Close Relations by Deborah Moggach Read Free Book Online

bewhiskered matron who had been there for ever and whose wall was stuck with postcards sent by holidaymaking members of staff. She ran the switchboard; she knew all the gossip – people’s ailments, their problems with their children. It was Muriel who first heard the rumour of a buy-out by Unimedia, through various hush-hush calls from Frankfurt to their chairman Arthur Bunyan.
    Unimedia was a German-based communications empire. It owned newspapers and TV stations; it owned paper mills and software companies in Europe and the United States. It already had a majority shareholding in another publishing group, the result of a takeover bid in the early nineties. It had been sniffing around Beveridge and Bunyan for some time, for despite its air of gentility B&B in fact made a healthy profit. This was due to publishing various standard legal textbooks and a series of EFL course books that were used in schools throughout the developing world. So in April the company was bought up and the last of the Mr Bunyans, a man whose heart lay in fly-fishing, retired to his home next to the River Test.
    Since then the place had been shaken out of its long slumber. The first swathe of redundancies and early retirements had removed various old time-servers. Prudence had mixed feelings about this. Though she was sorry to see her colleagues go, their jobs merged or their positions taken by corporate suits who seemed to regard books as just another commodity – though she was sorry to see this, she also found it invigorating. Coming from her background, she had always resented the old boy network. Publishing used to be full of them; privileged, patronising, invariably male, they had kept the best jobs for themselves, relegating women to the lowlier editorial posts or, if the girls were pretty, the publicity department where they could charm journalists over spritzers at lunchtime. Didn’t they realise that the world had changed? One of them, Prudence’s former managing director, had once boasted:
‘I’ve only been into my wife’s kitchen twice, and once was to put out a fire.’
Her new MD was a coarseAustralian called Alan Watkins who cracked jokes and who chain-smoked in meetings, setting off the alarms. He had fought his way up from nowhere, like her father, and though his ruthlessness dismayed her she also found him refreshing.
    It was Monday morning. Unlike most of Britain’s workers Prudence longed for the arrival of Monday. For two days, throughout the interminable weekend, she hadn’t seen Stephen. She couldn’t phone him; he couldn’t phone her. Yesterday’s painfully frustrating message had been a rare occurrence. Each week the shutters came down. He was closed away with his family in Dulwich, in a house she had never seen and that she tried not to imagine.
    She knew his routines. He played football with his sons on Saturday afternoons; he went to Sainsbury. He was a husband. The word grew in her like a tumour.
Husband
. . . a rounded, smug word, a word describing a man who belonged to somebody else. She told herself it was just a collection of letters, a gathering of dots, but she couldn’t convince herself. Like all married people he spoke so casually of
we. ‘We had to go to this boring residents meeting, I wished I was with you.’
He tried to be tactful, to imply that his marriage was unhappy. ‘
We had an awful row on Sunday morning
.’ Though he was trying to reassure her, it was the
we
that cut into her heart. Sunday morning . . . croissants in bed . . . sheets rumpled by the previous night’s lovemaking, though he promised her that sex between himself and his wife had ceased.
    He called his wife
she
; so did Prudence. Never by name. The verbal courtesies of a married man speaking to his mistress occurred so naturally that she sometimes suspected he had done this before. He strenuously denied it. He said that until he met Prudence he