Read The Forever Girl for Free Online Page A

you knew?
    Teddy was keen.
    “Yes,” he said. “I’ve often thought that people round here arehiding something.”
    “There you are,” said James. “So what we have to do is just make sure that everybody round us is okay. We check up on them first, and then we move on to other people. We’ll find out soon enough who’s a spy and who isn’t.”
    “Good idea,” said Teddy. He looked puzzled. “How do you do it?”
    “You watch,” Clover explained. “Spies give themselves away eventually. You note where they go. You have to keep records, you see. And you take photographs. I’ve got a camera.”
    “Me too,” said Teddy. “For my last birthday. It has this lens that makes things closer …”
    “Zoom lens,” said James knowingly. “Good.”
    “And then we can load them onto the computer and print them,” said Teddy. “I know how to do that.”
    “We can begin with your dad,” said James casually. “Just for practice.”
    Teddy shook his head. “No. Why begin with him? Why not begin with yours?”
    James glanced at Clover.
    “All right,” she said. “We don’t have to start with your dad, Teddy. We can start with mine. Or even my mum. My dad’s out at the office most of the time. We can start with my mum.”
    “Doing what?” asked Teddy.
    Clover put a finger to her lips in a gesture of complicity. “Observation.”

6
    He was there when she reached the bar, which is the way she wanted it to be. If she had arrived at the Grand Old House first then she would have had to sit there, in public, looking awkward. George Town was still an intimate, village-like place – at least for those who lived there – and somebody might have come up to her, some friend or acquaintance, and asked her where David was. This way at least she could avoid that, although she realised that this meeting might not be as discreet as she might wish. People talked; a few months previously at a tennis club social she had herself commented on seeing a friend with another man. It could have been innocent, of course, and probably was, but she had spoken to somebody about it. Not that she had much time for gossip, but when there was so little else to talk about … And in due course she, and everybody else who had speculated on the break-up of that marriage, had been proved right.
    She should have said no. She could have said that she had to get back to the children – they had always provided a complete excuse for turning down unwanted invitations. Or she could have suggested that he called at the house for a drink later on, and she could then have telephoned David asking him whether he could get back in time because George Collins was dropping in. And David would have told her to explain to George about his meeting and that would have been her off the hook – able to entertain another man at the house in complete propriety. But she did not do this, and now here she was at the Grand Old House meeting him without the knowledge of her husband.
    She tried to suppress her misgivings. Men and women could be friends these days without threatening their marriages. Menand women worked together, collaborated on projects, served on committees with one another. Young people even shared rooms together when they travelled, without a whiff of sex. It was natural – and healthy. It was absurd to suggest that people should somehow keep one another at arm’s length in all other contexts simply because their partners might see such friends as a threat. The days of closed, possessive marriages were over; women were no longer their husbands’ chattels, to be guarded jealously against others.
    That was a rationalisation, though, and she was honest enough to admit it to herself. She wanted to see George Collins because he interested her – it was as simple as that. She thought, with shame, of how different it would have been if it were David she was meeting for a drink; she would have felt nothing. Now something had awakened within her –