Aphrodite's Hat Read Free

relishing their nakedness in the December cold, stared out into the wintry darkness. A figure over by the bins straightened up and looked furtively about. Clive opened the window.
    â€˜Oh, Mrs Hampshire,’ he shouted down. ‘What a lovely party. We did enjoy ourselves. But we should have helped with all those bottles, instead of leaving them to you.’

JOIN ME FOR CHRISTMAS
    Emily had met Lionel after many years managing on her own. For those who are not temperamentally suited to solitude, living alone feels not so much a trial as a waste. Emily’s first husband, a physicist, had gone to America to deliver a lecture and had never returned. Emily was a little put out when, at a later date, she met the cause of his decampment. ‘Dumpy, with red-veined cheeks’, was how she described the new wife to her friend Deb. Emily herself was slight and on the whole did not forget her makeup. ‘Perhaps he likes them with a bit more flesh,’ Deb had, not too tactfully, replied.
    While the children were small, Emily had coped with the life of a single parent, sometimes with a touch of despair, sometimes almost breezily. But when her younger daughter, Kate, left to study drama at Bristol University, Emily found herself crying into a brushed cotton nightdress – the one with koala bears on it which Kate had rejected as unsuitable for college wear. Emily knew from this that change was called for. ‘This won’t do,’ she said sternly to herself and arranged with Deb to attend evening classes.
    Lionel was at the class on Greek civilisation which had led, in time, to a study tour of the ancient sites of the Peloponnese. Emily had left her handbag in a restaurant, and Lionel had been gallant in retrieving it. After that, they had become a couple, of a kind. At weekends, Lionel visited Emily because her house was larger than his bachelor apartment. They walked, her arm in his, through the park and discussed Greek and other civilisations; and it was pleasant to have a body beside hers in bed at night, and a face to chat and read the papers with in the morning.
    Lionel’s introduction to Emily’s children went better than she’d expected. ‘He’s nice, Mum,’ Beth had said after a dinner where Emily had burned the leg of lamb in her anxiety over her daughters’ pending judgement. ‘You could do worse,’ was Kate’s more laconic view. The girls were glad their mother had someone to spend time with so that they needn’t worry about her. So when Lionel asked Emily to marry him it seemed not a bad plan.
    â€˜Well, if you’re sure,’ Emily said. She didn’t want another disappointment, not at her time of life.
    â€˜I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t,’ Lionel had said.
    Perhaps there is some concealed trap-door which the vow to love and cherish unlatches but once they had signed their names in the local registry office, which was the last port of dreariness, the sense of companionship which had attracted Emily to Lionel began to slip away. Few people attended the ceremony – just the girls and Deb on Emily’s side – Lionel had not asked anyone on his, which Emily vaguely noticed but at the time didn’t trouble to ponder.
    The honeymoon in Ravenna, where they admired the famous Byzantine mosaics, was only moderately passionate – but sensible people know not to expect too much of such occasions. Emily had learned her lesson with Mark. She kept her own counsel when Lionel complained about slow service in the laid-back local taverna and became irate over the matter of the lazy water pressure in their bathroom. And she did not take issue when he objected to the weather – unfortunately unseasonably inclement – though it was far from clear to her to whom his objections could usefully be addressed. But then, she thought, it is not every day, thank goodness, that one gets married and maybe it was his way of letting off