Unfaithfully Yours Read Online Free Page B

in the Northumberland Club and we got talking about people stiffing – as you do – and your missus was mentioned.
    ‘Was it cancer that got Pamela Larner?’ I said to him. ‘Or was it her heart? She was always a tense sort of person!’
    He dragged his bulbous nose out of his pint and said, rather mysteriously, ‘I heard it was suspicious circumstances. Although I couldn’t quite say where I heard that.’ You could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather, Mike. Suspicious circumstances!
    ‘What kind of suspicious circumstances?’ say I.
    ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ says Norman, ‘but there was something dodgy about it.’
    It seems only yesterday that we were all standing around the playground at St Jude’s Primary and watching Conrad and Jasper and Barnaby and Molly (or was it Milly?) and dear little Elaine (did she become a nun, I wonder?) skip around in their green uniforms. Do you remember Conrad absolutely fucking up as the Roman soldier in the nativity play? And ‘Find a Bin’?
    Find a Bin
    Find a Bin
    Find a Bin and PUT IT IN!
    Jesus, we’re all getting so old. Where did the years go, Michael?
    Suspicious circumstances! Pull the other one. It’s usually cancer, isn’t it? Was it cancer? Almost everyone I know seems to have cancer. Toby Loosestrife has a brain tumour and is clearly on the way out. I saw him in the Green Man at the top of Putney Hill the other day, wearing a woollen cap, presumably to hide the scars on his bonce, and staring into his beer as if it was about to suggest an answer to the question ‘What Was It All For?’
    God knows, mate. You go to school. You manage to slither through to university. You are a lawyer. You have 2.4 children. You die. That’s about it. Oh, in my case, it’s more like 1.75 children since no one in their right mind would dare to suggest that Conrad is a fully developed human being.
    Mavis Whatever Her Name Was had a stroke apparently and Peter Vansittart is in a coma – only this time it’s official! Don’t mean to sound callous. I sometimes feel making a joke is the only way to get through it all.
    Don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to try to raise a few cheap laughs about the demise of your wife. Although – as you will remember from the old days – Gerald is a man not averse to the cheap laugh. Do you remember the time when I locked ‘St’ Johnny Goldsmith in the lavatory at Courseullessur-Mer? Served the pompous fucker right – and I did let him out eventually.
    Seriously, Mike, Pamela was a really special person. She was one in a million. She was always so well turned out, and the work she put into those children was phenomenal. Norman seemed to think they had all got into Oxford, which is amazing. Molly was always bright, wasn’t she? And Barnaby and Leo, I seem to remember, could read and write Latin from the age of three! Maybe Barnaby bullied Conrad a bit, but bullying is about the only way to get through to Conrad.
    God knows what happened to Jas and Josh Goldsmith. Extended prison terms for both of them, I imagine. Dr John Goldsmith may be a paragon of virtue but his and Barbara’s kids should, in my humble, have been strangled at birth.
    But Pamela! My God! Pamela! I remember her in the kitchen with Elizabeth knocking up banquet after banquet while we men lounged around and played tennis. She was a very beautiful woman, Miguel – at least, she was fifteen years ago. We’re all getting senile, Mike, and it won’t be long before we, in our turn, are being shipped down to Putney Vale Crematorium in a rented saloon.
    We are still jogging on. Elizabeth is still tormenting the daughters of estate agents at Dame Veronica’s, and I am still doing the old medical negligence. Every time a heart surgeon’s scalpel goes wide of the mark or an anaesthetist tries to take forty winks in the middle of a bladder operation, it’s ‘Send for Gerald’. I have just finished a very lucrative eight weeks demolishing some hopeless loser