Blind Date Read Free

and fixed her smile while her heart sank. Dear Mrs. Caroline Smythe had been a regular for a fortnight almost every year since financial necessity had forced Diana to accept her and her kind.
    â€œCaroline, how nice to see you!” Mrs. Kennedy murmured, taking an apparently impulsive step towards her and extending her hand. God forbid that the woman should kiss her. “I saw from the book that you’d arrived yesterday evening, I was out, I’m afraid. How
are
you? I was just coming to find you.”
    This display ofpleasure, as befitted a pair of widows of a certain age and long, if intermittent acquaintance, may have been entirely false, but Mrs. Smythe beamed. She was wearing a variation of her usual, jaunty headscarf and her fringe was a different colour. She was dressed in cut-off trousers, socks, hiking shoes and a flannel shirt, as if she was making for the cliff path and all the miles beyond, although she had never been known to walk further than a hundred yards. It was quite a change from the frothy frocks of last year. The woman was a miracle of reinvention, doing well for her age, whatever that was. No-one would ever guess they had been close, once, by mistake. A friendship born of crisis, as inexplicable as it had been temporary.
    â€œOh, Diana, darling,” Mrs. Smythe murmured. “Lovely to see you, too, but, my dear, I am so sorry to hear your news. The poor girl! And here, of all places! I am so sorry. As if you hadn’t had enough …”
    Diana darling detached her hand from the other’s grasp and resisted the temptation to wipe it on her trouser leg. Caroline’s hands were always sticky, as if she had overdone the moisturiser on fat fingers so soft they could no longer absorb it.
    â€œYes, well,” she said briskly, regretting Mary’s inevitable propensity to share family gossip with regular guests, and also realizing that this encounter could not be curtailed without adding something to the information already received. She lowered her voice to one of intimate confidentiality. “Terrible of course. Bizarre, isn’t it, to have a daughter with a dangerous job in horrid old London—although she’d already given that up, thank heavens—come down here for a break, only to get mugged by a madman in the village. Still, she’s getting better all the time.”
    â€œDid they catchhim?”
    â€œOh yes. A weirdo from down the coast. Confessed. He’d been barred from the pub. Kept on throwing things at customers on the way home. Troubles never come singly, do they?”
    She had a dim memory of Mrs. Smythe’s son, sliding down these banisters, screaming colourful abuse. Mrs. Smythe’s boy, who must have been born when Mummy was too old to control him and Daddy was halfway to desertion, the very child who had caused Diana to prohibit children and dogs apart from her own, and for that, she supposed she should feel grateful. She remembered not to ask about the son, just in case she should be told yet again how well he was doing now and what a fine young man he was, all to remind her of a faint feeling of guilt. She could not quite forget the memory of longer conversations with Caroline. Diana should never have confided in Caroline Smythe whatever the occasion: she had known it even at the time and had resisted a repetition, using any subterfuge which came to mind, in the same fortnight, every year.
    â€œI suppose that makes a difference to her recovery?” Caroline said. “One would imagine it would,” she added kindly. “I mean, knowing the danger’s removed, the culprit apprehended.” There was a mere tinge of a London accent in her voice; the use of words of more than one syllable sounded unnatural, as if she employed the longer words to decorate her speech rather than to explain herself. “But she was always a tough little girl and I expect she’s being very brave. Isn’t she?”
    â€œOh