Emergency: Wife Lost and Found by Carol Marinelli Page A

held up the white plastic bags. ‘I stopped and grabbed some Thai.’
    ‘Yum!’ She sat up far more easily than she had in recent days and went and got the plates. James opened and served up the food. They sat on the sofa and ate off their knees, Lorna drinking her blackcurrant juice as James enjoyed a glass of red wine. Lorna felt as if shewas finally back in contact with the real world. She told James she’d read the paper, seen the news and rung her friends to catch up.
    ‘Not bad for a day’s work!’ he teased.
    ‘You didn’t have to waste your Friday night with me,’ Lorna said, when they’d finished their take-away and it was still only eight-thirty. ‘I’m sure you’ve got loads of things to do.’
    ‘Well, you go home on Sunday.’ He shrugged.
    ‘Still, I don’t need a babysitter, and you get so little time off—you should be spending it with Ellie. Is she away? Only I haven’t seen her.’ She took a sip of her blackcurrant juice and found she was holding it in her mouth when he answered.
    ‘We broke up.’ James said, rather too lightly.
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘No need to be—it had been on the cards for ages.’ He was flicking through the TV channels and something caught his attention. ‘Oh, it’s…’ He stopped then because it was her favourite movie or it had been her favourite movie and he’d liked it too, but for ten years now, whenever it had come on, whenever he’d seen it at the video store, he’d just ignored it.
    ‘I haven’t seen it in ages,’ Lorna said, so he left it on, but she wished he hadn’t. It reminded her of when a sex scene came on the television while her parents were in the room. Even a steamy kiss had had her mother sitting rigid as her father silently fumed—not that there was much sex in this movie, and not that James was rigid or fuming, it was just too close for comfort, a movie that divorced couples should watch alone. It was too late to admit it, so they both sat in a strained silence as theywatched two friends who should always have been lovers resisting it at every turn.
    He could smell her hair. Even from the other end of the sofa, he always had been able to the night she’d washed it. It was just so thick and long and there was so much of it that the fragrance hung in the air. The only difference was it smelt of his shampoo tonight, instead of her usual. The other difference was that he couldn’t reach over and touch it. Actually, not so different, James thought with a rueful smile because by the end of their marriage he hadn’t been able to touch it either. Her hand would come up and push his away—as if it made her skin crawl for him to even touch her.
    She wouldn’t push his hand away tonight. He knew, just knew, that sex hung in the air. It was like trying to breathe deeply in a sauna. There were just a few inches separating them and a whole ten years too, and now she was crying.
    He could hear her sniffing. Even though the film was still funny, she always cried at this point because, Lorna had once explained, she knew what was coming, knew what was about to happen.
    He’d known her so well and then suddenly he’d found he didn’t know her at all.
    ‘What happened to us, Lorna?’
    ‘Please, don’t, James,’ Lorna said, because she couldn’t bear it. She wanted to turn to him like a flower to the sun, to curl up in his lap and let him stroke her hair as they watched the movie, or to lie on the sofa wrapped in his arms and not worry about the ending, only she couldn’t. ‘Please, don’t start about that.’
    Except he had to, because there had been no finalrow, no harsh words, no goodbye sex. He couldn’t, though he’d tried and tried to remember, still he couldn’t recall the last time they’d made love. He hadn’t known that night or day or whenever it had been, that it had been the last time he’d hold her.
    ‘You just left.’
    ‘James.’
    ‘If we could have talked…’
    ‘What was there to say?’ Amber eyes met