Aphrodite's Hat by Salley Vickers Page A

asked.
    Although Sylvie found her husband tiresome she had never been unfaithful to him. Infidelity was not her line. She didn’t like complications and sex with anyone but her husband was something she was prepared to try again only in the unlikely event that she might fall in love. She had been in love once and the experience had been painful. The other person had been married and they had agreed to be honourable. In marrying Phillip, she had succumbed to the lure of security – a false one, as she now saw, but the nature which had kept her from stealing another woman’s man also kept her faithful. So when the beautiful young man telephoned at first she pretended not to know who he was.
    â€˜Who is it?’ she enquired. And waited.
    â€˜If that’s a riddle it’s either very difficult or very easy,’ was the answer. And after that Sylvie stopped pretending with Jamie Ransome.
    Sylvie had always thought of herself as someone who disliked the phone. ‘I can’t think what we find to say to each other,’ she remarked one day when Jamie had called three times.
    â€˜We speak the things we would otherwise say only to ourselves,’ he replied.
    There was no doubt that it was flattering to be the object of so much attention from someone so young and so beautiful.
    â€˜I am eighteen years older than you, old enough to be your mother,’ Sylvie commented when Jamie exclaimed that a particular hairstyle made her look sixteen.
    â€˜An indecently young mother,’ was his rejoinder, ‘and besides, a person’s “age” has more to do with their soul than their chronological years.’
    Sylvie had worried at first that she might fall in love with Jamie; it hardly seemed possible she could avoid doing so. It was not so much his beauty but the wisdom of his utterances which she found compelling. To be understood was a secret yearning; one she had put away after the experience of falling in love had worked out so badly. Phillip understood her so little that it was almost a relief. There was a cool privacy in his non-comprehension which left her free to be herself. But to be oneself is almost always lonely; to be perceived and apparently comprehended was unexpected, and disarming.
    Sylvie hoped that she was not going to make a fool of herself, something, temperamentally, she fought shy of. But as the weeks went by, and she and Jamie became more and more familiar, she was glad to note that while she occasionally wanted to fold him in her arms, she had no thoughts of any greater intimacy with her new friend. Instead, they talked, animatedly, and intimately, several times a day, and went on shopping trips together, where Jamie dictatorially chose her clothes and issued decrees over makeup.
    From time to time, Sylvie wondered what Phillip made of her friendship; but a bonus of living with Phillip was his apparent indifference to how his wife spent her time. That she might be becoming a little dependent on Jamie occasionally troubled her. But she was not a dependent sort and told herself firmly that when, as she must expect, Jamie found more enthralling company than herself she would swallow any hard feelings and be dignified.
    However, Jamie seemed to want no other confidante and, after a while, she began to take her position with him for granted. The dinner they had met at was in February. ‘We’ll have known each other six months next week,’ she reminded him. The six months had passed in the blink of an eye. She could not say where the time had gone; only that it had passed more vividly than usual.
    â€˜We must celebrate,’ Jamie declared. ‘We’ll put on our glad rags and paint the town red. Where would you like to go?’
    Before he went off to be killed in the Great War, Sylvie’s grandmother had met the love of her life at Claridge’s and it lingered in Sylvie’s mind as the most desirable place in London to dine. She and Jamie