The Return Read Free Page B

Petite, blonde, with a pert bottom well outlined by a tight skirt, and a neat bosom cupped in a lace bra just visible through a silk blouse, she satisfied several male fantasies. James’s stares made her feel almost uncomfortable.
     
    ‘Peachy,’ James described her to a colleague that lunchtime. ‘And quite sparky too.’
     
    The following week when she returned for a second meeting, he suggested a working lunch. The lunch led to a drink in a wine bar and within the week, they were what James called ‘an item’. Sonia was being swept off her feet and she had no desire to feel the ground beneath them. As well as being quite handsome, he filled in all kinds of gaps in her life. He came from a large, terribly English, entirely conventional, Home Counties family. Such firm foundations had been lacking in Sonia’s life and proximity to them made her feel secure. The two significant relationships she had been through in her twenties had ended disastrously for her. One had been with a musician, the other with an Italian photographer. Neither had been faithful to her and the appeal of James was his reliability, his public school solidity.
     
    ‘He’s so much older than you!’ objected her friends.
     
    ‘Why does that matter so much?’ queried Sonia.
     
    It was the very fact of this age gap that probably gave him the resources for lavishly extravagant gestures. On Valentine’s Day, he did not send a dozen red roses, he sent a dozen dozen, and her small flat in Streatham was overwhelmed. She had never been so spoiled, or indeed so happy when, on her birthday, she found a two-carat diamond solitaire ring in the bottom of a glass of champagne. ‘Yes’ was the only possible answer.
     
    Although Sonia had no intention of giving up a job she enjoyed, James offered her long-term security and in return she brought a dowry of childbearing potential and tolerance of a mother-in-law for whom no one was good enough for her son.
     
    As she lay in her cramped Granada hotel room, Sonia thought of their glorious white wedding, the images of it still so clear; a video had been professionally done and was still occasionally replayed. The marriage had taken place, two years after their first meeting, in the Gloucestershire village close to James’s family home.The dingy part of south London where Sonia had grown up would not have provided a picturesque enough backdrop for these nuptials. There was a rather obvious imbalance in the congregation (representation on the bride’s side was noticeably thinner than on the groom’s, which swelled with second cousins, fleets of small children and friends of his parents) but for Sonia the only really noticeable absence was her mother’s. She knew that her father felt it too. Apart from that, everything was perfect. Sprays of freesias festooned pew-ends and scented the air, and there was a gasp as Sonia entered through the arch of white roses on her father’s arm. In a full tulle gown that almost filled the width of the aisle, she floated down the strip of carpet towards her groom. Crowned with flowers, the sun creating a halo of light around her, the silver-framed photographs in her home reminded her that she had looked translucent, other-worldly on that day.
     
    After the reception (a four-course dinner for three hundred in a pink candy-striped marquee), James and Sonia left in a Bentley for Cliveden and by eleven the following morning they were on their way to Mauritius. It was a perfect beginning.
     
    For a long while, Sonia had loved being petted, cared for. She enjoyed the way that James opened doors for her, came home from business trips to Rome with satin lingerie in silk-lined boxes, from Paris with perfumes packaged in boxes within boxes layered like Russian dolls, and with airport scarves from Chanel and Hermès that were not quite her. The habit of clothing her and choosing how she might be fragranced was one he had copied from his father. Sonia’s in-laws, Richard and