The Silver Chain by Primula Bond Read Free Book Online Page B

drink. For everything. It’s been fun meeting you, too.’
    Amazing how convincingly detached I sound. I start to back away and suddenly he’s in front of me. He’s looking down. All I can see is his black hair, the slope of his nose as he takes my hand and pushes a business card into it. Closes my fingers round it. Holding his own warm hand round mine like a cage as he pats it down into my pocket.
    ‘You never know.’ His voice is sombre and sad.
    I hesitate. I haven’t told him the party isn’t that far away. I could stay for at least a couple more drinks. Everything in me is straining to stay, but I won’t. I might never know if there’s something between us. If that spark I felt when his fingers were on my neck, his mouth on my fingers, was real.
    What is real is the way he nods at me to go then leans back against the bar, arms crossed over his wide chest, the sleeves rolled up over his wrists. I must depart, otherwise I never will. So with his eyes watching my every move, every bounce of my hair on my back, burning hot under my stranger’s gaze as I try to move gracefully, I push out into the foggy cold.

FOUR
    My feet are curiously sluggish as I walk down St James’s Street, as if there are weights in my boots or a magnet is drawing me backwards. The truth is I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want to leave that warm bar, that half-sipped cocktail. That intriguing tall stranger with the split-screen eyes and a way with his fingers.
    But as he lifted his hand in casual farewell just now it was as if he’d already forgotten me.
    There’s a chain spanning the space between us, a rope between ship and shore; no, more like a jailor’s thick chain jangling with keys and handcuffs. Except this is woven thin like a spider’s web, so delicate, so invisible it only occasionally catches the light. I don’t know which one of us holds it. Which one is caught.
    I might not see him again. So what? It was only an hour or so. A chat. He bought me a drink. Dry martini. Period. Why would I even consider missing a party to spend the evening with an older guy who, come to think of it, idiot that I am, oh my God how stupid am I, probably has a beautiful wife waiting for him in his beautiful home, stirring a stunning soup in a designer kitchen.
    My phone buzzes again, as if to knock some sense into me. I study the map that Pol has texted, so my eyes are down as I cross Trafalgar Square. The map shows a warren of streets on the other side of Covent Garden, and the venue is in the narrowest street of all.
    It feels very quiet out here. I thought there would be more of a party atmosphere, but I guess it’s still quite early. A few people are wandering about under Nelson’s haughty column, emerging from the tube at Charing Cross Station. They’re mostly in costume. The stab of scarlet skirts and fiery masks, the sharp black outlines of stalking skeletons, of horns and tails, pierce the thickening fog, which has simply dropped like a shroud. It dims the circling traffic, the glowing streetlamps, muffles the foot shuffle, like old photographs of the smog in post-war London.
    They seem to be gathering by one of the lions. I reach under my scarf to lift the camera from its strap. And I realise it’s not there. Icy panic grips me as I scrabble in my bag, my pockets, under my jacket even. As I stand there, going round in circles like a cat with a firework on its tail, I’m vaguely aware of people whispering and jostling around me, a shout, a cackle, but I can’t focus on them.
    A voice seems to whisper in my ear, the exposed ear, the ear he tucked my hair behind. It’s here, it says. Your camera. Both cameras. You left them in the cocktail bar in Dukes Hotel.
    I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Without my cameras I might as well have had my eyes put out.
    I have to get back there, sharpish, this is too good a photo op to miss. What makes it all the worse is that out of nowhere I think of how Jake would be nagging me to