The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach Read Free Book Online Page A

seize 40 percent from those prudent enough to save and prosper? Christopher could get quite emotional on this subject. Hadn’t it already been taxed? What message did this double whammy give the honest citizen?
    So it was settled. “Shrouds have no pockets,” said Evelyn.
    “Oh Mum, don’t be so morbid!” replied Theresa. Gratitude made her daughter snappy; Theresa had always been a turbulent woman.
    Theresa lived up north, in Durham. Nowadays she seemed to be some sort of counselor, though Evelyn couldn’t quite imagine what sort of people would need her daughter’s help. Theresa came down to visit, of course, usually on her way to some holistic weekend. Evelyn found these events curiously exhausting. Theresa did take things to heart. She cross-questioned the staff on her mother’s behalf; when Evelyn made a mild complaint about the food, Theresa barged into the kitchen and demanded to see the cook.
    Worse still were their tête-à-têtes. Theresa was processing the past, she said; she was working on her feelings of rejection. Had Evelyn felt ambivalent about her husband’s hostility toward his daughter, when she was little? Did she, as both wife and mother, find her loyalties split? This sort of talk confused Evelyn. The past she remembered bore almost no resemblance to Theresa’s version; the events might be the same, but it was like seeing a foreign film—Serbo-Croat or something—that was vaguely based on them but all in black-and-white and somehow depressing. Then off Theresa would go to some Group Hug in Arundel. Why, thought Evelyn, does she hug strangers, and never me?
    Evelyn missed being touched. She missed Hugh’s arms around her. Without the casual contact of skin upon skin she felt brittle and unwanted; she felt like an old schoolbook, filled with irrelevant lessons, that somebody had shoved into a cupboard. The only hands upon her belonged to professionals—the visiting nurse taking her blood pressure or anointing the bruises that bloomed, after the slightest knock, on her papery skin. She had never considered herself a sensual woman, it wasn’t a word in her vocabulary, and she hadn’t expected this hunger. Nor the need to be needed. Nor the loneliness, in a building full of people. She was only seventy-three but, gradually, those familiar to her were deserting her by dying—her two brothers, several of her friends. People who understood what she meant. Now she had to start all over again with strangers—fellow residents whose wrinkled faces reflected her own mortality—she had to explain things to them. If, that is, they could be bothered to listen. Most of them didn’t, of course; old age had deepened their self-absorption. Even after a year it felt like being at a new boarding school, with no possibility of going home.
    Evelyn hadn’t predicted this. She had expected the aches and pains, the failing vision, the reliance on others. She knew she sometimes became confused. But she hadn’t predicted the loneliness. She remembered Hugh, stuck with tubes, turning to her and smiling. “Old age is not for sissies,” he said. And then he had gone, and left her to it.
    That was why she loved Beverley. Once a week Beverley visited Leaside to do yoga and manicures. She was a chatty, affectionate girl and had taken a shine to Evelyn. She kissed her and called her darling; she brought in a blast of fresh air. Beverley’s life was go-go-go; she whizzed around Sussex in her little car, running classes at a dizzying variety of venues: Pilates at the Chichester Meridian Hotel (Mondays), aerobics-’n’-line-dancing at the Summerleaze Health Club (Tuesdays), St. Tropez tanning at the Copthorne (Wednesday evenings) and Table Decorations for Special Occasions once a month at the Billingshurst community center. Then there was the acupuncture, which she was learning from a videotape, and her home hairdressing business. Among all this she found time for a packed and disastrous love life. It was no wonder