by Tony Parsons
Terry nodded. ‘Can you take it off?’
Misty fumbled in her bag for the key. Then she began to search more desperately, and it took a long moment for him to realise that she wasn’t joking. Terry stared at the pink fake mink handcuffs around his wrist and then he looked away. He loved her but sometimes she drove him crazy. Was that real love? Or was that something else? Did true love really have room in it for irritation? Or was that kind of love a lesser kind, a love that was already on the way out?
The thing was, now that he knew he was definitely going to be with this one girl – woman – for the rest of his life, he sort of missed all the others he had known. And he couldn’t help wondering how it would have turned out if he had gone with one of them instead.
He missed Sally, missed her goodness and decency, and he missed the way she didn’t look like everyone he had grown up with. He missed that lustrous black hair, he missed those eyes like melting chocolate, and he missed her slim, golden body inside the sleeping bag on the night shift. He missed how straightforward she was, and he missed her friendship. He missed the way she never mentioned the suffocating tyranny of men.
And he even missed Grace Fury, despite the strangeness and the horror of her visit to his flat, because everybody wanted her, and because he loved it when they had that wildness inside them.
Terry could have been happy with any of them. At least for a while. They were all great women in their way, and they all liked him. Maybe more than Misty liked him. Because he knew he irritated her too. Loving someone – it wasn’t the same as liking them.
And he wondered how much choice we really have in the person we end up with, and how much of it is down to pure chance. That was the big problem with loving someone. There were lots of other people that you could love, if the timing was right, and if you got the chance, and if you were not already promised to someone else. It all just seemed so random.
But Terry had built his dreams around the one in front of him, and there was a baby growing inside her, he had to follow those dreams through now. Then she winked at him, and smiled, and he was aware of the old feelings, felt them rising up inside him, as strong as they ever were. Maybe it would be all right after all. Maybe it would. He looked up as a whistle blew, knowing that, either way, it was too late to stop now. The whistle blew again.
The train lurched forward and began to move out of the station, the jewel lights of the city soon yielding to the soft dusk of harvest fields, and they headed north into what was left of summer with the pair of them still joined at the wrist, just like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as runaway prisoners in The Defiant Ones, or the bride and groom on a wedding cake.
About the Author
Tony Parsons began his career as a writer on NME, interviewing everyone from The Sex Pistols, Blondie and The Clash to the Rolling Stones, Bowie and Springsteen. His novel Man and Boy is a publishing phenomenon, selling two million copies in 36 countries and winning the UK Book of the Year prize. His subsequent novels – One For My Baby, Man and Wife and The Family Way – were all number one bestsellers. The film rights to The Family Way have been sold to Julia Roberts. Tony Parsons lives in London.
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Man and Boy
One For My Baby
Man and Wife
The Family Way
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005
1
Copyright © Tony Parsons 2005
Tony Parsons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0 00 715125 X (hardback)
ISBN 0 00 721045 0 (trade paperback)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © 2005 ISBN: 978-0-00-736293-6
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