beside her husband. Fifty years of marriage and he’s still making them; worse still was that crack about inertia. That was unforgivable!
    There were toasts at the end of the speech and cheers for the happy couple. Peter’s Chambers (for whom, at 72, he was still working) presented them with an elegant stone plinth topped with a brass sundial. Phoebe thought that Peter suddenly looked very tired. She often found it difficult to remember that he was an elderly man; he was so vigorous and bombastic.
    ‘I wasted time and now doth time waste me,’
Rick quoted into her ear.
    ‘True,’ Phoebe said, turning to look at him. ‘But Peter didn’t really waste time, did he?’
    ‘He should have been Lord Chancellor, or at the very least a judge,’ Rick said, ‘but he was too anti-establishment, too unreliable, too busy with other ploys. Now I think he wishes he had climbed the greasy pole.’
    There was a sudden blinding flash and the clunk of a camera shutter. Phoebe hadn’t noticed the presence of the press until that moment. ‘Perhaps he’ll be in the papers,’ she said. ‘That should please him.’
    In the event, it was herself and Rick who featured the next day, under a small headline:
‘HARVEST MOON BUGS GREENS.
    ‘Actor Roderick Moon, seen here with a sister-in-law at his parents’ Golden Wedding celebrations, spoke yesterday about his support for the destruction of the tropical rain forest by the people of Madagascar. “What else can they do?” he said. Moon (41) who starred in the controversial disaster movie
A Lemur Too Far,
made in Magadascar [sic] in 1988, spoke of the Malagasy’s need to harvest whatever natural resources they had available. “After all, they’ve got to live, poor sods,” he said …’
    ‘Does he mean it?’ Phoebe asked, pausing in her reading out loud, to question Duncan.
    ‘I don’t suppose he c-cares one way or the other. It’s all p-publicity,’ Duncan said.
    Phoebe read on.
    ‘The Worldwide Fund for Nature, Friends of the Earth and other environmental