The Radleys by Matt Haig Page B

husband, slightly hungover but relaxed and thinking about Peter’s frightened face after she’d made her modest move under the table. She stares across the room to the picture on their wal . A tantric diagram of a right foot—a print of a classic eighteenth-century Hindu yantra mapping al the inner structure and energy points of the foot, which she had bought on eBay.
    Mark hadn’t wanted it hanging on the wal , of course. Just as he didn’t want her clients taking off their socks in his living room.
    Stil , she nestles into him now, as he rouses from his sleep.
    “Good morning,” she whispers into his ear.
    He barely grunts a response.
    Undeterred, her hand slips inside his T-shirt and caresses his skin with a feather-light touch.
    She slides her fingers lower, unbuttons his boxer shorts, and strokes his flaccid penis as tenderly as if it were a pet mouse. And this soft and careful stroking works, in that it arouses him and he kisses her and they head quickly toward sex. But this sex is as disappointing for Lorna as it so often is—a short, straightforward journey from A to B when she could real y do with running through a bit more of the alphabet.
    For some reason, as Mark clenches his eyes and releases himself inside her, he has a vivid picture of his parents’ sofa. The one they’d gotten on an instal ment plan the day Charles and Diana got married, by way of celebration. He pictures it as it was for a whole year. With its polyethylene cover on, in case anyone decided to get too comfortable and dirty the thing. (“You’ve got to learn to respect things, Mark. Do you know how much this cost?”) They lay there absorbed in their own unconnected thoughts. Lorna notices she is feeling a bit dizzy again.
    “I wish we could stay in bed al day,” Mark says, once he’s gotten his breath back, though he doesn’t real y mean it. He hasn’t had a lie-in since he was eighteen.
    “Wel , we could have a bit of time together, couldn’t we?” Lorna says.
    Mark sighs, then shakes his head. “I’ve got . . . stuff I have to . . . this bloody rent situation . . .”
    He gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. Her hand stays on his side of the mattress, feeling the pointless warmth left behind.
    And as she listens to him pissing noisily into the toilet, she decides that she should phone the doctor’s and make an appointment with Peter (it has to be Peter). And she knows that today could wel be the day she has the courage to ask her neighbor what she has wanted to ask him ever since she felt his intense, thirsty eyes on her at their barbecue last year.
    She picks up the bedroom phone from its cradle. Toby’s voice is on the line. She stays on and listens silently, something she has done before when scouting for evidence of her stepson’s hatred of her. Why has Mark never supported her on anything to do with Toby? Why can’t he see how much the boy despises her?
    “Hi, is Stuart in, please, Mrs. Harper?” The voice is almost unrecognizably polite.

    And then Mrs. Harper. “Stuart! Stuart! Stuart? ” This last “Stuart” is so loud Lorna has to take the phone from her ear. “Stuart, get out of bed! Toby’s on the phone.”
    But no sound from Stuart Harper is heard on the line.

    New Clothes

    Eve lies in bed in the baggy T-shirt she was wearing the night her mother went missing two years ago. She would have thrown it out if that hadn’t been the case, as it is faded and ful of holes around the neck from where she’d chewed it and because it promoted a band she was no longer interested in.
    To trash the T-shirt would be to burn another bridge between the Time Before and the Time After, and there weren’t that many bridges left since they moved here.
    Their old house in Sale had been so different from this place. It had been a house for a start, not an apartment designed for retirees. It had been a place with soul, and each corner of each room had contained memories of her mother, evidence of her. This place