China Wife Read Free

rather than the real thing, it was a decision that essentially made itself.
    It was obvious that many of the clientele of the coffee shop were regular and looked-for daily visitors. Julie wouldn’t have counted herself as one of these but she was slowly becoming one. Her welcome was assured and the slow recognition of her as one entitled to a favourite seat on the padded bench at the back of the eating area was apparent. Tables were mostly for two but generally rarely occupied by more than one at this time of the morning. The service was slick and Julie was impressed by the facility with which some of the long-standing customers were served with their first caffeine fix almost before they had even got themselves seated. And, with the mixed hopefulness and trepidation that was Monday morning, the sense of being in a somehow alien world diminished somewhat.
    The noise level was low and dominated by the hissing and spluttering of the shining Gaggia coffee machine as if the early-morningprivacy of the customers was not to be disturbed by unnecessary chatter nor their concentration on the sporting or financial pages of The Age broken by needless courtesy greetings. And being Australia it was usually the sporting pages that demanded first attention. Very few financial crises would have outweighed the need to know whether the Ashes series was going to go to the wire again. And, again, being Australia it was probably unnecessary to read the actual printed word to be in the know. The faces of those seeking their coffee fix after a Metro or car journey would readily have been able to tell you how things had gone.
    All of which being said, the coffee shop was rather more crowded this day than Julie had ever yet observed it. She put this down to the total absence of customers sitting outside. The diehard smokers had been forced into abstinence and inside by the arctic blast whistling between the canyons of the office buildings that verged on Spring Street and filled the space behind it.
    It was this unusual intensity of people, still discreet in their noise and movement, that attracted Julie’s attention to the figure temporarily blocking the shop doorway rather than his Greek-god good looks. Like the diehard smokers, he was obviously trying to escape the wind, or so Julie imagined, but unlike them it was equally obvious that this was the first time that he had set foot in the coffee shop. This gave her a fellow feeling.
    Always alert to the needs of her customers and to the proximity of competing establishments, the waitress steered the man towards Julie’s table. Single occupancy, of necessity, was going to have to be foregone.
    â€˜Do you mind?’
    Julie was hardly going to say no!
    The silence between them wasn’t going to last either.
    â€˜You don’t like scrambled eggs, then?’
    Julie took in the obvious humour in the man’s remark; therelish with which she was consuming her breakfast was clearly all too apparent. The sparkle in the clear blue eyes that met her more complex, almond-shaped brown ones lingered as she considered her reply. The muffled but persistent opening bars of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture emitting from her shoulder bag somewhere under the table cut off her half-formed response to be replaced by a distinctly unladylike curse under her breath. The blue eyes opposite sparkled even more.
    The speed with which Julie untangled her mobile phone from her belongings impressed the man. Starting to lever himself to his feet in a question of whether she needed privacy, she flashed a negative in a quick, friendly smile. The displayed mobile phone number wasn’t immediately familiar to her; not that many numbers were after so short a sojourn in Melbourne, but that meant that she didn’t know whether she would mind being overheard or not.
    â€˜Julie Kershawe.’
    To the man sitting opposite Julie, the ensuing conversation must have seemed bizarre in the extreme. From time to