All Chapters of TOO LATE TO CALL ME WIFE: Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

The Ashford house in Surrey had been built to be looked at, and on Sunday afternoons, when Margaret was entertaining, it looked its best.Clara had been coming to the house for seven years and still felt, every time she walked up the gravel drive, as though she were arriving for an interview. The stone front was covered in pale wisteria, the lawns were cut in perfect stripes, and the hall smelled of beeswax and lilies. Dominic parked beside a row of expensive cars, came around to open her door, and put his hand briefly at her elbow as they climbed the steps. He was in a good mood. He had slept well, he had taken no calls in the car, and he was looking forward to seeing his father. She could see it in the loosened line of his shoulders, and she wished with sudden force that she could simply enjoy it with him."Clara, dear." Margaret Ashford met them in the hall, silver-haired and straight-backed in a gray wool dress, and kissed the air an inch from each of Clara's cheeks. "You are look

Daniel Brooks arrived at the Kensington house on Saturday with a bottle of wine under one arm, a bag of terrible sweets under the other, and the conviction that everyone he loved needed to be fed.He was thirty-five, a children's surgeon at St Thomas', a big, untidy, cheerful man with a loud laugh and the large, careful hands of someone who spent his working days mending things that could not afford to be mended badly. He had known Dominic since their first week at university, when they had been assigned the same cramped room and had discovered that one of them could not sleep without silence and the other could not sleep without a radio. They had been friends ever since, in the way of men who never discussed it. When Clara opened the door, Daniel lifted her clean off the floor, set her down again and studied her face with the frank professional interest he gave to a scan."There she is. I was beginning to think he had hidden you.""He keeps me in the cellar with the good wine," Clara

It was the word wonderful that kept coming back to Dominic.He had said it two weeks ago, from the stairs, when Clara told him she had spent an evening drawing. He had meant it. He had gone on meaning it, in a vague, pleasant way, through three Thursdays in which she left the house at half past six with a sketchbook under her arm and came home at ten with graphite on her hands and a look he could not quite name. In all that time he had not asked her one question about it. He did not know who the model was, or what the room looked like, or whether she was any good, although he suspected with some private certainty that she was better than good. He had said wonderful, and then he had gone back to his study, and the word had sat in the house like a closed door.On the fourth Thursday, he left the office at ten past six, which was early for him, and told Helen that nothing was to follow him. He did not decide to go to Hackney Wick. He simply found that he had given the driver the address.