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For all that, next day Paul sent me a text. The alcohol by then
had dissipated, but the message still did not find me sober.
First it was a meeting over coffee, then lunches, then days out – a
very conventional courtship after so brazen a first encounter. Throughout
August, we giggled and flirted on pub benches and in parks and at
outdoor café tables and returned to our separate homes.
Meanwhile, I held Ann Summers parties, sold a lot of underwear and
made a lot of new friends.
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They were not the sort of friends that I was brought up with. They
were young and relatively uneducated, and their subjects of conversation
were largely sex, shopping, children and man or woman-problems, but
their laughter was ready and ragged and their language bracingly
unguarded. I swam in a curious inflatable swimming-pool or
lay by its edge in the back garden and giggled and advised and felt
unchallenged. It was a little like receiving news from the front
for someone who has spent the war years in a sanatorium.
As for Tony, he took our trial separation very literally. He returned
from work to his computer and occasionally went out with old schoolfriends,
but we slept in separate rooms now and led separate lives.
#
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