Daphne by Justine Picardie Read Free Book Online

good at, and the house, and me. And I know I should be grateful, I should feel like the luckiest girl in the world, chosen by a handsome, intelligent man, the first man who ever told me that I was beautiful, who brought me to live in his house, this lovely, gracious house, filled with books and comfortable chairs in which to curl up and read. The light streams in through big, generous windows, and is reflected on polished wooden floors, and in the garden there are espaliered apple trees, and scented creamy roses that Paul's mother planted, entwined with evergreen clematis and a climbing jasmine that smothers the brick walls, even now, in the depths of winter.
    But sometimes I feel like a lodger again, as if I am just staying here until Rachel comes home to reclaim what belongs to her; cleaning her house, keeping it pristine and fresh for her; camping out in her bedroom, sleeping on her white linen sheets, beneath her feather duvet; borrowing her husband, who might already be missing her, or maybe he's just beginning to get bored of me. I have very few belongings of my own in this house, just my books, a pitiful collection, when compared to Paul's library, and my clothes, huddled like refugees in a corner of Rachel's empty mahogany wardrobe. And my face in her wardrobe mirror is washed-out and pale, and my fair hair turned into a colourless reflection, a curtain that shadows my eyes.
    I'm not quite sure why I seem to be spending more and more time alone here, looking after the house, wiping and washing and ironing, just like I used to do for my landlord when I was a student, earning some money to supplement my grant. I don't think Paul notices all the cleaning I do when he is at work (though he might notice if I stopped doing it), but he is encouraging me to concentrate on my PhD. 'You're a very clever girl,' he says. 'You got a Cambridge scholarship, and a First in your finals, and funding for your PhD - so don't let it go to waste, don't fritter your time away like this . . .'
    But I wonder, sometimes, if he says all this in order to make himself feel better about having married me; to make me seem more grown-up, less of a pointless appendage, an embarrassment in the eyes of his friends (and himself? Maybe that, too . . .) We hardly ever saw his friends before we got married - I was still at college during term-time, and in the Easter holidays, I stayed in Cambridge to revise for my finals. And then we went away for three weeks in the summer, to a rented cottage in the Cotswolds, just the two of us. It was idyllic, like a honeymoon before the wedding, with long, languorous days in the garden, and night after night entwined in bed together, when he said I made him feel young again. But afterwards, in September, he went back to work, and back to his previous life, too, seeing several of the friends he'd lost touch with after he and Rachel had split up. At first we saw them together, in the pub around the corner from his office at the university but I always felt uneasy with them, tongue-tied and gauche, while they traded jokes and told stories about people that I didn't know, and episodes in the lives they'd shared long before I came along.
    I suppose that was when Paul began to see me differently; it was as literal a change as that, when his eyes narrowed slightly after one of those uncomfortable evenings in the pub, and he tilted his head to one side, and stared at me, appraisingly. 'How about getting a haircut?' he said. 'You look like a schoolgirl auditioning to play Alice in Wonderland, with your hair brushed straight down your back like that.' So I went to the hairdressers, hoping for a transformation, but not really wanting a radical crop, and the stylist just trimmed a couple of inches off, saying, 'You've got beautiful long glossy hair, you should enjoy it, at your age, while you're still young enough.' Paul didn't comment on it; I'm not sure he even noticed, he seemed quite preoccupied with work by then, and as the