‘I suppose so,’ he said, looking slightly appalled. ‘What’s that?’
‘A list of the things you said to Polly last night.’
‘I was rather drunk, last night.’
‘In Ancient Rome, if you committed a crime when you were drunk you were punished twice. Once for the crime, once for being drunk.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘So I’m ignorant, huh?’ I said.
‘Are you going to marry me or not?’ he said. He sounded half-serious, half-amused.
‘I have to share your feelings, first,’ I said.
‘Another put-off,’ he said angrily.
I put my hand out to take his reassuringly. At that moment our first course arrived and the hand I took was the waiter’s.
When we’d sorted it out and the waiter’d gone, the moment had passed, but Barty wasn’t angry any more. ‘It isn’t another put-off,’ I said. ‘It’s a good point. You say you want to marry me, but there’s all these things you haven’t told me about.’
‘Because you haven’t asked.’
‘I’m asking now.’
‘What are you asking?’
I glanced down the list:
mother
grandmother
childhood
dog who died
first time he knew he loved me
where live
emeralds
Comme des Garçons
friend’s production company
hinterlands
the meaning of life
I read it twice, and thought. Mostly I thought about why I felt so paralysingly shy.
‘Alex,’ he said, ‘are you doing this to hurt me?’
‘No. Really not. It’s – loops.’
‘Loops?’
‘Little toy-train circles, that everyone chugs round. Like Jacob. Obsessive. Had to know best. Didn’t trust anyone, so loneliness made him trust the wrong person.’
‘Only fifty per cent of the time,’ said Barty. ‘He was right to trust Jams.’
‘I suppose . . . But that was luck. Anyway, I think you want me to leave my loop. I can’t leave it, but I could broaden it. Put in branch lines, you know. And I’m trying, but it’s hard. So I make a list because I like lists and I make a sort of joke because it’s safer.’
‘You’re very honest,’ he said. ‘That’s one of the reasons I love you so much. Will you let me see the list?’
‘No. OK, I’m ready to start. We’ll start with – the dog you had, that died.’
‘Why start there?’ he said tenderly.
I hesitated. But he’d said he liked my honesty, hadn’t he? ‘It’s probably the dullest,’ I said. ‘We can get it over with.’
Anabel Donald
Anabel Donald has been writing fiction since 1982 when her first novel, Hannah at Thirty-five, was published to great critical acclaim.
In her thirty-six-year teaching career she has taught adolescent girls in private boarding schools, a comprehensive and an American university. Most recently, she has written the five Alex Tanner crime novels in the Notting Hill series.
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The Notting Hill Mysteries
An Uncommon Murder
In at the Deep End
The Glass Ceiling
The Loop
Destroy Unopened
Copyright
First published 1996 by Macmillan
This edition published 2015 by Bello
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Copyright © Anabel Donald 1996
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The Loop Page 21