Weekend Read Free

from MI5 billeted in the house. You never know what they’re up to. But I like that about them.’
    ‘We have a cat.’ The ‘we’ was ominous. Was she married to the peripatetic vat? ‘Maisie. She has the run of the house. Sometimes sleeps on my bed.’
    ‘My’ bed. Green shoots of hope showing again.
    ‘Oh, we’ll have to see about that,’ he said.
    She looked at him, slightly startled.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Well, it could be dangerous. Maybe pass something on to you. All that proximity of fur.’
    ‘Oh, that.’
    ‘Also. Could maybe do some physical damage when you least expect it. Bite your bare bum or that.’
    ‘And why would your bum be bare?’
    ‘I honestly can’t think of a reason offhand. But I’m sure there must be one somewhere.’
    They were smiling at each other when a man, walking as if he had a brass band behind him, came up and shook hands without preliminary, introduced himself and said, ‘I’m a lawyer.’ Harry just managed to stifle an impulse to say, ‘Ssh. If you don’t announce it, maybe nobody’ll guess.’ Instead, he introduced the lawyer to her, allowing her to supply her name, which he couldn’t immediately remember. Mary Sue. He was trying to resign himself with grace to a three-way conversation when he realised this was to be a monologue. The lawyer was here to put him right about something he had written in his column. The man was obviously one of those people who mistake fluency forarticulacy. As long as he kept talking, he assumed he was saying something of significance. He thought conversation was a one-way street. As Harry had dreaded, it was a street where she wasn’t going to loiter. She turned down her mouth at him and drifted away.
    Time passes, like a three-legged tortoise sometimes.
    ‘What you don’t seem to appreciate,’ the man was saying, ‘is that those lawyers were simply fulfilling a public service by being there.’
    He was trying to remember which column the man was going on about. It must be the one where he had attacked that legal firm which was picketing its local casualty units, distributing leaflets on how to claim for compensation if anything went wrong with your treatment.
    ‘I admit it’s possible that some few may be a trifle over-zealous,’ the man said.
    ‘Hm.’ (Excuse me while I go and throw myself off a cliff.)
    ‘But –’
    He had lost track of her. That had been pleasant for a moment there, relaxed nonsense behind which their eyes had been reading each other like a sub-text. He had enjoyed her presence. He figured her about mid-thirties, maybe slightly over that. She had an attractiveness that made him not just wonder where she had been but wish a little he could have been there with her. Her body had reached the point of being opulently fleshed without yet being heavy. The soft blonde hair imbued her maturity with a warm glow. Given the almost anorexic fashionability of most of the younger women in the room, she had been like coming upon a Renoir in a gallery of Lowrys. Not that he didn’t like Lowry but he knew whose figures he would rather get physically involved with.
    ‘I don’t see why lawyers should be criticised for finding enterprising ways to ply their trade.’
    His eyes were wandering round the room when he saw her. She was standing among a group of men. Well, she would be, wouldn’t she? But she was looking at him. The glance congealed into a stare. He didn’t know how long it took her eyes to turn away towards one of the men. Five seconds? Fifteen? But it had been as if they were looking at each other down a private, silent corridor. If that was just a glance, it was one your imagination could feed off for a month. It was a glance that felt like an assignation.
    ‘I say, good on them,’ the lawyer was saying.
    Had he imagined it? She was talking with the men again. They weren’t a bad-looking group either. Especially two of the three. And they were young.
    He hadn’t imagined it. To think that