Images [antikvár]

Chapter One It began as a joke. They were dressing for a dinner date, he on his side of the bed, she on hers, a tall, balding man who was losing the í battle with middle-age spread, and a petite woman with a few threads of silver in her dark hair. Before taking her bath, she had selected what she would wear. While she put on her make-up, he had showered. Now he was stepping into his trousers, and she into her skirt, like the well timed double-act they sometimes appeared to be. They were due at the restaurant in forty-five minutes, but were unlikely to be late. Punctuality was important to him, and he practised it like a fine art. It had not mattered to her before she married him. Nor had he, before he married her, been the paragon of neatness she required him to be. Neither had found it easy to adapt to living with the other, but, in the name of love, each had adjusted to the other's foibles. Suffice it to say that, among other things, she had trained herself to watch the clock, and he to leave the lavatory seat in the position in which a lady expects to find it. Somé might call it voluntary subjugation in the name of marriage, but this would not have occurred to the peace-loving Ridgeways. Coming home at the end of a hectic day's work was, for him, like returning to a quiet cocoon, where a sympathetic ear and a cordon bleu meal awaited him. And for her, the nightly sound of his key in the lock was the moment around which her day revolved. They were a devoted couple and had never been known to air marital differences in public. It was rare for them to exchange a cross word in priváté, since there was little for them to differ about. Nobody was surprised that they had raised a model