Read Aphrodite's Hat for Free Online Page B

people afraid.’
    â€˜You see,’ she said, triumphant, disengaging his grip from her arm and placing her own under his, ‘even your stupid old Church believed in it!’
    She was smiling again, and in a rush of joy that the matter of the dragon had been settled – slaughtered for good, he hoped – and that she was back with him again, he was about to propose lunch in the trattoria they had passed when she continued:
    â€˜Where shall we go for lunch?’ – and before he could answer – ‘Or, let’s just have a snack now, shall we? Then we can eat properly for once tonight. At the Danieli, or that one I read about, where the film-stars go, the Cipriani. We can, now, can’t we …?’

THE HAWTHORN MADONNA
    Every Easter, Elspeth and Ewan stayed in a cottage loaned them by Mrs Stroud, who had been a school friend of Ewan’s Aunt Val. Not that the two old ladies ever saw much of each other in their latter days. Still, it was recognisably Edie Stroud in Aunt Val’s photo album – the girl with the almost coal-black hair, very bobbed – unless that was Mary Squires, after all, who died of tuberculosis after her fiancé shot himself. When Mrs Stroud herself died, the cottage passed to her nephew who worked in Amsterdam – something to do with diamonds, someone had said, though that might have been wishful thinking. He was glad enough to let it without trouble to a couple who did not mind that there was a greenish fungus around the window frames and that you had to hang the bedding before the fire to air each night before you went to sleep. Indeed, they would have missed the nightly ritual, Elspeth and Ewan, if Mrs Stroud’s nephew had done what his aunt had always been saying she would do and have a proper damp course laid down.
    Luckily, Mrs Stroud herself was now laid down instead and the fingers of moisture were allowed to settle inside the glass of the windows unhindered and make little feathery rivulets down the pane and emanate out into the general air of the place.
    Elspeth and Ewan had never had any children. In the early days when they went to ‘Brow’ they had gone with the plan of serious lovemaking. But as anyone who has ever tried it knows ‘serious’ lovemaking is not the most successful kind. When it became clear that for one reason or another (they never tried too hard to discover which) they were not going to have children they tacitly dropped such plans. This did not mean that they were not affectionate with each other. People often said of them that they were an exceptionally warm couple – really, it did you good to be with them. In bed at night they held each other close even years after the lovemaking had been dropped altogether, except for birthdays and Christmas. But it was Easter when they always went to ‘Brow’ which seemed not quite to qualify …
    This Easter was particularly cold, though Elspeth said that all Easters were cold these days and it must be to do with climate change. She believed that something had happened to the calendar since they were young. Not at all, Ewan said. The Met Office had produced statistics which demonstrated that the weather had been much the same, give or take the odd fluctuation, for the past two hundred years. That was just like men, Elspeth had retorted, to dismiss everything the scientists tell us if it didn’t suit their prejudices. They were driving, as usual, down the M3 and off the A303 past Stonehenge and into the heart of Somerset, if such a promiscuous county could be said to have a ‘heart’.
    The cottage was called ‘Brow’ because it stood on the brow of a low hill – hardly a hill at all, really, more a kind of hump. It stood alone at the end of a lane, which fortunately had never been surfaced and therefore discouraged picnickers.
    Elspeth unpacked the box of groceries she had brought from London to save having to go too often