Desperately Seeking - By Evelyn Cosgrave Page 0,91

there was Jean. What would she make of it? Since she’d left Mike she hadn’t stopped surprising me. She had moved her life on; she was happy enough to be happy for him, there was no doubt about it. But could she be happy for me?

I continued to play with these thoughts as I pushed a sausage and an incinerated steak round my plate. I wondered if I should talk to Lucy or Marion. Lucy had shared the kind of relationship I’d always had with Mike; she understood us well. If I asked her straight out what she thought my chances were, she’d tell me. But she didn’t need this: she was wrapped up in her world of Iris and the baby. I had to accept that Lucy and I might never be quite as close again. And that was how it should be. Family relationships should give way to the ultimate relationship with the ultimate person. Yet, I wouldn’t have minded hearing her thoughts on this. If I got truly desperate, I’d talk to her.

Marion would listen, of course, but I didn’t think she’d approve. She’d say I was being childish, wanting something I couldn’t have, and that I was a fool to have let it ruin things with Keith. She’d be fair-minded and clear-sighted. She’d be everything I didn’t want at the moment.

Meanwhile, I was keeping Mike within my radar. He seemed to embody everything I’d ever desired in a man. As well as loving him for reasons that were pure and noble, I craved him physically in a way I’d never experienced before. I couldn’t recall a time when I’d been so engulfed by lust. It made me a little nervous that maybe my feelings weren’t genuine, that I was experiencing an adolescent crush, but deep down I knew that wasn’t so. Deep down I knew this was the real thing.

I watched him have a lengthy conversation with Jean while I pretended to listen to Ruth as she explained how her eldest was about to go to playschool for the first time. He was standing in front of the maple tree with a pint in his hand when she joined him; she had her back to me and I had a full view of him. They really had managed to keep everything civil between them. As far as I knew they hadn’t had a single fight over anything. The house was sold and the proceeds split down the middle; Mike had said she could have the contents, but in the end she didn’t want much of it. They let most of the furniture go in the sale, apart from a few things Mike had brought with him. I had no idea what they might be talking about now: Jean seemed very animated while Mike nodded every so often and said something that started her off again. I convinced myself that when he looked up he was gazing at me, and each time my heart and stomach flipped. But he was probably just staring into the distance.

I knew I was starting to obsess when I began to memorize the clothes he was wearing – a turquoise shirt open at the neck (affording a tantalizing glimpse of chest hair) with faded denims… and the way the last of the sun picked up the different colours in his hair – the mid-brown that had hardly faded and the strands of grey that added depth – and the contours of his face, the high cheekbones and firm jaw, the intense blue-green of his eyes… It was time to tune back into Ruth and her motherly anxieties, but I had clearly been out for far too long because now she was done with playschool and was trying to involve me in a plot to set Mike up with some old schoolfriend of hers. I was horrified. How dare she talk of him in that way? And the girl she was planning for him was a horrible old cow whose husband had walked out on her a year ago. I remember her at school – she was a whiny, slimy bag of misery. Just because she was separated, Ruth thought she was perfect for Mike. I had to get up and walk away.

I wandered back into the house to find more of the delightful prosecco. Some of the older kids had migrated inside to watch television. I sat with them for a while and had a fragmented conversation with Marion’s Lisa about the