The Forever Girl Read Free Page A

rather unexciting man, a man of habit, interested in figures and money and not much else. She felt dizzy at the thought of … of what? Years of emptiness ahead? Clover was eight now, and Billy was four. Fifteen years?
    She answered his question. “I promised her I wouldn’t mention it to anyone, but I assume that she didn’t intend you not to know.”
    He agreed. “People think that spouses know everything. And they usually do, don’t they? People don’t keep things from their spouse.”
    She thought there might have been a note of criticism in whathe said, even of reproach, but he was smiling at her. And she was asking herself at that moment whether she would ever sleep with another man, while staying with David. If she would, then who would it be?
    “No,” she said. “I mean yes. I mean they don’t. She probably thinks you know.”
    He tucked the papers into a folder. “Poor woman. She loves kids so much and she can’t … Unfair, isn’t it?”
    There was an old sea-grape tree beside the pool and a breeze, cool from the sea, was making the leaves move; just a little. She noticed the shadow of the leaves on the ground shifting, and then returning to where it was before. George Collins. If anyone, it would be with him.
    She felt a surge of self-disgust, and found herself blushing. She turned away lest he should notice, but he was getting up from his reclining chair and had begun to walk over towards the pool.
    “I’m going to have a dip,” he said. “It’s getting uncomfortable. I hate this heat.”
    He took off his shirt; he was already wearing swimming trunks. He slipped out of his sandals and plunged into the pool. The splash of the water was as in that Hockney painting, she thought; as white against the blue, as surprised and as sudden as that.

3
    George and Alice Collins had little to do with the rest of the expatriates. This was not because they were stand-offish or thought themselves a cut above the others – it was more a case of having different interests. He was a doctor, but unlike most doctors on the island he was not interested in building up a lucrative private practice. He ran a clinic that was mostly used by Jamaicans and Hondurans who had no, or very little, insurance and were not eligible for the government scheme. He was also something of a naturalist and had published a check-list of Caribbean flora and a small book on the ecology of the reef. His wife, Alice, was an artist whose watercolours of Cayman plants had been used on a set of the island’s postage stamps. They were polite enough to the money people when they met them on social occasions – inevitably, in a small community, everybody eventually encounters everybody else – but they did not really like them. They had a particular distaste for hedge fund managers whom George regarded as little better than licensed gamblers. These hedge fund managers would probably not have cared about that assessment had they noticed it, which they did not. Money obscured everything else for them: the heat, the sea, the economic life of ordinary people. They did not care about the disapproval of others: wealth, and a lot of it, can be a powerful protector against the resentment of others. Alice shared George’s view of hedge fund managers, but her dislikes were even broader: she had a low opinion of just about everybody on the island, with the exception of one or two acquaintances, of whom Amanda was one: the locals for being lazy and materialistic, the expatriates for being energetic and materialistic, and the rest for being uninterested in anything that interested her. She did not want to be there; shewanted to be in London or New York, or even Sydney – where there were art galleries and conversations, and things happened; instead of which, she said, I am here, on this strip of coral in the middle of nowhere with these people I don’t really like. It was a mistake, she told herself, ever to come to the Caribbean in the first place.