The Master Bedroom

Начало книги

IT WAS NOT a sign. Kate refused to let it be a sign.

She hated driving anyway. As soon as she got home, she was going to sell the car; but of course she had needed it to bring all her stuff from London. The back seat was piled up with boxes of books and holdalls stuffed with that miscellany of her possessions which it had seemed impossible to leave behind, so that she couldn’t even see out of her rear-view mirror. She always expected when she was driving to die at any moment, and braked and changed lanes with desperate recklessness as if she was gambling; but actually what happened not long after the Brynglas tunnel coming out of Newport wasn’t her fault. No one was going very fast. She had meant to time her journey to miss the rush hour, but the minutes and hours of her morning, taken up with dropping off keys, dropping off marked exam scripts at the university, had drifted off evasively as usual. Her life would never fit inside the lucid shapes she planned for it. So here she was in the middle lane in a queue coming out of Newport in dreary winter dusk and rain, shrunken among towering lorries whose wheels fumed with wet, gripping the steering wheel with both hands, longing to smoke but not daring to fumble a cigarette out of her pack on the dashboard. The cat in its basket, strapped into the passenger seat beside her, slunk round in circles with its fur flattened, expressing precisely the mingled unease and ennui that she felt.

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