Starting Over by Tony Parsons

as Lara came in. I helped her carry the shopping bags into the kitchen. She hugged me and kissed me and made me a cup of tea.
    ‘Why are you wearing that ridiculous hat?’ she said. When we had finished our tea she took me out for a very gentle walk in the park. As if I were a toddler, or a dog.
    Or as if I might break.
    In my dream I was sleeping by the side of a woman who was wanted by a million men. This phenomenal woman, this fabulous creature, this prize.
    And when I awoke it was true.
    ‘George,’ Lara said. ‘No, George.’
    But I would not be denied. She knew that look. Even inthe darkness of the early hours, with only a drop of moonlight creeping around the curtains, she recognised that look in my eyes.
    Cunning, amused, slightly bashful.
    The look of love.
    I edged across to her side of the bed and took her in my arms. I kissed her on the mouth. I knew that mouth and I had missed it. I had missed all that side of things, I realised. Our mouths did not want to let go. They fit well. Somewhere Lara’s mother radar searched for the sound of our children.
    But Rufus was out and Ruby was sleeping.
    ‘George, George,’ she said, offering one last chance of a cooling-off period. ‘Are you sure that we should be doing this?’
    I was sure.
    Then she didn’t say anything else, not even my name, and we loved for the first time in months. And that would have been fine, that would have been great, that would have been enough, but then later we woke, or at least came halfway out of sleep long enough for another slower, easier, less desperate meeting.
    And then – somebody pinch me – yet again when it was just before morning and the room was still full of night, and now the urgency of the first time was back again – and I mean both the first time that night and the first time ever. And it was the way it is at the very beginning, when you just can’t get enough of each other, when you can’t believe your luck, and the night goes by in a blissful blur of heat and exhausted sleep and gathering light.
    I was sleeping on her side of the bed when she got up and went to the bathroom. I could hear the birds and see the white edge of dawn around the windows. I needed to sleep now, I really needed to sleep. I was worn to a frazzle. But Iopened one eye when Lara came back and turned on the bedside lamp. ‘What?’ I said.
    She touched my face. ‘Just checking.’ She smiled.
    I rolled over to my side of the bed and closed my eyes.
    ‘Checking what?’ I said into the pillow.
    That made her laugh.
    ‘Checking it’s you,’ she said.

six
    A few people stared at us as we walked into the Autumn Grove Care Home. An old lady in a chair who had just been taken for a Sunday afternoon wheel around the park. Her middle-aged son and his two teenage children. A porter I didn’t recognise.
    Then the woman on reception smiled and said hello, and they all looked away. But we got that all the time. My wife and I were one of those couples that people take a second look at, without ever really knowing why. But I knew why.
    It was because we didn’t seem to fit.
    Lara was so small and pretty, and she still had that dancer’s grace, that ease in her own body. Whereas I was so big and lumbering and, well, not exactly ugly, but my nose has been broken twice – once by a Friday-night drunk who threw a traffic bollard in my face, and the other time while we were rolling around on the pavement as I arrested him. It gave my face a bent, damaged look, as though there were a lot of miles on my clock and I was likely to fail my MOT. Actually, now I think about it, ugly is exactly the word.
    But Lara had retained some indefinable air from her dancing days. People once paid money to see this woman perform, to see her dance, to see her shine. She would be forty years old on her next birthday, and she was a working mother with two teenage children, but she still had that showbiz glamour. Whereas I was stolid. I wasn’t like the other men she had