Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon by Linda Newbery Read Free Book Online Page A

dead-heading the roses.
    She’d rather stay in. She isn’t hungry and she doesn’t want to spend the evening in pointless chit-chat, but Don has said they’ll go and it’s too late to back out. There’s no escape from what she can only see as an ordeal. He’s like that. If he says he’ll do something, he does it.
    ‘Ready, then?’ Don is jingling his keys, just short of impatient. She puts on her coat and a silk scarf, picks up her gloves and follows him downstairs.
    Malcolm. That’s who they’re going to visit. A golfing acquaintance of Don’s, and his wife, Kathy; she’s met them both briefly, but can hardly picture their faces. Why not keep it like that? Why make the effort to get to know each other better , as Kathy put it when she invited them? Other people’s lives. Other people’s children and grandchildren and holiday plans. She wants to float away, look down on it all from an aloof height.
    ‘But we won’t be living here much longer,’ she objected, when Don told her about the arrangement. ‘What’s the point of making new friends?’
    ‘For Pete’s sake! Cranbrook isn’t a million miles away. We won’t be cutting ourselves off from everyone we know. That’s the point.’
    Perhaps they should move a million miles away. Perhaps that’s what she wants. Cranbrook is no more than a feeble gesture of change, barely forty minutes in the car.
    Don has remembered to pick up the wine and chocolates she bought yesterday. All she has to do is belt herself in and be transported.
    ‘You’ll like Kathy,’ he tells her, wiping the inside of the windscreen.
    ‘Will I?’ She always bridles when people tell her that. Are her affections so logical, so easily predicted?
    There’s a pause, then Don says, as he pulls out of the drive, ‘I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong. You don’t seem very happy. I thought you’d be pleased everything’s going so smoothly.’
    She takes a deep breath and sighs it out, wondering if she can pick something from the confusion that will make sense. ‘It’s – oh, something at work. Not important enough to bother you with.’
    ‘No, go on.’
    ‘Well – I wish they wouldn’t try to change things. Afternoons. I can’t do afternoons. I told them.’
    ‘Have they asked you to?’
    ‘Yes, two a week, but I said I couldn’t.’
    Don looks at her. ‘Is that all? It’s sorted, then. Why worry about that? You’ll be leaving, anyway, when we move.’
    She wonders why she started this; she has no intention of elaborating. And yes, he’s right. Just a few weeks more. It’s part of her routine now to get well away from the health centre by one-thirty; she can’t risk being even five minutes late. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays have become dangerous now, evenly spaced, waiting to trap her. The others in reception have no idea, seeing no difference between those days and the others. But she doesn’t have to keep putting herself through this – it’s the one thought that keeps her going. She could resign now if she liked: say she’s got too much to do, getting ready for the move. Don wouldn’t mind. It’s only a kind of obstinacy that makes her reluctant to give in. With so much about to change, she wants at least to hang onto the shape of her days.
    She keeps noticing, lately, how carefully he treats her, with a mixture of concern and exasperation, as if she’s a frail-tempered convalescent who must be humoured. It’s making her feel frail, her nerves about to snap, as if she’s entitled to outbursts of temper or irritability. She has to remind herself that there’s nothing physically wrong with her, nothing at all. It’s only a house move they’re facing, not life-threatening illness.
    Soon the tyres are crunching on gravel and they’re outside an ivy-clad house with a pillared entrance porch. The woman, Kathy, comes to the door, wearing some sort of Eastern-inspired, bead-encrusted garment, her hair held back by jewelled clips. In the gush of How