Read The Light of Day: A Novel for Free Online

just be tempted?
    And anyway it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a “womanizer.” Only professionally. There wasn’t a history. Just the history of them being a happy couple with good careers, a grown-up son who’d flown the nest, and (her own sad words): “pretty well everything we could want . . .”
    She poked her spoon in her cappuccino. The traffic slid by outside.
    “And, anyway, when she first arrived, she looked—well, she looked like not much at all. You know what I mean? She looked like she didn’t care how she looked . . .”
    If you have everything, why go and risk it all? The good life. That house up there, through the trees, in burglar-alarm country. Why go asking for trouble? All her own bloody fault.
    But for pity’s sake. Or charity’s. Since wasn’t that the point? If you have everything, then shouldn’t you be able to afford that? And to look out from your window at the world now and then? Why do people spend money on flowers?
    “Do you follow the news . . . ?”
    It wasn’t really a question, and I didn’t say anything. I sipped my coffee. I follow people, I follow scents, it’s how I make my living. And where would I be if the well-off didn’t go chasing trouble now and then, with their cheque books to wave in its face?
    The black cashmere—to shop in. How much did a gynaecologist make?
    And she’d thought the vermouth was wrong.
    A teacher, she said. French and Spanish. A little freelance translation. A little English as well.
    I sipped my coffee. I didn’t say: Teachers—smart-arses, they always used to piss me off. But there must be something about them . . . I married one once.
    She looked straight ahead at the window but I could see her reflection in the glass.
    A teacher. A “lecturer.” Twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays (so it was where she’d just been), she took an English class, open to all-comers but aimed especially at foreign students. Brush up your English. And into that class had walked, one Tuesday afternoon, Kristina Lazic from Dubrovnik in Croatia.
    I looked it up, I wasn’t sure. You could say my field was domestic affairs.
    Croatia then—Yugoslavia before (and in my out-of-date atlas). The “former Yugoslavia”: a familiar phrase.
    “They won, you see. The Croats beat the Serbs.”
    What did this have to do with a flat in Fulham?
    And Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia, had once been, I knew this, in the holiday brochures. Hot old walls, blue sea. A tourist destination. The “Dalmatian Coast.” And that’s how it had been before she left—before Kristina had left—five years ago.
    She’d won a studentship and come to London only months before the serious trouble began. It must have involved calculations, hard thinking. Conscience searching. Eighteen years old: her big break. And then the world she’d left behind her had been smashed apart.
    But not just that—worse than that.
    “It’s hard to imagine . . . You might as well know . . .”
    First her brother, then both her parents had been killed. She’d got the news in two terrible, barely separated stages. The brother had become a soldier—but not for long. The parents had been unluckier still. They’d left for where they thought they’d be safer. A mistake. The wrong place, the wrong time. They weren’t the only ones to be rounded up.
    “Can you imagine . . . ?”
    I cleared my throat, the way you do during a lecture. The samba music swayed on.
    It put paid to her studies, of course. What was the point now? Though she was granted an extension to her studentship—and counselling—and, slowly, she’d begun to pick up the pieces, to make up for lost time. But even when she’d walked that Tuesday into Sarah’s class she’d looked “only half there—like some convalescent.”
    So Sarah had taken her under her wing.
    This would have been late in ’93. Then the summer had drawn near when her studentship—and visa—would expire, when her only option would be to register as an asylum