White Lies. Dexter Petley

      WHITE LIES

      Dexter Petley

       COPYRIGHT

      This edition first published in 2016

      First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Fourth Estate A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Copyright © Dexter Petley 2003

      The right of Dexter Petley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780007135103

      Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN 9780007392667 Version: 2016-08-10

       DEDICATION

      FOR LAURE

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Dedication

Part 1

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

       Part 2

       Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       Eleven

       Twelve

       Thirteen

       Fourteen

       Fifteen

       Part 3

       Sixteen

       Seventeen

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       Twenty-One

       Twenty-Two

       Twenty-Three

       Twenty-Four

       Twenty-Five

       About the Author

Copyright

       About the Publisher

PART 1

       ONE

      We were in a supermarket in Flers that Saturday afternoon last January. Joy was choosing things you wouldn’t buy if you were planning to leave your husband, unless she was stocking up for the unexpected, the bare cupboard I didn’t know was coming. But there was something wrong, she was low-speed, and anything I said echoed and died out like a weighted sack of words dropped into a winter pond.

      I saw her clutch a bag of flour like she couldn’t let it go, her bottom lip pegged in her teeth. Did I catch her in the act of planning or had she just made the decision, and was wondering if she really wanted to leave me with a bag of flour I wouldn’t need? I must’ve tipped the balance, if there was still a balance, when I said: what d’you want that for?

      If she stood here now I wouldn’t say: when did you decide to leave me, which item in the trolley was the last moment of our marriage? She’d picked a tin of chickpeas instead of dry ones, holding her breath like she was weighing up the future.

      —We can’t afford these bloody tins, I said, snatching it off her and clunking it back on the shelf, jumping back in time and trying to change events. She’d run out of last straws right then.

      We drove home through mist like a stocking over your head, down lanes invisible under tractor mud. The Land Rover cab was cold and streaming, the glaze channels on the door-tops completely rusted away, the windows held in place