The Good Girl Read Free Page B

play.
    Ailsa couldn’t bear to watch again. She couldn’t decide whether she was being cowardly or sensitive. She sat down on the yellow sofa. When Romy replayed this scene in her head, as surely she would, periodically, for the rest of her life, would it be worse for her to watch it alone or with someone else? Ailsa, usually so decisive, didn’t know the right answer. She pressed her fingers into her temples until she could feel the blood vessel pulsing beneath. And then it was too late. Romy’s face froze. Her usually pale complexion flushed until even the tips of her ears were red. Her lips turned down until she looked like the mask of the goddess of tragedy that hung above the door of the school theatre. It was as if her face was separating from her body. For a moment it was a perfect mask. Ailsa knew she was about to cry. Her life as she knew it had ended.
    It was too late for anger, yet part of Ailsa wanted to shake Romy and demand why she had allowed this
to happen. The other part wanted to hold her in her arms like a small child and protect her. She knew from experience that this was the moment when she had to ask the question. Children would always tell the truth when there was nothing left to lose.
    ‘Who is the boy?’
    There was a knock at the door. Her father came in before Romy could respond.
    ‘Sorry,’ Harry said without offering any explanation. Ailsa’s anxiety spiked again at his bad timing. ‘I got a call about giving a lecture in Cambridge.’ He went over to his daughter and put his arms around her. Ailsa didn’t say anything. The girl didn’t need to ask how her mother would react. She knew already.
    ‘Oh, Mum,’ said Romy, getting up from the chair and looking at Ailsa for the first time. Ailsa walked over to her daughter, arms outstretched, like she did when her daughter first learned to walk. For a moment all three of them stood in a silent embrace. Ailsa looked up at Harry.
    ‘How has this happened to us?’

1
Three months earlier
    Ailsa woke up lying on her front, trying to piece together fragments of a dream that had already scattered. She allowed her hand to drift beneath the duvet until it reached the man in bed beside her. Good. He was still asleep. Keeping her eyes closed, she gently pressed a small circle of Harry’s flesh with her fingertip and tried to guess which part of him she was touching, remembering a game they used to play when they first met.
    Except it was instantly recognizable as the cleft above his left hip bone. Nineteen years together might have softened the angles but Ailsa was now more familiar with Harry’s topography than her own. She could navigate his body like a blind person reading Braille. She wished for a moment that she could go back to the first time, to recapture that excitement of mutual discovery. Passion was commensurate with the amount of insecurity you could tolerate, Ailsa had recently read somewhere, probably in a magazine she had confiscated from a pupil at school. And after almost twenty years she and Harry should be very secure together.
    His skin was hot to the touch. Its warmth made her
hesitate but if she curled herself around him to soak up his heat then he might wake up and misread the gesture as a desire for sex. The mechanics of early-morning arousal were as predictable as a metronome. The old post-coital euphoria had been replaced by the less glorious sensation of a job well done.
    Outside it was snowing again. Ailsa could tell because the usual sounds of early morning were muffled as if someone had thrown a blanket over the house. It wasn’t an illusion that snow created stillness and tranquillity, Romy had explained to her little brother, Ben, last night, during a family dinner characterized by a shortfall of both qualities. ‘Snow is porous so it absorbs noise.’ Nine-year-old Ben had stared at her in awe. ‘Perfect conditions for a trainee spy who needs to pass on information, Grub,’ she added. He nodded so vigorously