Read The Crooked House for Free Online Page B

hidden as though behind a curtain. When this wedding was over it would stop, these images would stop, thought Alison, letting her bag drop on to the sofa. She sat beside it. Her head felt odd, shorn, cold.
    ‘No, I like it,’ he said, leaning down over the sofa behindher, and for a moment he let his hand rest on the back of her neck. Then it was gone, he was gone. ‘I got you something.’
    She recognised the logo on the box. A line appeared beside his mouth as he gave her that half-smile, looking down at her on the sofa, searching her face. Watching. No one had ever examined her before, as he did – it was as if he was memorising her.
    ‘For our holiday,’ he went on, standing, as if he’d read her mind. ‘Drink?’ He was by a long veneer sideboard, where he kept booze, odd bottles of foreign aperitifs made of things like artichokes. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘No tonic.’
    She pulled at the ribbon around the box, but she knew already. There were layers of tissue, she could imagine the salesgirl with her startled eyebrows and her tight-buttoned dress folding the fine light stuff inside. ‘Oh,’ she said, panicked and excited at once.
    Inside the shop’s changing room, a thick heavy curtain behind her that muffled whatever the salesgirl and Kay had said to each other, Alison had hardly dared look at herself when she’d tried it on, but she remembered the thrill of the garment’s unfamiliarity, the weight and coolness of it. It was something for an older woman, it was dressing up, it promised things. Kay had tugged at the curtain, her eyes appeared at the gap, an
oh
had escaped her, sounding almost put out and she’d pulled back straight away, out of sight. When Alison had come out and shaken her head to the assistant Kay had frowned. ‘Just as well,’ she said. ‘I’d have had to kill you for it, looking like that.’
    He still had his back to her. ‘Did Kay tell you …’ She must have done – but Alison couldn’t imagine any such conspiracy. She held it up. She didn’t even know what it was supposed to be, for sleeping in? Or drifting about. She put a hand to her cropped head, thinking, stupidly, wrong time to cut your hair. But she couldn’t stop looking at it.
    ‘Youlike it.’ Now Paul had turned, a bottle of gin in one hand.
    She looked up at him over her shoulder. ‘How did you know?’ she said.
    ‘I was in Soho,’ he said. ‘I was on my way to lunch with someone and I saw you go in there, with that woman you work with.’
    ‘Kay.’ Something in his voice made her wonder if he didn’t like Kay. Had they ever even met?
    ‘I went back later,’ he said. ‘She told me what you tried on. The girl.’
    ‘Clever,’ said Alison. She thought of him talking to the foreign girl in her tight-buttoned uniform, in the dark room hung with expensive things to be worn in bedrooms. But she wanted the slip: she pulled it into her lap,
mine
.
    ‘Thank you,’ she said. Paul set the gin bottle down, came over and stroked her cheek. ‘You don’t mind, then,’ he said.
    ‘Mind?’
    ‘You’re a pretty independent girl,’ he said. ‘Woman.’ She flushed.
    ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.
    ‘I’m going out for some tonic.’ He reached for his wallet, and the door swung behind him.
    Alison had never been in his flat alone before: she was aware of that before the door even clicked shut. Did this mean something, that he trusted her, for example? It occurred to her as she stood from the sofa and let the slip fall that one of the reasons they’d got this far was that she had showed as much respect for his privacy as he had hers. Which meant that there was plenty she didn’t know.
    She didn’t know if it was the knowledge that he’d watched her go into the underwear shop without disclosing himself, or that he’d been on his way to lunch with someone whose name he hadn’t told her, but she was curious; suddenly, greedily,childishly curious. How long would it take him? There was an off-licence and