Scissors, Paper, Stone by Elizabeth Day Read Free Book Online Page B

existence that had only ever been hinted at. She assumed that other people had sex just like they did, the same physical bargain struck swiftly under the blankets. She never questioned Charles, given that he seemed so much more experienced than her. He knew what to do. She let him get on with it.
    As if to compensate for the lack of physical passion, she became gently obsessed instead with the trace and curve of his body: the downy plump cushion of his earlobe, the unexpectedly ticklish patch behind his knee, the twisted purple of veins running down his forearm. She liked to kiss him awake in the mornings, starting at the tip of his forehead and running down past the fragile skein of his eyelids, meeting his lips at the last moment, the exhalation of his breath metallic against her tongue.
    ‘Morning,’ he would say, blue eyes lazily opening.
     
    Frieda was unconvinced and sulky about the burgeoning relationship. ‘You spend all your time together,’ she said at dinner in hall one evening. ‘I never see you any more.’
    Anne found she had no answer to this and no desire to give one. It was true that she increasingly spent as much of the day with Charles as possible, returning to Newnham only when she had to, swaying into bed with a sort of tired happiness. She could not understand Frieda’s angst or the constant background hum of her friend’s strained anxiety. Nothing in Anne’s life had ever caused her to question good fortune: it was simply there to be taken for granted and not to be worried about or overly analysed. Later, she would look back at her earlier self and be astonished by how guileless she had been, how improbably arrogant to assume that contentedness was a gift that everyone was given. She had been sheltered all of her life. By her parents, her privilege, her cleverness and her beauty.
    Because although she liked to believe she never thought about it, Anne knew instinctively she was beautiful. She knew it, and yet she had no idea how to deploy it, how to use it to get what she most desired or how to subtly craft it into a knowing sort of charm. At nineteen, Anne was a girl-woman. Her sophistication was a pretence; her maturity unfinished. She was an innocent with the looks of an older woman, ill-equipped to recognise her own fatal power. She found herself on the edges of situations that she did not fully understand – with Fred, with countless other men who felt she led them on with her teasing, unwitting flirtation. Yet she was not courageous enough to admit the shortfall of her knowledge. And once she was able to, she found that she was too trapped to do anything about it.
    At the start of her relationship with Charles, she ignored any faint intimations of disquietude, pushing them to the far corners of her mind and telling herself not to be so ridiculous. She spent the days in a library haze, surrounded by the open pages of books, making half-hearted notes underneath the strip-lighting of the History faculty. At nights, she would occasionally sneak him into her room to stay over, squashed into the rickety single bed, his feet barely covered by the sheets.
    Once, she had woken up as the sun was creeping in through the curtain crack to find that he was no longer beside her. She put on her dressing gown and tiptoed across the uncarpeted floorboards, opening the door a crack in case the porter discovered she was entertaining an illicit male guest. She peered up and down the corridor but Charles wasn’t there. Then she heard the gentle rumble of his laughter. It was coming from Frieda’s room. She knocked and heard a sudden scrabbling and the sounds of Frieda shushing briskly. The door opened.
    ‘Anne,’ said Frieda, her face impassive. She was wearing a silk nightgown over a grey cashmere cardigan pulled tight around her breasts. Her hair, slick and dark, fell straight to her shoulders. Her angular face seemed to be faintly powdered and there was a smudged bruise of red lipstick on her mouth,