Then she carried her cup of tea to a table on the far corner of the pool terrace beneath the tamarind tree, where he wouldn’t immediately see her when he returned. He’d assume that at this hour she would still be in bed; his early-hours thinking time was, she understood, a vital and private start to his day and he wouldn’t be thrilled to find her waiting to chat to him on the terrace, where he liked to do his cool-down stretches in meditative peace. Tough, she thought as she peeled a banana and took a sweet delicious bite. Today, like it or not, he was going to have his body checked out. This overdoing the sports combined with overdoing the booze and food was getting way out of hand. Yesterday he’d come back from tennis (played in the midday sun, how stupid was that?) sweating like a racehorse and with his face the livid colour of tinned tomato soup. Suppose the heartburn he grumbled about really did turn out to be his heart – literally burning away? If he dropped dead tomorrow it wouldn’t be a big surprise, but there’d be no satisfaction in being able to say ‘I told you so’ to the corpse of your adored husband.
