Read Falling for Free Online

was away. But she’d wanted the cottage to be away from everyone she knew; had not wanted that crowded, frenetic weekend society experienced from staying with friends in their
weekend places – drinks, lunches, drinks, dinners. She had wanted somewhere quiet, where she was unknown and unnoticed and could work and sleep and read in peace. Anthony had offered to come
down with her to help her settle in, but she had refused. And so she had ended up by allowing a total stranger to help her. It had been odd, coming back from her first visit to the village shop to
find him apparently hanging about – almost as though he was waiting for her. She had felt a vague sense of alarm at the sight of him, but it turned out that he was simply wanting a job in the
garden (useful and reassuring); on the other hand, she had later realized, he hardly had the voice of a genuine jobbing gardener. This had struck her after he had made that really rather surprising
remark about art critics, then asked a series of questions that were unexpected and – although it was hard to say how – impertinent.
    But long before then she had implicitly engaged him by asking him to come back in the afternoon. If the call from America had not come a few seconds after she had encountered him, she might well
not have asked him back – might not have engaged him at all? Well, if he turned out to be too chatty and generally time-consuming, she could always tell him to go away, say that she wanted to
do the garden herself, anything. That problem, if it was one, was far away; she expected to be stuck in Los Angeles for at least two months, possibly three. A peevish way of putting it.
    She started to enumerate all the possible advantages. She would escape a good deal of the English winter. She would be able to go to New York and Mexico for short breaks. Money would not be a
problem for at least two years. She liked working with George. And finally, but by no means of lesser significance, it would be an enormous relief to be somewhere where she
knew
she would
not bump into Jason and Marietta, which during this autumn had seemed to happen with a regularity that she would have liked to call monotonous, except that it left her gasping inwardly with pain.
And rage, she reminded herself – hang on to the rage, whatever you do.
    But even after twelve years, ten of them divorced from him, her grief and . . . not shock but the memory of shock was there, and humiliation, wounded pride and subsequent anger had always to be
deliberately invoked. But not now, she thought, you’re getting away from all that. And really you’re away from it anyway; you don’t have to worry about how to divide your time
between work and love; you can dress to please yourself; you can read in bed all night if you want to; you can skip meals, spend too much money on your car, buy a cottage on impulse – in
short, please yourself. Pleasure was all very well, but I don’t
enchant
or
delight
myself, I need someone else to do that – or, rather, would need, if I wasn’t too
old for it. Work is the thing at my age, and jolly lucky to have it. But she didn’t want to start thinking about that now.
    In order not to have to try too hard, not to think about it, she pressed the play button for the tape. Bach streamed into the car and into her; passion and logic locked together to the
enhancement of each – an aspect more noticeable in him than in any other composer she could think of. She could see the motorway ahead and hoped that the partitas would last out.
    She had thought that the drive from North Oxfordshire plus all the things she had to do when she got home would have tired her enough to make her want to sleep, but they hadn’t. She had
had a hot bath, hoping that it would release some of the nervous tension she felt at the immediate prospect of the trip, but it had not. Now she lay on her back in the dark trying to bore herself
to sleep. She went through her lists; the