Perfect Strangers [antikvár]

Chapter OneThe rain had started during dinner, some time between the removal of the red snapper with herb polenta and the triumphant arrival of Bridget's home-made tiramisu. This was not the usual diffident English drizzle, but a drenching deluge that cascaded out of the sky, rat-tatted against curtained windows and gathered in splashy pools in basement wells. Two hours on, it was still spraying across the slick London pavements in fierce gusts. Standing on a street corner somewhere at the nastier end of Kensington, desperate for a taxi, Suze felt as if she had been hosed down like a horse. An animal tang rose from her ruined leather jacket. Wet crawled like spiders from her hairline. Only a blaze of indignation kept her warm./ will never get married, she vowed. Never will I be as smug, as patronizing, as boring - she leaped away from the kerb as a newspaper delivery van shot an arc of dirty puddle-water at her knees. The Sun, she read, in the rat-eyed ghmmer of its tail-lights. How very appropriate. Cold water trickled down her tights and seeped into the new suede shoes she had worn to impress Bridget's spare man. Vanity, thy name is