Thursday 26 May 2011

Verity’s Back!


                She dropped in on me yesterday evening, mostly to pick up a key.  She’d parked outside her house and only on attempting to get in had she remembered that she’d asked me to get the locks changed.  I walked back round with her to help carry the luggage in and to show Verity what I’d done following her instructions.
                “There’d better be nothing of His left in the house,” she said.  You could hear the capital.
                I find it sad that a relationship that appeared to work so well can disintegrate so rapidly, but perhaps Verity hadn’t been telling me everything.  Certainly the comment about a Spanish woman had been news to the whole village.  But it’s taken its toll on Verity.  She has always been fashionably slender but she’s lost weight up at Ronnie’s and is close to looking haggard, and it can’t all be due to avoiding Ronnie’s cooking because Verity is usually more than capable of taking herself out to a restaurant.  She’s also a little snappier with me than before, though maybe that’s because despite my best efforts, I have not managed to eliminate every remnant of Max from the house.
                “I can still smell him,” she complained, particularly in the bedroom and the bathroom.  “It’s as if he’d been spraying his aftershave at the curtains.  He probably did, just before he left.  Bastard!”
                I helped her take down the curtains in the master bedroom prior to taking them to the cleaners, and then we made up the bed in the spare room so she didn’t have to sleep in a room with no curtains.  I did ask if she wanted to come back with me, for dinner or for the night.
                “Oh, I couldn’t impose! But thanks for offering.” 
                Verity, impose.  The two words are synonymous.
                Meanwhile, the new neighbour, on the other side of Delyth?  My worst fears have been  confirmed.  It is indeed Fiona Hagerty.  Let us just hope our paths do not cross.

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