Swimming Pool Sunday by Sophie Kinsella, Madeleine Wickham Read Free Book Online Page B

than last time, but still …’
    ‘And then you celebrate madly?’
    ‘Then we celebrate madly.’
    ‘And tomorrow?’
    Louise shrugged.
    ‘Hang-over.’ Barnaby grinned.
    ‘You know, it just so happens, I’ve got a very good cure for hang-overs.’
    His cure had been to take her to bed, with a directness that sent Louise, who was accustomed to sensitive thoughtful undergraduates, into slight shock. When they had finished, he went to make her a cup of tea, and she lay in his single bed, clutching the sheet up to her chin as though afraid of attack, shaking slightly, while thoughts, protests and attempts at indignation batted round her mind like butterflies. From his bedroom window was a view of some school playing-fields, and as she lay there, completely silent, a group of rugby players came running onto the field, dressed in bright-red kit. With their big burly legs, they reminded her of Barnaby, and suddenly she began to cry.
    ‘I thought you’d gone away,’ she wailed, as he came back into the room, and then stopped short, for this was not what she had meant to say at all. But it was too late. Barnaby, who, he later told her, had been pacing the kitchen anxiously, wondering if what he had just committed was an act of love or an act of violence, hastened to her side with a relieved solicitude. His tea was so strong it made Louise shudder, but she said it was lovely, and smiled at him with tears still dancing on her eyelashes, and Barnaby, feeling a sudden unfamiliar surge of tenderness, went straight away and carefully made her another cup, just the same.
    Since then they had never really talked very much about politics. Louise’s father stood down at the next election, which was a year before Louise and Barnaby married, and then, a couple of years later, was made a peer.
    ‘If only we’d known, ’ Louise would say at regular intervals. ‘We could have been married in the House of Lords.’
    ‘But then we would have had to wait,’ Barnaby would reply, ‘and I would have had to move to Melbrook on my own.’
    Barnaby had accepted a job running a medium-sized estate, ten minutes’ drive from Melbrook, which he started two months after they married. He had been in the same job ever since. Louise had long ago given up suggesting he look for a more senior, more challenging, or more lucrative job.
    ‘We’re happy here,’ he would say, ‘that’s all that matters.’
    And for a long time they were happy. They moved into Larch Tree Cottage, and Louise commuted into Linningford for her job as marketing executive with a small publishing firm. Then she had Amelia and gave up her job, and then she had Katie. She was no longer involved in politics, her father wasn’t an MP any more,and besides, Melbrook was in a different constituency. Besides which, she no longer felt quite as fervent about it all. For a few years, the minutiae of the children, the school run, village gossip and church fêtes kept her going. I’m lucky, she would tell herself at frequent intervals, I may not have a career, but I have a loving family and a happy life.
    It never occurred to her to question why she needed to reaffirm these facts to herself quite so regularly. Nor did she understand why, as the tenth anniversary of her marriage to Barnaby approached, she began to get edgy and irritable; to attack Barnaby with unreasonable complaints and heap bitter criticisms on the village, her life, his job, Britain. It didn’t help that her brother had recently moved with his family to a reportedly exciting new life in New York; nor did it help that Barnaby couldn’t begin to understand or, it seemed, sympathize.
    ‘But you grew up in the country!’ he once shouted, when her impatience with Melbrook had spilled over into a suppertime diatribe.
    ‘I know!’ she retorted angrily. ‘But it was different! It was exciting! We had important people to stay, and we had interesting discussions, and we had a flat in London, and we went to parties at