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Perfect Day

Perfect Day

Titel: Perfect Day Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Imogen Parker
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her sleeping, or why he feels so beleaguered by his responsibility for her.
    He glances at his bench companion who’s drawing hard on his cigarette. You wouldn’t be smoking if you really knew the risks, he thinks. He tries to think of a way of telling him without sounding sanctimonious, but he can’t. His creeping sense of failure is like a cloud going over the sun, dulling everything.
    Alexander gets up.
    ‘See you,’ he says to the new father.
    ‘See you, mate,’ the man calls cheerfully.
    Instead of going out of the park at Admiralty Arch, Alexander decides to walk round again. He cannot face going home just yet.
    He walks southwards past the edge of the lake, trying to make himself concentrate on the questions that are hovering around his head like persistent wasps round a picnic.
    Question one: why was his instant reaction to the thought of another baby so hostile? Is it because he feels that he wasn’t involved in the decision, or because he does not want to have another child? He thinks it is the latter, although he is still annoyed about the former because he thinks that Nell should have told him that there was a chance of conception. So, why doesn’t he want another child? Is it because it would tie him closer to Nell, or because he doesn’t want all the worry that goes with a child? If someone could guarantee that there would be no worry like they’ve had with Lucy, would he welcome the thought of the baby?
    Does he still love Nell?
    However logically and simply he poses the questions to himself, there are only more questions, and the same question. He tries to consider his situation from a more positive angle. What is it that he does want?
    He wants to lie on a beach feeling warm sand between his toes. He wants to swim in pure underwater silence. He wants to sit in an unhurried Italian village square with benevolent sunshine on his face, and watch the world go by.
    He wants what he had, and didn’t imagine he would ever give up.
    Alexander sits down on a bench in the shade of a tree. He puts his head in his hands. He takes a deep, deep breath, throws his head back. When he opens his eyes he is looking up through pink cherry blossom to blue, blue sky.

Five

    ‘Daddy forgot his watch,’ says Lucy, at the breakfast table. ‘He was blowing the time with a dandelion clock.’
    The thought of Alexander strolling down the road with a dandelion clock in his hand sends a leap of optimism through Nell’s tummy.
    ‘He forgot to wave,’ says Lucy.
    The image of Alexander mutates from carefree to preoccupied.
    ‘He probably thought you were still asleep,’ she says.
    ‘I think you might be right,’ says the five-year-old, thoughtfully, as she manoeuvres a spoonful of dry Cornflakes towards her mouth.
    On the other side of the window, a bumble bee queen hovers just a couple of inches away from Nell’s face. She remembers the day she viewed the house and rushed back to London . ‘The air — it’s like breathing honey!’ she told Alexander as they ate dinner in the dark kitchen of the little house in Kentish Town that smelt of illness. ‘It would be so good for us all!’
    Nell stares at the bright lime green leaves and luminously pale blossom on the two old apple trees whose gnarled branches embrace above the drive. She knows quite a lot about the science of allergy now, but still she can’t help thinking sometimes that it’s a spell that turns beauty poisonous.
    ‘Shall we do your antihistamine now?’
    Nell dispenses 5 millilitres of clear fluid onto a plastic medicine spoon. Lucy takes it.
    ‘Do you want to lick the spoon?’
    Lucy laps at the clinging syrup with methodical seriousness and smiles. It’s one of those moments that makes Nell feel like a proper mother. She recalls the sheer pleasure when her mother awarded her the cake spoon, the floppy floury taste of uncooked Victoria sponge, and the slightly rough softness of the damp wooden spoon against her tongue. It’s one of the universal truths of childhood that licking spoons is a treat.
    The father of Lucy’s friend, Ben, jogs past the bottom of their drive. He smiles and waves, and then he’s obscured again by the hawthorn. Nell finds herself staring at the cloudy haze of grasses in the hedgerow on the other side of the lane.
    ‘I think I’ll tell Mrs Bunting that you’d better stay inside at breaktime ,’ she says.
    ‘Why?’ Lucy asks, reasonably enough.
    ‘Because I think the hay fever season is starting. I think

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