A Perfect Life Read Free Page A

We’re going to the cinema.’
    On the sofa in the snug, Nick flicks on the television, and thanks God for the invention of cricket.

Angel
    The children have gone into a trance of tiredness now that Angel has got them back in the car after a day playing with school friends. Ruby and Foss are bundled on the back seat in an array of play implements which should have been stashed in the boot. Angel is regretting her own feebleness in not insisting on this with every corner, as plastic spades clatter and fall on the floor, or a rush of beach pebbles spills from a bucket down between the seats. Driving with dark glasses on through the lustrous pink and gold evening cornfields, Angel wonders how many conversations and thoughts it is possible for one person to have at one moment and not implode. Radio Two is playing a song from her past, getting lost in rock and roll, drifting away.
    Part of her mind is transported back to a summer when she was seventeen, and had too much time to lie around feeling sorry for herself. It was hot, like today, and every day Angel lay naked on the flat roofof the woodshed at home in the suburbs of Cambridge, soaking up the sun. She breathed in the sticky earth smell of bitumen tar, inhaled one cigarette after another and deliberately closed her mind to revision. Her mind hummed and buzzed through all of that summer, with the rush of nicotine from the stolen cigarettes she sneaked from her father’s pocket.
    Angel turns the car off the main road and slows down for a tractor dragging a trailer piled high with a gold glacier of corn. She shivers involuntarily. The first field is harvested, the path cut to make way for the end of summer; this moment always makes her sad, even though it is still only July.
    Her thoughts return again to the wilful destructiveness in her teenage self that took her tiptoeing into the bedroom where her father lay gasping for breath, only half conscious. His prone state, incapacitated from smoking, drowning in his own lungs from emphysema, enabled her, unnoticed, to slide her hand into the cool silk of the inside pocket of his jacket for his always-present packet of cigarettes. The hot, ironed smell of his shirts, the whiff of lemon aftershave and tobacco curled like smoke through her memory. She could take the cigarettes and no one knew. No one cared what she was doing or wondered where she was. Her father was dying, a process which would take ten years. Her mother Dawn was distant. Fourply, the family business set up by Lionel and his brother Terry, was run by the board. In its heyday the company had flourished, supplying school uniform manufacturers and swimming-costume makers with stretch nylon,but at the time Lionel became ill it slumped, and Angel remembered Terry’s glee when Fourply won a shell-suit contract with a removals firm.
    â€˜I don’t think this is what Lionel built the company for,’ her mother had sighed. ‘Anyway, I’m going upstairs to see him. You’ll find some lunch for yourself later, won’t you?’
    It was late morning. Dawn was in her dressing gown and had just put the telephone down. She went through to the kitchen, opened the fridge and took a glass from the cupboard next to it. As she poured vermouth, then tipped her head back to drink it in a gulp, Angel realised with vague unease that she had seen her mother do this every day for as long as she could remember. And until she left home, she measured time by this small deliberate routine of her mother’s, though she never told a single person. Now, more than twenty years have passed, and Angel still remembers the ache of feeling unwanted that opened like a chasm when she heard her mother telling her father, ‘And we don’t have to worry about getting her up for school for a while. She’s revising and she can get the bus. And then she’ll be gone. She’ll look after herself, Lionel.’
    The present intrudes sharply, a voice in