Blood Sinister (41 page)

But he wished he didn’t have an image of her, flushed and
excited with her bagful of shopping, waiting for him to come to supper, her lost child. What had she ever done for him but save his life? And so he took hers. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the gods laughing.

He fell at last into an exhausted sleep, too dead for dreams, and woke with a start to find it was daylight. Wrong, wrong, his head shouted. He must have slept in.

‘I let you sleep in,’ said Joanna. ‘You were dead to the world.’

He struggled up to sitting position. She was standing by the bed, in her dressing-gown, holding a mug from which a snippet of steam arose, like the irresistible wisp that used to drag the Bisto kids along to the haven of kitchen, mum and gravy. Oh, bugger, he had to stop thinking about that.

‘Tea,’ she said.

He took the mug and thanked her with a croak. She sat down on the edge of the bed with a serious look, and the functioning bit of his brain shouted
Uh-o, trouble! Bad talk coming!

‘Bill,’ she said, ‘I’ve been thinking. About this job offer of mine. No, wait,’ she lifted a hand. ‘Don’t say anything. The fact of the matter is, I realise I haven’t really been fair on you. Whether I take the job or not is absolutely my decision, and it was unfair of me to expect you to take responsibility for it. You can’t make up your mind about the situation until I’ve made up mine, otherwise it’s like me asking you to decide for me. So I’ve thought and thought, and I’ve taken the plunge.’

‘Uh?’ was all he managed to get out from his matted brain via his matted mouth.

She smiled a tense smile, as of one who has screwed herself up to the sticking point. ‘I’ve decided what I’m going to do,’ she said.