Up Island [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE You know how people are always saying 'I knew it by the back of my neck' when they mean those occasional scalding slashes of intuition that later prove to be true? My mother is always saying it, though she is not always right. Nevertheless, in my half-Celt family, the back of one's neck is a hallowed harbinger of things to come. I first knew my husband was being unfaithful to me, not by the back of my neck, but by the skin of my buttocks, which, given the ultimate sorry progress of things, was probably prophetic. I always thought it was grossly unfair that Tee got all the fun and I got dermatitis of the posterior, but there you are. According again to my mother, it was a pattern we had laid down in stone in the early days of our marriage. I had been having fierce itching and red welts off and on since Christmas, but at first I put it down to the five-pound box of candied ginger Tee's boss sent us and a savage new panty girdle that enabled me to get into my white beaded silk pantsuit. Later, when the itching and welting did not go away, I switched bath soap and body lotion, and still later had the furnace and air conditioning unit cleaned and found some plain unbleached cotton sheets for our bed. Still I felt as if I had been sitting in poison ivy, and often caught myself absently scratching in public as well as private. Teddy, my eighteen-year-old son, was mortified, and my best friend, Carrie Davies, asked me more than once, her elegant eyebrow raised, what was wrong. Tee would have 1 ki. !