Read Out on a Limb for Free Online Page B

spouses, we have, as far as I can tell, no reason to feel any antagonism towards each other, yet Corinne, who was perfectly civil during our phone calls, still seems decidedly disinclined to engage with either Pru or I.
    ‘Her father did just die, I guess,’ comments Pru, ever the sage.
    ‘I know,’ I say. ‘But even so… Don’t you think she’s being a bit, I don’t know, offish?’
    ‘Offish?’
    ‘Well not offish so much, as just a bit anxious to avoid us, you know?’
    She shrugs. ‘I guess she’s just not that bothered about speaking to us. Chances are, after this, she’ll never clap eyes on us again.’
    Which thought seems to sum up just how arbitrary some relationships can be. We’re just connected by circumstance and now the circumstance has changed. I wonder who’ll end up with the sideboard.
    Of course, sideboard aside, I’m not remotely aware of just how very much the circumstances have changed at this point. Not a bit of it. I am too preoccupied with the circumstance in hand; the one where I’m stuck in a house with a bunch of people I don’t know, who I don’t particularly want to know, who certainly don’t seem to want to know me – which is fine – and wishing the whole tedious business was over, so I can get back to the much cheerier and also necessary business of taking up residence in my life again. But for now I must cut cake and make tea.
    Thus it is that I’m holed up in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil so I can make a pot. Jake’s mooching round the garden, trailed by his cousins, and chatting to someone on his mobile. Likewise, I’m chatting to Dee on mine. She’s called to update me on Charlie (I keep telling her not to, but she takes absolutely no notice) and to make arrangements for badminton next week. Can I make Tuesday okay? Yes, I can. Post-Charlie, Tuesday badminton has become my new black. I’m not very good at it. I’m actually quite bad at it. But it’s one hundred percent better than being bad, for sure. Plus it’s very efficacious on the bingo wings front, which, looking at my mother when she’s in her triangle stand, is clearly a matter about which to be concerned. ‘You won’t believe what Mum said,’ I’m telling Dee as I empty out the teapot. She says oh yes she will. So I tell her.
    ‘Come to think of it,’ I’ m saying. ‘It’s exactly the sort of thing she would say. God, but my mother is incorrigible.’
    The kettle boils then, so I ring off and reach for tea bags. Humming to myself and with my back to the kitchen door. So it’s no surprise that I don’t know someone else is in the kitchen. Not until it speaks to me, at any rate.
    ‘I suppose,’ the voice says, ‘that she did have a point.’
    As the voice says this at least five seconds after I last spoke, I assume for a moment that it must be engaged in conversation with someone else. But when I wheel around, it’s to find myself face to face with the face of the weatherman – who, now I think about it, does look vaguely familiar – and I realise there’s no one else in here. So he must have been talking to me. He sort of smiles but not quite, as one tends to at a funeral. ‘Gabriel Ash,’ he says equably, proffering a hand.
    I wipe my own hands on a tea towel and then extend one to shake his. He’s still looking sort of smiley, in a faintly self-reproving way. He’s got that kind of face. Animated. Changeable. A bit like the weather. Adjustable according to the season.
    ‘Oh, God,’ I say, flustered, realising that he’s probably – no, definitely – referring to my mother. ‘How embarrassing. You didn’t hear her, did you?’
    ‘I didn’t need to,’ he says, equally equably. ‘I just heard you , didn’t I? But I can’t say it was any sort of shock.’
    As I’m still not sure who he is (well, apart from a television weatherman with a celebrity girlfriend), I’m not really sure how to respond.
    ‘You knew Hugo, then?’ I plump for, because I guess he